Comments from the Special Issue Editor: The Emerging Dialogue on Environmental Justice

Abstract

This special issue of Problems provides an interdisciplinary look at the relationship of class, ethnicity, gender, and race to community and workplace environmental problems. Drawing upon case studies, interviews, textual analysis, survey research, and household, community, labor force, and policy data, these articles represent a methodologically eclectic approach to the interpretation of environmental issues as problems of justice in a stratified society. While the disparate impact of social problems on minorities, women, and the poor has long been a central concern in sociology, few sociologists have focused their attention on the environment. A growing public awareness of pollution, toxic exposures, and resource limits has produced new social movements with implications for social theory and practice. A dialogue on environmental justice is emerging in community groups and in the network of national and international organizations which support them. This suggests the need for a parallel dialogue within the community of academics. Concept of Environmental Justice In the first article, The 'Environmental Justice' Frame: A Conceptual Discussion and an Application, Stella Capek locates the concept of environmental justice at the intersection of resource mobilization and social constructionist theories. Arising from the experiences of local grass-roots groups confronting contamination in their communities, the concept of environmental justice frames the claims of groups who perceive themselves as unjustly exposed to environmental risks. concept is transmitted to those in similar circumstances by an emerging network of national and international organizations. Edward Walsh, Rex Warland, and D. Clayton Smith propose an analytic distinction between what they call equity and technology movements. In Backyards, NIMBYs, and Incinerator Sitings: Implications for Movement Theory, they compare two protest movements for which success or failure depended upon protesters' ability to ground their claims in scientific arguments about threats to health and safety. As shown in Capek's analysis of the Carver Terrace neighborhood of Texarkana, and in Suzanna Smith and Michael Jepson's analysis Big Fish, Little Fish: Politics and Power in the Regulation of Florida's Marine Resources, movements based on social justice claims must also engage in political struggles to define objective, scientific assessments of their problems. Indeed, as Loren Lutzenhiser and Bruce Hackett show in Social Stratification and Environmental Degradation: Understanding Household CO2 Production, policies based on apparently rational scientific and economic assessments of such problems as global warming have the effect of unequally distributing the costs of solutions by social class. environmental justice perspective increases our understanding of the role of gender, race, and class in the social construction of work. In Psychosocial Effects of Workplace Hazardous Exposure: Theoretical Synthesis and Preliminary Findings, J. Timmons Roberts