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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Human societies have always been deeply interconnected with our ecosystems, but today those relationships are witnessing greater frictions, tensions, and harms than ever before. These dynamics mirror those experienced by marginalized communities across the planet, but they also provide a foundation for transformative thinking and action to address these challenges.
In this updated edition of his innovative contribution, David Naguib Pellow introduces a new framework for critically analyzing Environmental Justice scholarship and activism. In doing so he extends the field’s focus to topics not usually associated with environmental justice, including policing, incarceration, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so he reveals that ecological violence is first and foremost a form of social violence, driven by and legitimated by social structures and discourses. He enriches this radical approach to Environmental Justice by drawing on Indigenous Studies, the Black Radical Tradition, Disability Studies, Queer and Transgender Studies, and Multi-Species Justice, among others. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in entirely new ways.
This book is a vital resource for students, scholars, and policy makers interested in innovative approaches to one of the greatest challenges facing humanity and the planet.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
1 Critical Environmental Justice Studies
Environmental Justice Studies: An Overview of the Field
What Is Environmental Justice?
What is Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies?
How do we define justice?
Toward Critical Environmental Justice Studies
What Does Critical Environmental Justice Studies Look Like?
First Pillar
Second Pillar
Third Pillar
Fourth Pillar
Discussion and Conclusion
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Notes
2 Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge
Critical EJ Studies and Black Lives Matter
First Pillar: Intersections
Intersectionality and intersecting oppressions: Humans and more-than-humans
Intersectionality and the social discourse of animality
Agency and social change
Second Pillar: Scale and Social Difference
Race and the scales of time, history, and the future
Third Pillar: An Anti-Statist/Anarchist Reading of BLM/M4BL
Fourth Pillar: Indispensability
Collective Punishment, Black Lives Matter, and Critical Environmental Justice
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Notes
3 Prisons and the Fight for Environmental Justice
Early Linkages between Prisons and Environmental Justice: Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), Critical Resistance, and the Fight Over E-Waste Recycling
Prison Labor and Electronic Waste Recycling
The USEPA: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
The Prison Ecology Project vs. the USEPA
First Pillar: Categories of Difference
Race, class, gender, sexuality, citizenship, disability, species, and imprisonment
Humans and more-than-humans linked
Agency and resistance
Second Pillar: Scales of History, Futures, Geography, and Bodies
Histories
Geography and Bodies
Geography: Environmental contamination of bodies and landscapes
Sexual violence: From the microscale of the body to the macroscale of population
Scales of human extractivism: Impacts on children and families as environmental injustice
Third Pillar: Entrenched Inequalities and Politics of the State
Fourth Pillar: Racial and Socioecological Indispensability
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Notes
4 The Israel/Palestine Struggle as an Environmental Justice Conflict
Anti-Jewish State Violence and the Roots of Zionism
First Pillar: Multiple Categories of Difference
Anti-Jewish oppression, exclusion, and violence
The State of Israel as haven, site of violent exclusion, and nonhuman agency
Zionism as environmental injustice
Human and more-than-human exploitation, resistance, and agency
Second Pillar: Multiscalar Analyses of Temporal and Spatial Environmental Inequalities
Microscale of the Occupation
The Occupation and Israeli state actions on a global scale
The scales of time
Scales of resistance and cultural politics
Third Pillar: From Entrenched Inequality to Questioning the Social Order
Race, gender, religion, nation, and land
Tensions and divisions within the Jewish State
Nationalism and nature
Fourth Pillar: Racial and Socioecological Indispensability
Concluding Thoughts
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Notes
Conclusion
Policing, Prisons, and Palestine
Critical Environmental Justice, Critical Ecological Justice
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Dedication
To Sun-Hee and Jin-Young – thank you for giving me hope and sharing your love.
To Dr. Mary Hicks, who taught me that “we are all worth it.”
To Rachel Schurman – a brilliant mind and an extraordinary friend.
To Y.I.M.J.R.S.I. – thank you for guiding and connecting all of us.
What is Critical Environmental Justice?
2nd Edition
David Naguib Pellow
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © David Naguib Pellow 2025
The right of David Naguib Pellow to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First edition published in 2018 by Polity Press
This second edition first published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6004-2 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6005-9 (paperback)
A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024948450
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgments
As much as I would like to take full credit for this project, it turns out that researching, writing, and publishing a book is always a collective effort. I am indebted to a great number of people for sharing their ideas, criticisms, guidance, and labors to make this second edition possible. Students who provided me with critical assistance along the way include: Marjan Abubo, Harrison Ashby, Michaela Anastasia Austin, Mark Avalos, Elijah Baker, Reid Bongard, Ry Brennan, Olive Brogan, Thomas Crumly, Martha Escobar, Sheila Estrada, Denise Garcia, Yasmin Ghaemmaghami, Allison Goldsmith, Oscar Gomez, Emily Gribble, Erin Hoekstra, Cheyenne Kabil, Sanna King, Rebecca Kinney, Fabiana Lake, Michelle Le, Ren Levitan, Shannon McAlpine, Carly Marto, Annie Milburn, Chloe Ortiz, Ruth Alcantara Perez, Ivan Rodriguez, Alison Thompson, Ashkaun Shaterian, Yue Shen, Amy Tam, Unique Vance, Jasmine Vazine, and Cambria Wilson.
I want to thank my colleagues, students, and friends at UC Santa Barbara who warmly welcomed me into the Santa Barbara community with open arms and so much support. They include: Grace Abbott, Tamara Afifi, Walid Afifi, Peter Alagona, Celia Alario, Sarah Anderson, Shiva Balaghi, Bassam Bamieh, Javiera Barandiarán, Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Felice Blake, Joe Blankholm, Eileen Boris, Angela Boyd, Tamma Carleton, Julie Carlson, Inés Casillas, Oliver Chadwick, Jay Chakraborty, Iris Chan, Alenda Chang, Grace Chang, Maria Charles, Utathya Chattopadhyaya, Jia-Ching Chen, Charmaine Chua, Jordan Clark, David Cleveland, Chris Costello, Noa Cykman, Carla D’Antonio, Mona Damluji, Jigna Desai, Ranjit Deshmukh, Fabienne Doiron, Hilal Elver, Richard Falk, Ingrid Feeney, Jeff Feng, Dick Flacks, John Foran, Diane Fujino, Steve Gaines, Helene Gardner, Hunter Gelbach, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Avery Gordon, Corrie Grosse, Lisa Hajjar, Hahrie Han, Robert Heilmayr, Cami Helmuth, Ken Hiltner, Chase Hobbs-Morgan, Jeff Hoelle, Iris Holzer, Yvette Howze, Cheryl Hutton, Alyssa Jain, Ketia Johnson, Melody Jue, Terence Keel, Ed Keller, Sage Kime, Zachary King, Renan LaRue, Theo LeQuesne, Andrea Ellickson McCourt, Andy McCumber, Margaret McMurtrey, Oliva Macior, Mel Manalis, David Marshall, Jen Martin, Kyle Meng, Stephan Miescher, Matto Mildenberger, Dena Montague, Michelle Moreno, Miranda O’Brien, Erinn O’Shea, Michelle Oyewole, Sameer Pandya, Boris Palencia, Tristan Partridge, Simone Pulver, Alex Radde, Elizabeth Robinson, Tara Robinson, Martin Rodriguez, Laila Shereen Sakr, Jim Salzman, Josh Schimel, Sherene Seikaly, Daniela Soleri, Heather Stanford, Jeffrey Stewart, Leah Stokes, David Stone, Susan Stonich, Vivian Stopple, Ra Thea, Jennifer Tyburczy, Candace Wade, Janet Walker, Jane Ward, Elisabeth Weber, Richard Widick, Bob Wilkinson, Emily Williams, Pierre Wiltzius, Grace Wu, Henry Yang, Michele Zamora, and Eric Zimmerman.
A big thanks to friends and colleagues across a number of universities and scholarly outlets for offering space to share and receive feedback on many of the ideas contained in this volume, and they include: Cawo Abdi, Ron Aminzade, Randall Amster, Thomas Beamish, Ingrid Behrsin, Liz Boyle, Bruce Braun, Kate Pride Brown, Peter Cannavo, André Christie-Mizell, Brendan Coolsaet, Lindsey Dillon, Kwabena Edusei, Daniel Faber, Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman, Teresa Gowan, Katja M. Guenther, Lori Gruen, Rebecca Hardin, Jill Lindsey Harrison, George Henderson, David Hess, Larry Isaac, Anna Jacobs, Sonia Joshi, Julian Paul Keenan, Claire Jean Kim, Jacque Leaver, Jonathan London, Holly McCammon, Justin Marceau, Paul Mohai, Ivette Perfecto, Jonathan Purucker, Saed, Lacee Satcher, David Schlosberg, Rachel Schurman, Vicky Smith, Lijun Song, Magdalena Sudibjo, Julie Sze, Dorceta Taylor, Zdravka Tzankova, Anne Wall, and Kyle Powys Whyte.
Colleagues and collaborators spread far and wide across the country who were also instrumental in this effort include Joni Adamson, Julian Agyeman, Peter Alagona, Isabelle Anguelovski, Marco Armiero, Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Sara Bruya, Beth Schaefer Caniglia, Clare Cannon, Ian Carrillo, Alasdair Cohen, Ahmed Diongue, Mike Ewall, Beatrice Frank, William Gleason, Patrick Greiner, Ryan Holifield, Erik Kojola, Isabel Lane, Alex McInturff, Rachel McKane, Denise Josefina Martinez, Jordan Martinez-Mazurek, Brian Mayer, Jane Robbins Mize, Anthony Nocella II, Kari Norgaard, Hollie Nyseth Nzitatira, Ufuoma Ovienmhada, Elisa Privitera, Laura Pulido, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Jenny Rempel, J. Timmons Roberts, Stacia Ryder, Kim Socha, David Takeuchi, Samantha Teixeira, Yonette Thomas, Panagioti Tsolkas, Manuel Vallee, Traci Brynne Voyles, Sylvia Hood Washington, Mia White, and Danielle Wood.
And, at Polity Press, my editors Jonathan Skerrett and Karina Jákupsdóttir have been wonderful partners throughout this process, and I am grateful to the extraordinary anonymous reviewers of the manuscript, to Ann Klefstad for her outstanding copy editing of the first edition, and to Susan Beer for the second edition. I also have to extend a big thank you to Emma Longstaff who, while at Polity some years back, extended a generous invitation to me and came up with the initial idea that eventually resulted in this second edition of the book.
1Critical Environmental Justice Studies
Michael Brown was an African-American teenager living in Ferguson, Missouri. On August 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed him, sparking worldwide outrage at the seemingly unending series of police shootings of African-Americans. When protesters took to the streets of cities around the U.S. and the world to declare that “Black Lives Matter,” they and those who were the targets of police shootings were frequently referred to as “animals.” Juana Gutiérrez is the daughter of a Mexican farmer and she immigrated to the U.S. at age fifteen. She started an organization called Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), which fought to keep prisons from being built in her city and around the state of California. Nicholas Morrissey was incarcerated at a state prison in LaBelle, Pennsylvania; he suffered from a chronic illness he believes was caused by the fact that the prison is located next to a massive coal ash dump. Foad al-Amodi is president of the fishermen’s syndicate in Khan Younis, a town in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. His livelihood is threatened because the fish that he and his customers depend upon are dying from exposure to the massive volume of sewage that flows into the Mediterranean Sea – a result of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has prevented the purchase of much-needed equipment to upgrade Gaza’s waste management system. Havah Ha-Levi was a Jewish Israeli woman who lived in a kibbutz near an old Palestinian Arab village, Sarkas, which Israel destroyed and converted into a garbage dump. In her memoir she writes, “Yet I remember. I testify.” State-sanctioned police killings of Black people; prisons and jails; the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Each of these cases reveals how human suffering and social injustice also are sites where that pain is intimately linked to the harm visited upon fragile ecosystems and other animals. And each of these cases speaks to the ways that ordinary people and, in some cases nonhumans, have worked for environmental and social justice.
Human societies have always been deeply interconnected with our nonhuman relations and with ecosystems but today those relationships are witnessing greater frictions, tensions, and harms than ever before, as global climate disruption, policing, warfare, and colonialism threaten to overwhelm our lives and life support systems. And, while those trends reveal incalculable damage to both ecosystems and human societies, the opportunities for addressing these problems are well within our grasp, if we only dare to break out of conventional modes of thinking and action. The harms suffered by ecosystems today are closely linked to and mirror the suffering experienced by the most marginalized human beings across the planet – what many scholars call the problem of environmental injustice. For example, where we find rivers dammed for hydropower plants we also tend to find Indigenous peoples and fisherfolk, as well as other working people, whose livelihoods and health are impacted as a result; when sea life suffers from exposure to toxins such as mercury, we find that human beings also endure the effects of that dangerous chemical when they consume those animals; and the intersecting character of multiple forms of injustice is revealed when nuclear radiation or climate change (unevenly) affects all species and humans across all social class levels, racial/ethnic groups, genders, abilities, sexualities, nationalities, and ages. The power (or agency) of the more-than-human world is on display here as well when, for example, nuclear radiation, COVID-19, or extreme climate patterns are triggered by human actions and then, in turn, exert their own force on various bodies, spaces, and ecosystems. The agency of human beings is evident when people imagine and work to bring about a different set of relationships with each other and with the more-than-human world through art, protest, music, research, planning, design, and other forms of action.
Environmental justice struggles reveal how power flows through the multi-species relationships and communities that make up life on Earth, often resulting in violence and marginalization for the many and environmental privileges for the few. But environmental justice struggles are also evident – if we are paying close attention – within spaces of conflict and collaboration that are not always typically defined as “environmental.” Consider, for example, the roles that land, air, water, and nonhuman species play in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (also known as the Movement for Black Lives or M4BL), in the construction and maintenance of the U.S. prison industrial complex, and in political struggles between Israel and Palestine. I draw on each of these examples in this book to explore the future of environmental justice research and politics. One path toward this future is made clearer through what I call Critical Environmental Justice Studies.
In our book Power, Justice, and the Environment,1 Robert Brulle and I used the term “Critical Environmental Justice Studies” to call for scholarship that builds on research in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies by questioning assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field, by embracing greater interdisciplinarity, and moving toward methodologies and epistemologies that include and move beyond the social sciences. A number of other scholars have adopted this term as well, as they work to expand the academic field and politics of environmental justice.2 In the rest of this chapter I offer an overview of some key ideas and advances from the field of EJ studies and introduce the concept of Critical EJ Studies as a way of pushing the ideas and potential of earlier generations of EJ studies into new directions. I view Critical EJ Studies not as an alternative to earlier-generation EJ studies, but as an extension of that foundational scholarship.
Environmental Justice Studies: An Overview of the Field
Why Critical Environmental Justice Studies? In order to answer that question, I must first offer an overview of the field of Environmental Justice Studies. But, before one considers the scholarly research on the topic of environmental justice (EJ), we must begin with the EJ movement. The U.S. EJ movement gained visibility and strength beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as activists and movement networks confronted a range of toxic hazards that were disproportionately located in communities of color (while the closely related Anti-Toxics movement was concentrated primarily in white working-class neighborhoods). This movement fused discourses of public health, civil and human rights, anti-racism, social justice, and ecological sustainability with tactics such as civil disobedience, public protests, and legal action to prevent the construction or expansion of unwanted and controversial facilities and developments such as landfills, incinerators, mines, and chemical plants. Activists also demanded that owners of existing facilities improve their operational safety, reduce pollution levels, and provide economic benefits to and offer power sharing with local residents or face the threat of being shut down. This movement sought to openly integrate campaigns for justice on behalf of vulnerable human beings with the goal of ecological sustainability.3 From the movement’s early days, activists sought environmental justice, not only through shutting down polluting facilities, but also by demanding and creating access to parks and green space and affordable, healthy foods,4 safe neighborhoods, and for climate-related policies and practices that are socially just and ecologically sustainable.5 Thus, even during its earliest days, the EJ movement articulated a transformative vision of what an environmentally and socially just and sustainable future might look like at the local, regional, national, and global scales. For example, during the historic Environmental Justice Summit conference in 1991, participants drafted the Principles of Environmental Justice, a document that embraced a synthesis of anti-racism and ecological sustainability, as well as support for anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, gender-justice politics. The Principles also recognize the inherent and cultural worth of nonhuman natures.6
The EJ movement is largely comprised of people from communities of color, Indigenous communities, and working-class communities who are focused on combating environmental injustice, racism, and gender and class inequalities that are most visibly manifested in the disproportionate burden of environmental harm facing these populations. For the EJ movement, the battle for global sustainability cannot be won without addressing the ecological violence imposed on vulnerable human populations; thus social justice (that is, justice for humans) is inseparable from environmental protection.
What Is Environmental Justice?
EJ studies scholar Robert Bullard defines environmental justice as the principle that “all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations.”7 U.S. President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14096 further elaborates on this principle by defining environmental justice as:
the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability, in agency decision-making and other Federal activities that affect human health and the environment so that people: (i) are fully protected from disproportionate and adverse human health and environmental effects (including risks) and hazards, including those related to climate change, the cumulative impacts of environmental and other burdens, and the legacy of racism or other structural or systemic barriers; and (ii) have equitable access to a healthy, sustainable, and resilient environment in which to live, play, work, learn, grow, worship, and engage in cultural and subsistence practices.8
While environmental justice is a vision of a possible future, environmental injustice generally refers to a situation in which a particular social group is disproportionately affected by environmental hazards.9 One specific form of environmental injustice is the phenomenon of environmental racism, which Benjamin Chavis first defined in this way:
Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental policymaking, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements.10
Thus, environmental racism “refers to any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color.”11 The scholarship and social movement focused on environmental racism and injustice sought to develop a vision of its opposite – environmental justice – which often involved a call for new legislation and the fair application of existing laws. In this chapter and throughout the book, I consider both the promise and limitations of such an approach, which seeks a path to justice through deploying the power of the state.
What is Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies?
The field of EJ studies has moved us toward a clear understanding that, where we find social inequalities by race and class, we tend also to find environmental injustices in the form of marginalized groups being exposed to greater levels of pollution, toxics, “natural” disasters and the effects of climate change/disruption, as well as their exclusion from policymaking bodies that influence those outcomes.12 Researchers have also refined and improved our ability to measure the details and granularity of spatial environmental injustices by race, class, and space.13 For example, in the study Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, the authors offered new evidence that clustering of environmental hazards – rather than just single sources of pollution – is a significant and measurable threat to communities of color.14 In that report, the authors also challenged the “minority move-in hypothesis,” which was the claim that people of color move into polluted neighborhoods rather than being targeted by polluters. To the contrary, the authors found that polluting facilities actually single out communities of color more often than not, moving into neighborhoods with high percentages of minoritized residents. This disturbing finding has extraordinary sociological and policy implications and was a major development in the field of EJ studies, since up to that point there was a lively debate on this topic.
A growing number of researchers – including and especially environmental humanities and ecofeminist scholars – have focused on the ways that gender, sexuality, citizenship, indigeneity, and nation shape the terrain of ecological inequalities.15 Though EJ studies has traditionally focused on race (and, to a lesser extent, class), scholars have explored other intersections of inequality and the environment in recent years. For example, gender and sexuality are categories receiving more attention for a number of reasons. Women are often physically and socially relegated to some of the most toxic residential and occupational spaces in communities and workplaces16 and several studies document the ways that women experience and resist discriminatory environmental policies on the job, in residential communities, and other gendered spaces.17 Ironically, women activists in the EJ movement are less politically visible because they tend to work for smaller, community-based organizations that rarely make headlines and survive on volunteer labor and small grants, despite the fact that women form the overwhelming majority of the movement’s leadership.18 Moreover, scholarship in gender, feminist, and queer studies reminds us of the importance of a focus on the human body, which opens up numerous possibilities for EJ studies to expand. For example, as Rachel Stein writes:
When . . . we view our bodies as “homes,” “lands,” or “environments” that have been placed at risk, stolen from us, and even killed due to social or physical harms that may be exacerbated due to our gender and sexuality – we may understand the need for new perspectives on environmental justices that encompass such factors within our analysis.19
The sexuality and reproductive capacities of women of color, immigrant women, and Indigenous women have long been the targets of state authorities, with varied and troubling consequences for human health, cultural integrity, and ecological resilience. Examples include: the justification for the conquest of the Americas was largely shaped by a contempt that European settlers and religious leaders had for diverse sexualities and sexual practices among Indigenous peoples in the Western hemisphere;20 the enslavement of Africans and the legal construction of enslaved women as breeders, whose children would also be chattel property, whose primary value was labor that facilitated control over land and livestock; and historical and ongoing debates over “pro-environmental” policies such as population control, which directly target the reproductive capacities of women of color and have resulted in forced sterilization, among other devastating practices, thus emphasizing the fertility of Global South women rather than prioritizing the overconsumption of resources by Global North populations. By offering analyses of how discourses of “nature” have been deployed to enforce heteronormativity, regulate sexuality, and criminalize and marginalize persons deemed sexually transgressive, scholars have reframed “environmental studies” concerns to include an understanding of the ways that diverse sexual identities, expressions, and practices have been defined as “unnatural,” thus allowing for creative ways of linking EJ studies to gender, feminist, sexuality, and queer studies. If sexuality has been a target of oppression and environmental exploitation, it has also been used historically as a site of resistance, as persons of varied sexualities engage gender and sexuality through means that challenge the colonization of their peoples, cultures, and lands, and that confront enslavement, genocide, and heterosexism.21 Furthermore, the very material landscapes being polluted and fought over in EJ struggles are deeply imbued with meanings that are gendered, sexualized, and expressed as such in local and global imaginaries, state policies, corporate practices, and activist resistance campaigns.22 The scourge of global climate change has further exacerbated these dynamics. For example, increased heat associated with global warming has contributed to a significant rise in preterm births and low birth weight babies being born in Black communities.23 Research on the relationship between LGBTQ+ populations and environmental justice finds that neighborhoods with higher percentages of queer folks may experience greater exposure to pollution. One study found that living in U.S. census tracts with high (vs. low) proportions of same-sex partners is associated with significantly greater cancer and respiratory risks from hazardous air pollutants.24 But we should be reminded that, in the face of overwhelmingly anti-transgender and anti-queer dimensions of statecraft and capitalism across most societies, queer and trans communities have had to develop practices that “are guidebooks for adapting to hostile climates.”25 In other words, despite the violence and harms associated with dominant cultural, political, and economic arrangements, marginalized communities have devised strategies for ensuring their safety.
Disability studies is an invaluable area of scholarship that is still emergent with respect to EJ studies.26 Disabled people constitute a large minoritized population, but one that tends to be ignored in policy-making regarding climate change and adaptation, a glaring omission considering that disabled persons are uniquely at risk from the consequences of climate change-driven extreme weather events.27 More broadly, climate change, drought, toxic drift, and other forms of large-scale environmental damage are what scholars call “mass disabling events” because they produce widespread harm across multiple species and habitats.28 We must also recognize that many leaders of environmental justice movements and members of communities facing environmental and climate injustices are disabled persons, who live with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, cancer, and other illnesses and disease that are caused or amplified by exposures to threats produced by various institutions.
EJ research on the ways that immigrant communities are affected by – and respond to – environmental and climate change threats is another important area of scholarship in the field, which is now receiving more attention.29 More recently, important work by scholars studying food justice movements reveals that, as a result of a complex matrix of policy mechanisms that tend to subsidize and support the industrial agricultural system, working-class communities and communities of color are often sites of hunger and malnutrition stemming from the dominance and control of food systems by a small group of large corporations focused on making profit rather than feeding communities.30 Moreover, those corporations tend to produce food using large quantities of toxic herbicides, pesticides, and fossil fuels that imperil consumers, fenceline communities, ecosystems, and the climate. Thus, the literature on climate justice and food justice/sovereignty is an integral component of EJ studies.
More recently, scholars have raised deeper, thornier questions about the driving forces that produce environmental and climate injustices and what a solutions-based framework might look like. For example, while the more proximate factors contributing to environmental injustice include discriminatory zoning and planning and racially segregated housing markets, the root causes are glaring political and wealth inequalities associated with racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Those root driving forces are much more difficult to address, since they are centuries-old systems of dominance and control, which are reinforced by virtually all major political and economic institutions today. Racial capitalism is a term scholars draw from the Black Radical Tradition to denote the fundamental and foundational ways in which capitalism is inextricably linked to racial logics because capitalism has always been a system that produces and thrives on racial difference and devaluation.31 Traditionally, many scholars have thought of capitalism as primarily a system marked by class struggle, but the concept of racial capitalism reveals how central the racialization of labor and land is to the core of capitalism’s primary functions. Racial inequality is built into the very structure of capitalism as much as class and gender inequalities, and capitalist institutions seek to deploy those forms of difference (among others) to engender control over labor and territory.32 Thus, when we observe that capitalism also requires the extraction of ecological wealth, creating pollution and climate change, those dynamics are propelled in large part by the social production and maintenance of racial differences.33
Similar to scholarship on racial capitalism, important work in the area of Indigenous environmental justice studies has successfully pushed EJ scholars to rethink many assumptions about the structures and historical forces producing environmental injustice. For example, these scholars argue that EJ studies must recognize the historical and ongoing facts of settler colonialism, invasion, genocide, and land theft, and how those horrors have dramatically altered Indigenous peoples’ relationship to land and ecosystems. Settler colonialism is the occupation or control over the land, water, aerial space, and peoples of a given territory by an invading power. Indigenous studies scholars argue that settler colonialism itself is a form of environmental injustice because it undermines the ecological conditions necessary for Indigenous peoples to exercise their economic, political, and cultural practices.34 Going further, it can be argued that settler colonialism is a framework that undergirds all EJ conflicts in the United States (and other settler nations) because these dynamics always reflect entanglements with land and ecological wealth from which Indigenous peoples have been dispossessed.35 Much of the literature on colonialism presents this phenomenon as a largely, if not exclusively, European matter. And, while there can be no doubt that in modern world history, Europe has indeed led the colonial charge, to focus exclusively on those nations would be a disservice to those communities – both human and nonhuman – that have experienced the yoke of colonial violence in other nations and regions on Earth at the hands of non-European states and corporations. Significant scholarly work has underscored that large-scale atrocities against Indigenous peoples and their land bases have been perpetrated by non-European colonizers for centuries in what we now call Latin America, Southern Africa, Japan, and India.36 These forms of socioecological violence must be reckoned with by EJ scholars because such documentation necessarily complicates longstanding narratives that tend to oversimplify racial-ethnic dynamics that have been central to the development of numerous nation states, the frequently threatened quality of life for marginalized communities, and the health of critical ecosystems around the world.
Indigenous studies scholars also argue that EJ must recognize the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems and their emphasis on relationality, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity, which is wholly distinct from the settler colonial relationship that is premised on private property and extractivism. Moreover, the emphasis on environmental racism in EJ studies generally centers the focus on race, when Indigenous peoples in the Americas tend to identify as nations, not racial/ethnic groups.37 Understanding these elements is key for EJ studies and EJ movements to support decolonization.38 For many scholars whose research accepts (implicitly or explicitly) the legitimacy of existing political and economic systems, these assertions may be challenging and unsettling, to say the least, because they suggest quite clearly that those systems must be abolished and reimagined entirely.
Scholars are increasingly pushing the conversation around environmental justice in more ambitious directions, drawing on work from Indigenous studies, ecofeminism, and animal studies. One concept that has emerged from this work is multi-species justice – a vision of a total transformation in our thinking, behavior, practice, policies, and infrastructures focused on ethical and respectful relations within and across species, including and extending well beyond the human.39 In a similar vein, Isabelle Stengers’ concept of cosmopolitics is intended to extend the realm of politics beyond the narrow focus on humans to include every being and thing in the cosmos.40 After all, we have always been multispecies societies, so why not also approach our governance practices in that way?
Such concepts may be new to some scholars, but Indigenous studies researchers have long engaged with these ideas. For example, the concept of kincentricity reflects a view that humans, nonhumans and ecosystems are part of an extended family with shared origins and ancestry.41 To be in a relationship with one’s extended ecological family, as Indigenous Potawatomi philosopher and environmental studies scholar Kyle Whyte writes, means to be transformed from a human who enjoys dominance over other species into a “relative with reciprocal obligations.”42 Monani and Adamson draw our attention to the concept of Indigenous “cosmovisions” – conceptions of entangled human relations with more-than-human-worlds.43 Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer argues and demonstrates that the path toward ecological sustainability must involve listening to, learning from and developing reciprocal relationships with our more-than-human relatives.44 Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser write about the ways in which many Indigenous cosmologies refuse the modernist separation between humans and nonhumans.45 Arturo Escobar calls this “radical relationality” or the idea that “all entities that make up the world are so deeply interrelated that they have no intrinsic, separate existence by themselves.”46 These scholars are engaged in decolonial thinking and activism, which seeks to reintegrate nature and culture, a decisive move away from an orientation that Western/modernist frameworks have promoted for centuries. The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth is also a powerful articulation of multispecies justice and environmental justice from an Indigenous perspective. That document contains the following statements: “… in an interdependent living community it is not possible to recognize the rights of only human beings without causing an imbalance within Mother Earth”; “Just as human beings have rights, all other beings have rights”; and “The term ‘being’ includes ecosystems, natural communities, species and all other natural entities which exist as part of Mother Earth.”47
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed in dramatic and stark relief how human and non-human communities can collaborate and collide in ways that impact the health and well-being of people at the cellular and societal levels. The pandemic killed millions of people worldwide, with the greatest hotspot being the United States. In the U.S. context, the pandemic had disproportionate impacts on low-wealth and people of color communities, particularly immigrants in “essential” industries like meatpacking48 and among incarcerated populations,49 thus reminding us that multispecies justice is both an ambitious and complex vision.
The relatively recent development of EJ studies should not be accepted as evidence that the phenomenon of environmental injustice is new. As a number of scholars demonstrate, a core component of European colonization was the production of many environmental injustices, as people and land were exploited for the benefit of colonizers in earlier eras.50 Historians and historical social scientists have explored what one might call the “long Environmental Justice movement” – those indicators that the scourge of environmental injustice and struggles against it have been in evidence long before the oft-cited beginnings of the EJ movement in the 1980s.51 While environmental injustice reaches back centuries, however, the recent intensification of global industrial and technological production, combined with heightened human migration patterns within and across national borders, extends this phenomenon into the present and amplifies its consequences globally. That fact, along with the growth of social justice movements among marginalized peoples, influenced the development of EJ studies and the EJ movement. In possession of this new lens for viewing environmental injustices, grassroots activists and scholars have worked to document, study, and combat the roots of the problem. Like the EJ movement, EJ studies has spread well beyond the borders of the U.S. to places as diverse as Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, Japan, Latin America, South Africa, the United Kingdom, West Africa, and the former Soviet Union.52
Recent scholarship divides EJ studies into two phases: the “first generation,” which was focused primarily on documenting the existence of environmental injustice through the lens of race and class; and “second generation” studies that extend beyond questions of distribution to incorporate a deeper consideration of theory and the ways that gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference shape EJ struggles.53 The aim of this framing is to push the field toward a greater embrace of methodologically creative and interdisciplinary approaches to EJ studies. I agree with much of that principle, but I find this framing misleading. That is, while it describes the majority of social scientific articles published during the early years – which were based on quantitative, positivist models that sought to measure environmental inequality – this perspective overlooks a wealth of highly visible and important books, edited collections, and qualitative studies published in academic and non-academic presses and journals that offer a very different perspective on EJ studies. For example, during the so-called first generation of EJ studies, some scholars were actually engaged in exploring the gendered dimensions of EJ conflicts,54 extending beyond the question of whether race versus class was the primary driver of unequal risk distribution and asking what the health and psychological impacts of environmental inequalities might be in residential communities and workplaces.55 Significant “first generation” scholarship involved excavating the historical, social, and political forces that produce environmental injustices in the first place.56 During that “first generation” period, scholars were also exploring: the complexities and contradictions of claims-making around environmental racism/injustice in cases where communities of color and Indigenous communities audaciously declared the right to welcome hazardous and toxic industries and wastes in the name of environmental justice and sorely needed economic development;57 the historical process of social identity construction and the intersections of race, class, and gender as they relate to environmental injustice;58 and EJ struggles across a variety of social spaces, including the workplace.59
Thus, the field of EJ studies has always been marked by a great diversity of scholarly approaches. Having registered the above qualifications, it would be generally accurate to say that the second generation emphasizes a wider variety of methodological approaches and interdisciplinarity, the extension of scholarship into areas of greater theoretical breadth, and the expansion of social categories under consideration, particularly a stronger attention to gender, sexuality, and, increasingly, nonhuman natures. Scholars also are envisioning and grappling with questions of justice and sustainability at greater depth.60 This book is written in this spirit, building on the important work of these earlier generations of EJ scholarship.
How do we define justice?
Recent scholarship has struggled with the various ways to theorize the meaning of justice, and how this can include justice defined as distribution, inclusion, participation, recognition, fairness/procedure, and capabilities,61 thus raising complex questions about how the scholarship and the movement have imagined both the problem of environmental injustice and its possible solutions. Some years earlier, sociologist Stella Čapek laid the groundwork for these ideas when she introduced the “environmental justice frame,”62 which is a lens for constructing meaning among EJ activists. Čapek’s EJ frame consists of six key claims, including the right to accurate information from authorities concerning environmental risks; public hearings; democratic participation in decision-making regarding the future of any threatened community; compensation for injured parties from those who inflict harm on them; expressions of solidarity with survivors of environmental injustices; and a call to abolish environmental racism/injustice. Environmental injustice was not just about the threats associated with disproportionate hazards facing marginalized communities, under this framing; it was about ordinary people demanding respect for their grassroots definition of the situation, while gaining access to democratic processes and exercising power. That is, EJ was ultimately focused on reordering power relations among stakeholders. These arguments were later explored by David Schlosberg and others, who concluded that much of the EJ literature’s focus on justice was limited: scholars and activists tended to focus on distributional outcomes of environmental inequality, when they would do well also to emphasize the power structures and social systems that give rise to environmental inequalities to begin with.63 When activists and scholars first issued demands for EJ, much of the movement activism and scholarship focused on distributive justice. In other words, they focused on issues of equity regarding the distribution of environmental harm and risk. Recent scholarship has called for a move beyond the “distributive paradigm” because it seemingly fails to challenge the underlying power structures that facilitate environmental injustice.64 Many scholars have also argued for expanding EJ to include a focus on procedural and recognition justice.65 Arising from the idea of participatory democracy, these concepts shift the lens from distributive outcomes to the importance of enabling participation and recognition of excluded and/or aggrieved groups. They argue for closer attention to whether and how marginalized populations can gain access to levers of power primarily through spaces moderated by the state. And recognition justice centers on those political and cultural practices involving the acknowledgment and inclusion of marginalized groups and their unique experiences with oppression. These issues have particular salience in communities of color and Indigenous communities globally, where dominant state forces and elites have routinely denied residents the opportunity to participate in decisions regarding environmental impacts that shape their lives.
David Schlosberg points out that “recognition” efforts can, but do not always include the state.66 However, much of the literature on theories of justice – whether distributive, procedural, or recognitional – does center on the state. That is concerning because the state is one of the primary forces contributing to environmental injustice and related institutionalized violence. That is, these ideas of justice are important in principle, but in practice, they have often meant the inclusion and recognition of EJ community leaders by the state, followed by co-optation and siphoning of grassroots energy away from other key goals, and ultimately achieving relatively little by way of policy changes. Consider, for example, how poorly the enforcement of environmental laws in communities of color has proceeded via the President’s Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice, and how poorly communities of color have fared in seeking environmental justice through the courts and the legal system, years after these communities and the issue of environmental racism enjoyed state “recognition” at the highest levels in the U.S.67 “Justice” as defined above is primarily a quest for inclusion in the political process under the assumption or hope that such a move will be more likely to lead to substantive changes in that system. Political theorist Iris Marion Young refers to this tension as the disagreement between “deliberative democrats,” who seek to work inside the system and “activists,” who seek to pressure the system from the outside. Critics (myself included) have argued that the dream of deliberative democracy is made difficult by the realities of structural inequality that shape and limit ordinary people’s access to the deliberative table, as well as the terms of debate and questions considered for discussion, which tend to reinforce existing institutional arrangements.68 Iris Young writes that “advocates of deliberative democracy who believe that deliberative processes are the best way to conduct policies even under the conditions of structural inequality that characterize democracies today have no satisfactory response to this criticism.”69 Going further than the “insider” versus “outsider” orientation – because both are really little more than different approaches that ultimately focus on making change via the state – few political theorists working on this issue seem to have considered the possibility that some people and communities might not want to be included in a political process that has meted out so much punishment and brutality toward them. That is, if we take a different approach to social change, we might find that many communities seek to walk away from the state rather than toward it.70 In other words, why can’t we imagine that some communities simply want to be left alone to practice and enjoy their autonomy as a means to social change?
Lisa Cacho writes that justice via inclusion of people of color and undocumented persons in a white supremacist state like the U.S. is a deeply flawed goal, given the extensive historical and ongoing exclusions of these populations and their association with criminality:
As criminal by being, unlawful by presence, and illegal by status, they do not have the option to be law abiding, which is always the absolute prerequisite for political rights, legal recognition, and resource distribution in the United States. When subjugation is engendered, justified, and maintained by the law, legal recognition cannot be a permanent or meaningful solution to subjugation.71
While I agree that justice via procedural inclusion and recognition can be important to the future of the EJ movement and to any community’s efforts to create change, the reality is that it is often a step toward a more sophisticated effort at co-optation, displacement of movement goals, diffusion of grassroots energy, assimilation, and a strengthening of existing power relations. The push for this limited brand of justice within EJ studies and the EJ movement reflects a longstanding tendency that seeks to take a pragmatic approach to social change, but I believe we must take bolder steps. Critical EJ Studies offers one such approach.
Toward Critical Environmental Justice Studies
Critical EJ Studies is a perspective intended to address a number of important limitations and tensions within earlier generations of EJ studies. These include, for example,
Questions concerning the degree to which scholars should place emphasis on one or more social categories of difference (e.g. race, class, gender, sexuality, species, etc.) versus a focus on multiple forms of inequality and injustice;
The extent to which scholars studying EJ issues should focus on single-scale versus multiscalar analyses of the causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of EJ struggles;
The degree to which various forms of social inequality and power – especially state power – are viewed as entrenched and embedded in society, which are elements that must be confronted rather than embraced;
The largely unexamined question of the
expendability
of human and nonhuman populations facing socioecological threats from states, industries, and other political economic forces.
On the first point, EJ scholars have had a tendency to focus on only one or two forms of social inequality in studies of environmental injustice. For example, some scholars continue to debate the relative importance of race versus class as drivers of the unequal distribution of environmental hazards,72 while a small but growing group of scholars have explored the role of gender and sexuality in EJ studies.73 Moreover, the key social category species remains, at best, at the margins of the field of EJ studies, despite the fact that, generally, when and where humans suffer from environmental inequalities, so does the more-than-human world (and vice versa), often as a result of ideological frameworks that devalue and associate marginalized humans with “nature.” As noted earlier, the concepts of kincentricity, radical relationality, multi-species justice, and cosmovisions are emerging to fill in this gap, which is a welcome addition to EJ studies. A small number of researchers are grappling with these ideas in the fields of ecofeminism and animal studies as well.74 My point is that since multiple forms of inequality drive and characterize the experience of environmental injustice, the field would do well to expand in that direction.
With respect to the second point, concerning scale, the EJ studies literature tends to be characterized by research at one scale or another, rather than taking a multiscalar approach. Aside from important work by political ecologists and geographers,75 few studies attempt to grasp how EJ struggles function at multiple scales, from the cellular and bodily level to the global level and back.76 CEJ seeks to promote a more consistent attention to multiscalar research. Some scholars have addressed this important question by exploring cases in which pollutants produced in one part of the world travel across national borders and affect human and ecological health in another hemisphere.77 For example, German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s concept of the “risk society” underscores that, in the contemporary age, the scale and impacts of technological threats to human and ecological well-being have expanded enormously, rendering our capacity to understand, measure, and respond to them much less effective.78 The enormity of what some scholars have called “wicked problems” (such as climate change and nuclear radiation) leaves us at a loss, and prompts many of us to withdraw and engage in denial.79 Scale is of critical importance because it allows us to understand how environmental injustices are facilitated by decision-makers who, for example, behave as if sites where hazards are produced “out of sight and out of mind” are somehow irrelevant to the health of people and ecosystems at the original sites of decision-making power and consumption, when they clearly affect both spaces. For example, the deforestation of much of Indonesia to supply timber for Japan reduces carbon sinks and air quality for the entire region and world. When U.S.-based companies dump toxic electronic wastes in China, this produces chemical poisons in the air and water in China that ultimately cycle through ecosystems and affect U.S. residents. As Peter Newell argues, “injustices enabled through processes of globalization are rendered invisible through distance.”80
Attention to scale also assists us in observing how social movement responses to environmental injustices draw on spatial frameworks, networks, and knowledge to make the connections between hazards in one place and harm in another. Scholars have demonstrated that the environmental justice and climate justice movements are comprised of networks of activists from local communities who collaborate with partners at transnational and global scales, launching campaigns directed at transnational corporations and participating in United Nations-sponsored gatherings to implement stronger global climate treaties.81 This is essential for understanding and addressing environmental injustice: it functions at all scales in both its driving forces and its consequences. That is, environmental threats “jump” scale, crossing vast expanses of geographic space and time, by refusing to be contained by artificial boundaries such as national borders and election cycles. Finally, my conceptualization of scale includes both spatial/geographic dimensions and temporal understandings of this phenomenon, which I will address later in this chapter. A Critical EJ Studies approach embraces multiscalar analyses for producing more robust understandings of the reasons why environmental injustices exist and for developing more effective responses to them.
Regarding the third point – the degree to which various forms of inequality and power are viewed as entrenched in society and yet are elements that must be confronted – this concern stems from my conclusion that the vision of change articulated by many EJ studies scholars and EJ activists generally looks to the state to accommodate demands via legislation, the court system, regulation, institutional reforms, and other policy concessions. The issue here is that such an approach may leave intact the very power structures that produced environmental injustices in the first place. Yes, it names those institutions as sources of the problems and seeks to reform them, but by working in collaboration with those entities, such efforts ultimately risk reinforcing their legitimacy and power. A Critical EJ Studies approach raises the question as to whether scholars and activists should look to the primary actors responsible for producing environmental injustices to offer remedies for those harms. Thus, CEJ invites perspectives that ask whether we should rely on the state to facilitate social change, or whether there may be other paths that can lead us to those goals. I address this point more extensively below.
