By Katie Koenig
Nejem Raheem is a faculty member in Marketing Communication at Emerson, and in 2024, he won Emerson’s Sustainability Advancement Award!
I asked him what he was most proud of concerning environmental justice, and he said it was the range of his work. He detailed a few of the projects he’s been involved in throughout his career. They span from environmental conservation in Arctic Alaska, to working with a U.S. Federal Agency to change how they communicate with indigenous stakeholders, to setting up Emerson’s Teach Ins on Sustainability, all the way to working with artist workshops on decolonization.
It’s a long list of incredible projects, and certainly demonstrates a range of topics from conservation efforts to education to community workshops.
Nejem said that he was so motivated due to the huge amount of training and experience he has to offer others to help them consider environmental justice in their own work and lives. Plus, he said that “if I don’t do that, I feel a huge gap in my life. Sometimes I feel like I’m not doing nearly enough.”
Still, the feeling of making a difference in human and non-human lives is a fulfilling one. Nejem said that “Aldo Leopold taught us that ‘One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.’ This is a hard thing to live with, but these small efforts of hope are invaluable to me. May they be so for others.”