Studies on the social lens of environmental justice: an interview with Major Eason

Environmental justice is an essential concept that must be considered in climate action to ensure disproportionately impacted vulnerable communities can build stronger resilience to climate change-induced threats. Major Eason is a PhD student of Sociology at Harvard University who is conducting research on the impact of racial dynamics on the climate crisis in the US. Through this conversation, Major described the importance of considering the social costs of climate change and its intersection with economics, race, and politics.

Why is it important to view the climate crisis as a social issue?

The thing that's really going to matter is the relationship between people in this climate crisis. So people say, oh, it's like the end of the world. It really isn't. Some species will die, but a lot of species will live. So, it really is a crisis for us at least, a crisis of humanity and where humanity stands in the future. And that's just completely social. Like, how the climate crisis affects different people—we need to understand that, to know how they get people to where they need to go or what they need to do. 

One reason why people don't want to address climate change is because of the economic concerns—green energy has some economic value, but, you know, you have places thatrely on things that are terrible for the planet, which are going to lose huge parts of their economy. That is another social thing. Like, whether you think they should suck it up or not, that's a debate. People are having, whatever the case is. People have to get on board with it for us to be able to do anything. Places that are getting warmer and warmer—I mean, it's bad for wildlife, but some wildlife will live. But no people will be able to live under circumstances unless you build the most adaptive, costly, things. So some are going to have to move, and again, what does that look like?

So, like, most of the questions are climate change is inherently social because while we do care how it affects other species and other things on Earth, most people's first concern is people and how we're going to be able to live with it. 

What does your research on environmental justice look like?

I came across something about research on towns, and I know that racial dynamics vary depending on the context. Here, for instance, Black communities are often more stigmatized, and that can intersect with poverty in significant ways. I’m curious about how communities like these deal with toxic facilities, and this isn’t unique to the US; it’s a global pattern where poorer places are disproportionately exposed to pollution. However, they also provide the economic basis for these facilities, so we have to understand how they navigate that tricky situation where it is polluting, but there also is something holding up the small amount of money you do have. And I care about doing that. 

That's like the small level. But when we look at a broader level, that's important for climate change because some of these facilities, obviously, put out greathouse gases. We need to understand the relationship between polluters and people, because that's still the ground part of the climate crisis. How people deal with pollution and the economy and all these other things in relation to one another, helps us understand how we can do something else, because to get away from the greenhouse gases, we need to be able to go from place to place and town to town and say, "Hey, here are some alternatives. This is how you can do this better." And that way, we're at the local level, being able to slowly and place by place really engage people, and show that they can do something that they can live around something that isn't contributing to climate change as much. 

What’s a concept in environmental policy that more people should understand but usually don’t?

I think we need to understand that this isn't just a big global issue, but there's a local level. So, like, if you're in, like, Cambridge right now, it's a local city. Harvard and MIT, down the road, have developed some of the best things for human advances, like cancer research, but they've also done some of the worst things, like the Napalm testing on the other side of the road for the oil industry. They've done great things for green energy, but also developed the machinery for the big oil industries. And so this city, Cambridge, is on the local level, there has been all these things for greennes, but then there's also an international, national interface, in terms of the role you play in that big economy. And so it's the same thing with climate change.

At the big level, we have greenhouse gasing. We need to cut emissions. At the small level, you're not thinking like, "If I do this, is this part of cutting the emissions to that level?" You're thinking, "What does my town like right now? or "What is my city like right now? How can I improve my city and what can we do to help climate change but first serve for our citizens?" We need to integrate this big level concept with this small level by asking, "How can this big level concept actually engage the citizens on a small level? Engage not just with their ideas of what should be, but their material reality. "How do we make it easier for people to do work in industries that are more sustainable and pay the same amount? How do we make it possible to have people who may be struggling to see a brighter future, this, from, like, changing because of these big level concepts?" I think that's the biggest issue. If it were about just tackling the big level concept and treating each person like a robot, we can do it. But people are so different by place. There's so much goal and power imbalance, there's all these things that make it very, very, very complicated as to what we do at that lower level. And that is where the real fight is and you have all these small fights going on to try and get to that big player.

Take Nigeria, for example. They were under colonialism until 1960. Multiple coups, all that because of the colonial structure. And now in 2025, they're like, "We make money off of oil. So how are you going to tell us not to do that when y'all have done that forever? You made the world hall for us so you should get your act together and make our economy more environmentally sustainable." And it makes sense for them to say that. In that case, it's about how we turn this big issue with climate change into an issue that is completely relevant to the people's lives, even if it doesn't say climate change.

What have you learned about how environmental issues connect with other systems, like economics, race, or politics?

What I can think of is the transnational trade of waste management. So eventually in America, we have less and less landfills, because we send them to random different places, like Liberia and Vietnam. So we have countries with way more money to transport a lot of their trash and industry to other places. And therefore we aren't dealing with what we've created. So that's one thing. 

I think another thing is, in a lot of places, people who are more marginalized have more to do with environmental problems. They contribute less to climate change, but those are issues that people have already talked about for the past 40 years. Beyond that, people's race, class, gender, nationality, all these things affect how you interact with your environment, and I think the next stage is understanding those interactions across places. 

For climate change, we know a lot of solutions. Renewable energy, cutting down carbon and oil—we know a lot of solutions on the scientific end, even though we can continue to get more. On the social end though, it's going to be about understanding how people are constrained by their identities and how they work within those constraints in life, and how we can apply that to then how they can create new realities with the environment.