When people talk about sustainability, they usually mean solar panels, reusable water bottles, and buying organic. They don't usually mean asking who gets to live near parks.
But here's what we need to talk about: environmentalism that ignores who has access to nature isn't just incomplete, it actively perpetuates the harm it claims to fight. If your sustainability movement assumes everyone can just "spend more time in nature" or "grow their own food," you're designing for people who already have access to green spaces, land, and resources. Everyone else is locked out.
This isn't an oversight. It's environmental racism, and it's built into how we design cities, allocate resources, and define what "going green" even means.
The Parks You Have Depend on the Neighbourhood You're In
Let's start with something measurable: the distribution of green space.
In most cities, wealthier neighbourhoods have more parks, more tree cover, and better-maintained public spaces. Lower-income neighbourhoods, which disproportionately consist of Black, Indigenous, and communities of colour, have less green space, fewer trees, and what parks they do have are often neglected or unsafe.
This isn't accidental. Historical redlining practices systematically denied Black families access to loans for homes in certain neighbourhoods, concentrating communities of colour into areas that were then deliberately underinvested in. Parks, trees, and green infrastructure weren't priorities in these areas. Decades later, that disparity still exists. The legacy of redlining is visible in every tree-lined suburb next to a concrete-heavy urban neighbourhood with minimal shade.
Why this matters: Trees aren't just aesthetic. They lower temperatures (which are critical during heat waves), improve air quality, reduce flooding, and provide mental health benefits. Communities without adequate tree cover face higher rates of heat-related illness and respiratory problems. Living in a concrete heat island isn't just uncomfortable; it's a public health crisis.
When we talk about climate adaptation, we have to ask: adaptation for whom?
The "Green" Lifestyle Is Gatekept by Class
Now let's talk about the sustainability movement itself.
The mainstream environmental movement, the one you see on Instagram and in glossy magazines, is overwhelmingly white, middle- to upper-class, and focused on consumer choices. Buy organic. Shop local. Use reusable everything. Support sustainable brands.
All of these are good things. But they're also expensive.
Organic food costs more. Reusable products (the nice stainless steel ones, not the cheap plastic ones that break) cost more. Living near walkable neighbourhoods with farmers' markets and green spaces costs more. Having the time to research sustainable brands, meal prep, and tend a garden assumes you're not working multiple jobs just to survive.
When sustainability is framed as individual consumer choice, it becomes a luxury. And when environmentalism equates morality with purchasing power, it tells people without money that they're not "green enough", even though they often have the smallest carbon footprints simply because they consume less.
This is where environmentalism fails its own mission. The people most affected by climate change, low-income communities, communities of colour, and Indigenous communities, are the ones least responsible for causing it and least represented in environmental spaces.
Urban Green Spaces and the Displacement Cycle
Here's where it gets complicated: sometimes, when green spaces are added to underserved neighbourhoods, they trigger gentrification.
A neglected neighbourhood gets a new park. Property values go up. Rent increases. Original residents, the ones who needed the green space most, get priced out. Wealthier (often whiter) residents move in. Suddenly, the neighbourhood has a park, but the people who lived there for decades are gone.
This is called "green gentrification," and it's a cruel irony: the very improvements meant to address environmental injustice end up displacing the communities they were supposed to help.
The problem isn't the park itself. The problem is that green space is treated as an amenity that increases property value rather than a public health necessity that everyone deserves. Without protections against displacement, rent control, community land trusts, affordable housing guarantees, green infrastructure becomes another tool of inequity.
What Intersectional Environmentalism Looks Like
Intersectional environmentalism, a term coined by Leah Thomas, recognises that environmental issues are inseparable from social justice issues. You can't address climate change without addressing racism, classism, and colonialism because those systems determine who suffers most from environmental harm and who has the power to make decisions.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Community-led design: Green spaces designed with the people who live there, not imposed on them by urban planners who don't understand the neighbourhood's needs.
Equitable resource allocation: Investing in green infrastructure in underserved areas without triggering displacement. This means pairing parks with affordable housing protections.
Redefining sustainability: Moving beyond consumer choices to systemic change, holding corporations accountable, demanding policy shifts, recognising that people living paycheck-to-paycheck are already practising sustainability out of necessity.
Centring marginalised voices: Environmental movements need to be led by the people most affected. Indigenous land stewardship practices, for example, have sustained ecosystems for thousands of years, but they're often ignored in favour of Western conservation models.
Why Designers Need to Care About This
As someone studying design research, I can't ignore that design decisions have power. Where we put parks, how we structure urban spaces, what we consider "sustainable design"- these aren't neutral choices. They reflect and reinforce existing inequalities.
If I'm designing with plants, ecosystems, and sustainability in mind but not thinking about who benefits from that design, I'm part of the problem. If my vision of "bringing nature into cities" only serves people who already have access to nature, I've failed.
Good design asks: Who is this for? Who is excluded? What systems am I reinforcing or disrupting?
Sustainable design that doesn't grapple with environmental justice isn't sustainable; it's just aesthetics with a green label.
The Bottom Line
Green spaces aren't neutral. Access to nature isn't evenly distributed. Sustainability movements that ignore class and race aren't actually sustainable.
If we're serious about environmentalism, we have to be serious about justice. That means looking at who has trees in their neighbourhood, who can afford organic groceries, who gets displaced when a park goes in, and who gets to call themselves an environmentalist without being questioned.
It means recognising that the people doing the most with the least, the ones reusing, repurposing, and making do out of necessity, have always been practising sustainability. They just haven't been given credit for it.
And it means understanding that a truly sustainable future isn't one where a few people live eco-conscious lives in expensive green neighbourhoods while everyone else lives in heat islands with polluted air. It's one where access to nature is a right, not a privilege.
We have a long way to go. But the first step is admitting that the problem exists, and that we've been complicit in it.