Stephanie Pincetl in KCET: 10 Mold-Breaking Ideas on the Concept of Justice
Stephanie Pincetl, founding director of UCLA’s California Center for Sustainable communities, focuses on social and environmental justice and finding equitable ways to reduce human impact on the planet. She pointed out that as we develop new technologies, we need new kinds of elements, and said, “Those elements are found in places like the Congo, like Mongolia, places where there’s an enormous environmental and social impact and there’s no accountability about those impacts.” She offered the example of an open pit copper mine, and said, “What’s happened is we’ve scraped off the best. The best copper has already been mined. That is beginning to happen for a number of these really important elements. What does that imply? It means that the next layer, the next level of quality is going to require a lot more energy resource to extract.”