Voices of Huxley
By: The Planet Magazine
Tags: Diversity And Inclusion, Black Lives Mater

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, Huxley College reckons with student demands to make up for racism in the institution's history.

Story and photos by Emily Amos

The Environmental Studies building on Western’s campus awaits the return of people back to campus once the COVID-19 pandemic is over. Founded in the late 1960s, Huxley College was one of the first environmental schools of its type in the nation.

Since the founding of Huxley College of the Environment, white faces have dominated all facets of the institution. Today, only 20% of students within Huxley are people of color. Scrolling through the names and photos of faculty and staff at the college, there is a distinct lack of diverse complexions staring back from the screen.

“There are so many [black, indigenous people of color] students in Huxley College who don’t feel safe or welcome, and those people are my friends,” said Sargun Handa, the AS senate pro tempore and woman leader of color.

On June 10, Huxley College released a solidarity statement in response to the nationwide protests against racism, racialized police violence and the suppression of historically excluded groups within the United States. The statement pledged its continued commitment to social justice and civil rights.

“Huxley joins the call for dismantling the structural racism and oppression that endanger and devalue the lives and rights of People of Color across the world,” Huxley College faculty and staff said in the solidarity statement. “Everyone has a place on the Earth we call home. There is not a place for hate.”

Since its beginnings, the environmental movement has largely left out the voices of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and LGBTQ people, among other marginalized groups. Huxley is no exception.

Huxley College was founded in the tumultuous times of the late 1960s. Named after the nineteenth-century British scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, it has become a well-known and respected college for environmental learning. Before the Environmental Protection Agency, Washington Department of Ecology or federal acts like the Clean Air and Clean Water acts were established, Huxley students helped tackle some of the region’s most pressing environmental dilemmas. The creation of Whatcom County’s first recycling center in 1971, and the work to make SeaTac Airport one of the greenest airports in the world are just two examples of what students have accomplished, according to the book Green Fire: A History of Huxley College.

Now, students want to know how words found within the Huxley College Solidarity Statement will be put into tangible actions. Laura Wagner, a white student elected as a Huxley student senator in October, said she constantly sees updates from Sabah Randhawa, the president of the university, stating that Western is an accepting university that stands with people of color. Anyone can say anything they want, Wagner said, but they have to follow through with actions.

Wagner has many goals to help make the college a more welcoming place to all. Thinking back to Dr. Seuss’s well-known environmental story, she came up with this analogy:

“The Lorax said, ‘I speak for the trees, because the trees don’t have a voice.’ He has to speak for them. But people of color, LGBTQ people [and all other historically underrepresented groups] have voices of their own; you don’t need to speak for them. You just need to provide them spaces where they can be heard, or find ways to amplify their voices.”

Historically marginalized people living in Washington state — who are most affected by environmental issues — are the ones whose voices are often not heard, and whose voices are missing from environmental conversations. This is a common narrative shared across communities of color in the United States, according to Carolyn Finney, the author of the book Black Faces, White Spaces.

Huxley is not alone in the structural inequities that exist within the college. The North Cascades Institute in Western Washington is an example of an environmental group working on equity, inclusion and diversity (EID). It is a nationally recognized nonprofit that focuses on environmental education and seeks to share the beauty and wonder of the natural world.

However, it shares a similar white-washed history to Huxley College, according to Saul Weisberg, the executive director and co-founder of the institute.

Weisberg has been involved with environmental education for more than 30 years and said the organization has worked on issues regarding diversity for some time now. Like Huxley College, one of the struggles has been hiring a diverse demographic, he said.

“The people who are applying to work in environmental education, for the most part, had these formative experiences with their parents, or with scouts, or with organizations like [National Outdoor Leadership School] or Outward Bound, which meant they came from families that can tend to afford that. And they came from families that were predominantly white,” said Weisberg.

There is a continued perpetuation of injustice within the environmental scene, rooted in the systemic racism of the United States, according to Weisberg.

The works of Thomas Henry Huxley, specifically what came to be known as “Huxley’s rule”, have been pointed to as an origin of scientific racism by historians of science like Nicolaas Rupke, in his essay “The origins of scientific racism and Huxley’s Rule”. Drawing from Darwin’s theory of evolution, Huxley categorized humans into different races. Another renowned name in the environmental community is John Muir, heralded as the father of national parks and a beacon of the conservation movement. A lesser known fact is that Muir’s values of whiteness and religion informed his perspectives on wild spaces. His environmental ethics only considered white audiences, according to Finney.

When figures like Muir and Thomas Huxley, who have a continued presence within environmentalism, are memorialized in the names of institutions and buildings like Huxley College it doesn’t support Black, Indignous students of color, said Francis Neff, a Huxley student senator and white student.

This summer, Black student organizations at Western issued demands to the university, including a call to change Huxley College’s name, along with other buildings on campus, to honor historical figures in Black history.

While Western’s student body is 28% students of color, this number drops to 20% for those attending the environmental college. Huxley’s Diversity Recruiter and Retention Specialist and South Asian woman of color, Shalini Singh, believes students of color face barriers in pursuing an environmental education. Her three years working at Western and her advising work at Student Outreach Services and the Ethnic Student Center has shed light on some fundamental issues.

“In my opinion, I think too much focus is on increasing the number of students of color,” said Singh. “It’s important to investigate why the numbers are so low and address those root causes.”

Minority students are deterred from pursuing environmental education in the first place due to negative perceptions of the environmental field born from a long history of exclusion from the outdoors. Singh emphasized that because Huxley lacks diverse role models within faculty and staff, students are often drawn to other departments that have a more diverse faculty.

Grace Wang, Huxley professor and department chair of environmental studies, reiterated the importance of having qualified, dynamic people of color working for the college. She said the classes students take are shaped by the professors they have. As department chair, Wang doesn’t spend much time in the classroom anymore.

“As a professor of color I miss the classroom because I really love teaching,” said Wang, who is Taiwanese-American. “I also miss the opportunity to inspire, especially women of color, to say, ‘hey, my professor is a woman of color. I can do it too.’”

There are a lot of great faculty at Huxley who believe that the environment is supposed to be inclusive and welcoming, said Wang. But she isn’t sure what concrete changes could make the college more accessible.

However, both the environmental studies and science departments within Huxley have diversity committees working towards changes.

Jenise Bauman, the chair of the Environmental Science and Inclusion Committee, said the department is working on initiatives in regards to diversity. Recently, the department has shifted towards hiring more women and people of color, with the last 12 or so hires being women or people of color, according to Wang. Their ultimate goal is to create a safe and welcoming environment for students who are underrepresented, but to also encourage and welcome new faculty. To do so, the committee made a virtual course for faculty to aid in the ongoing process of EID training.

Handa said that Huxley College could become more welcoming by improving their communication with underrepresented students.

“It’s incredibly unethical and irresponsible to try to get a quota of diversified populations into your college without addressing how your college has historically harmed [them],” said Handa. “If Huxley College wants to recruit more underrepresented students, then they really need to fix the institutional issues that are rampant in their environment.”