Anderson, Rhonda
Rhonda Anderson
Rhonda Anderson is a leading environmental justice organizer in Detroit, Michigan. She was the Senior Organizing Representative for the Detroit Chapter of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign & Environmental Justice Organizer. At the Sierra Club in Detroit, Anderson worked with neighborhoods on a daily basis. She assists with community organizations, helping empower communities to by providing information on improving the community’s health and quality of life (i.e., environmental justice).
“We adopt the following Environmental Justice Principles to provide a vision of how our Club’s Purposes should justly serve the Earth and all of humanity. Through these Principles, we intend that Earth’s wild places should be protected so that all people and future generations may explore and enjoy nature’s beauty; that the Earth’s ecosystems and resources should be used responsibly and sustainably so that all people and future generations may share nature’s bounty; that the natural and human environment should be restored to the benefit of all people and for other living things, and their future generations; and that no community should bear disproportionate risks of harm because of their demographic characteristics or economic condition” (Anderson).
Schulz, A. J., Mentz, G. B., Sampson, N., Ward, M., Anderson, R., De Majo, R., … & Wilkins, D. (2016). Race and the distribution of social and physical environmental risk: a case example from the Detroit metropolitan area. Du Bois Review: social science research on race, 13(2), 285-304
Rhonda Anderson came of age in Detroit during the ’60s and remembers it all like yesterday: the assassinations, the Black Panthers, Vietnam, riots, tanks rolling through her neighborhood. “The day Martin Luther King was killed, I saw this huge black cloud coming down the street. It was kids from one high school coming to gather the students at our school to join them in a march through the streets. The first person in the crowd was a girl. She had her fist raised and was yelling, ‘Black Power! Black Power!’ I will never forget that” (Anderson, n.d.).
Anderson has devoted her life and work to equal rights for BIPOC communities and women. She was part of the effort to shut down a polluting incinerator and then worked in a juvenile detention center. It occurred to her that many Detroit youth show the effects of growing up in a toxic environment - a sad fact she’s working to change by, for instance, getting industrial sites cleaned up.
“To me, being black has been a war,” Anderson says. “I’ve always fought, always struggled against a power that appears bigger than I am. But I know I’m making a difference by organizing my community. People tell me so” (Anderson, n.d.).
Rhonda Anderson has worked in the Detroit area with the Sierra Club for over 22 years, defending communities and fighting against industrial polluters in already overburdened areas. Anderson’s previous union organizing background positions her to manage environmental justice campaigns successfully. Anderson worked mainly towards green space justice and pollution reduction in Southeastern Michigan. Highlights of her career include testifying in support of Michigan Senate Bill 26, the Air Quality Enforcement Mitigation Fund Bill, which ensured a portion of fines that polluters day are re-directed back to the community. She has worked to bring local environmental justice issues to light, including receiving recognition from the state of Michigan and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Her work has been recognized nationally, and she has received multiple Sierra Club awards, including the Virginia Ferguson Award in 2013, the Mike McClosky Award in 201, and the Helen and Williams Milliken Award from the Michigan Environmental Council in 2019. While Anderson recently retired, she will continue to organize at a local level.
Allen, Kimberly Renee. “The Cultural Politics of Environmental Justice Activism: Race and Environment-making in the Contemporary Post-civil Rights Period.” 2009, https://doi.org/10.17615/q27p-0q49.
Anderson, Rhonda. N.d. Environmental Justice. Sierra Club. https://www.sierraclub.org/michigan/environmental-justice
Hernandez, Yuritzy. “Environmental Racism and Media Framing: A Qualitative Analysis of Major News Outlets??? Input of Environmental Issues.” 2014.