Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Abstract

Environmental JusticeVol. 16, No. 3 Guest EditorialFree AccessEarth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)JusticeFrancesca Rosignoli, Elisa Privitera, and Giusy PappalardoFrancesca RosignoliDr. Francesca Rosignoli is a Maria Zambrano postdoctoral fellow at Department of Public Law, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.Search for more papers by this author, Elisa PriviteraDr. Elisa Privitera is a postdoctoral fellow, University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada), Urban Just Transitions cluster.Search for more papers by this author, and Giusy PappalardoDr. Giusy Pappalardo is an Assistant Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture, University of Catania, Catania, Italy.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jun 2023https://doi.org/10.1089/env.2023.29016.frsAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail This Special Issue emerges from the conference “STREAMS. Transformative Environmental Humanities,” which took place in Stockholm (Sweden) August 3–6, 2021. Although the purpose of the conference was to stimulate the debate on future directions for rethinking environmental humanities at the time of ecological crisis, the specific aim of our panel “Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice”1 was to shed light on transformative collective actions confronting environmental injustices at the time of Anthropocene.2Building on panelists' enthusiasm, this special issue now extends theoretical and practical insights received during the conference, including authors beyond those who participated in the panel, to provide a broader understanding of the role of environmental humanities to address socioecological–spatial justices.Stemming from rejecting the conception of our time as condemned to an inescapable injustice and “apocalyptic end to all things”,3 this special issue has proposed to open an arena for understanding the various forms of action for empowering the most marginalized communities.More in detail, the call for papers asked for challenging three dimensions of environmental injustice:4spatial distribution versus maldistribution of goods and hazards, both at the urban and rural scale.recognition versus misrecognition of a spectrum of vulnerabilities, such as people of color, low-income communities, and future generations.participation versus exclusion of powerless communities facing obstacles to achieve justice.In addressing the intersections between and among various forms of injustices, the authors have contributed by empirical and theoretical research from both the so-called global South and North, in line with critical environmental justice (EJ) studies (Pellow, 2017) that look at socioecological issues through the lens of intersectionality.Baratti's article—focused on cases in Nigeria and Afghanistan—is exemplificative of how poverty and environmental degradation have a mutually reinforcing relationship, and produce spatial implications.Such intersections recall the recent debate on the increase of climate refugees that escape from inhabitable places, which are ecologically degraded and socioeconomically distressed, to pursue the possibility of self-determination in wealthier countries, highlighting the geographical maldistribution of climate change-related consequences.5Nevertheless, the ecological storm is not only entangled with interspatial injustices, but also intergenerational injustices. In this regard, Hahn's article brilliantly navigates how artists tackle the ethical contradictions and challenges of the unfair effects of climate change through various spatial and temporal dimensions. In her research seeking an in-depth understanding of climate (in)justice-related art, Hahn found out that current trends in artistic production are concerned with dystopian, and apocalyptic futures, but also with resistance and reactions. These artistic productions are intrinsically transformative, as they are intended as means for reflecting upon the present to affect future trajectories.If the use of visual art to reduce the temporal distance is consolidated in artists' practices, it entails more serious ethical concerns in spatial terms. This is one of the reasons why other artistic trends—still in Hahn's exploration—are concerned with the impacts nearby, mainly in the Global North, approaching climate change as a “domestic issue.” By treating climate change as not merely a remote issue (spatially or temporally), and as no longer “a catastrophe without event,” art expressions emerge as an action of proximity, to sensibilize on nearby effects.Besides Hahn emphasizing art's agency in spreading awareness about the responsibilities of everyone in facing climate change, other authors of this special issue have focused on the clashing relationship between collective actions in the Global South and North.For instance, Kenfack's study explores the contradictions and challenges faced by a faith-inspired movement like Development and Peace-Caritas Canada, through the religious environmental campaign “For Our Common Home” involving Indigenous communities in Canada and Brazil. Starting from a dialogue between the Christian concept of integral ecology and the Rematriation originating from indigenous spirituality, this article contributes to the development of a theoretical framework for understanding the religious motives underpinning climate activism. The author notes that, despite the principles of integral ecology and ecological conversion inspiring the entire campaign, the involvement of worshippers has focused on the “abroad” more than the “domestic” dimension.Owing to a very deeply rooted and dominating petroculture in Canada, the campaign did not entail taking individual and community actions to reduce the carbon footprints at the local and parish levels. Likewise, the expression of solidarity with Indigenous communities fighting in the Amazon was not equally accompanied by solidarity with local Indigenous communities struggling in Canada against extractivist corporations.Consistently with the plea for a multiscalar spatial analysis of environmental injustice and EJ movements,6 this case interestingly casts light on the tension and paradoxes between local movements and global causes, and on the shortcoming of converting and conceiving some local issues as global problems due to the emergence of particularisms and nearsighted visions.The local context as the litmus test to experience the global unjust chessboard incorporated in spaces is a theme also for Selva's article on the petrochemical risk landscapes in Val D'Agri in Italy. The author closely follows the local nonexpert activist association “Cova Contro,” and narrates its ability to mobilize low-tech scientific apparatus for monitoring the environment, as well as sense-based indicators, which generate qualitative experiential data, and bodily receptivity to contamination or narrations of encounters with experiences of pollution.By echoing the concept of “small data”7 and the theorization of “toxic autobiographies”,8 Selva emphasizes how the situated practices of citizen sensing—which navigate and assemble the evidence of slow and chronicle effects of industrial pollution on bodies—challenge the assumption that only expert-techno-scientific monitoring is productive of truth and reason regarding contamination. Her contribution, therefore, adds a precious layer of epistemological reflection to this special issue, stimulating the readers to question which knowledge can actually achieve more justice.If the disinterest of corporations for public safety lays at the basis of the EJ movements, the role of the state is a much more nuanced and controversial topic, on which Blanco-Moreno's article reasons. Here, the focus is on the community-based organizations that provide drinking water for human consumption and ensure access to water in rural areas and urban peripheries of Columbia. Despite the Colombian governmental institutional system underestimating the role of these organizations, their water ontologies, their community character, and the related citizen-driven initiatives can be seen as an effort to solve a basic need and to guarantee a basic right proactively. The state's neglect of this right underlies a lack of recognition of peasant populations as citizens.Other emblematic examples of such a thorny position of the state are provided in Rivera's and in Owusu-Daaku's articles. The first contribution, bringing up the case of the mismanagement of stormwater in the “unincorporated colonias”—the neighborhoods along the U.S./Mexico border in the south of Texas—confirms that the overlaps between several forms of injustices can be enforced primarily by the state and the law. The second unfolds the “apparently environmental-driven” policies, such as the federal Superfund program promoted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, to remediate and redevelop the nation's most hazardous sites.In the author's analysis, such policies can embed various forms of injustice since they may contribute to the phenomenon of gentrification related to the increases of property values and evictions of former low-income residents, where the recovery interventions are implemented.The aforementioned examples corroborate that the state is often instrumental in maintaining, if not increasing, already existing inequalities. Instead of guarantors of social justice, state institutions and norms, if affected by neoliberalist dynamics, are often among the perpetrators of injustices, in some cases mobilizing various forms of violence (from toxic narratives to militarization).In this line, Mushonga's article provides a clear picture of a case of state violence in the politics of EJ, by reporting the contradiction between constitutional provisions on environmental rights, and legal frameworks in the management of protected forests in Zimbabwe. Here, the affected citizens are mainly black people depending on natural resources for their survival. In contrast, military interventions, in the name of the environment, have inhumanly evicted thousands of people from their land and homes within the forests.In the context of postcolonial Africa, Mushonga then discusses the state approach to constitutional environmental rights, which is often embedded with exclusionary violent conservation top-down models, and how this creates unbalances in the real socioecological conditions on the ground.Therefore, this group of contributions (Rivera, Owusu-Daaku, and Mushonga), reflecting upon the role of public institutions and environmental policies, corroborates what radical EJ scholars,9–11 have argued in several publications, regarding the states as perpetrators of injustices.Nevertheless, we also do acknowledge that to conceive the state as a “wholly and inevitably repressive instrument” might bring a reductionist vision of it, since “the States also serve other ends, can be made to do so more meaningfully, must be made to do so, and are being made to do so”.12In conclusion, we believe that this special issue adds some elements for understanding various forms of reactions to the nuanced and controversial manifestations of environmental injustices. Not least, the contributions offer some pick locks to uncover the transformative tension embedded in most of the resistant practices discussed. Despite in most of the contribution the focus is on saying “no” to injustices, authors are already telling “yes” to a different prospect for the future.13Mobilizing confrontational disruptive alternative actions to the mainstream, as well as art-based languages and incorporated knowledge(s), authors have opened the scholarly debate to the richness of reflections coming from the ground, across geographies, political contexts, and a diversity of perspectives.AcknowledgmentsThe guest editors thank all panelists participating in the conference, authors for writing such thought-provoking articles, and reviewers who kindly dedicated their time in contributing to improving the articles received.Author Disclosure StatementNo competing financial interests exist.Funding InformationNo funding was received for this article.1 Although other existing studies offer some reflections concerned with resisting against the dominant culture (See Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith, eds. Earth at Risk: Building a Resistance Movement to Save the Planet. [PM Press, 2012]), or measuring the costs of ecological damage (See Claude Henry and Laurence Tubiana. Earth at Risk: Natural Capital and the Quest for Sustainability. [Columbia University Press, 2017]), this special issue expands these reflections exploring the transformative tensions in practices that are already in place, and their relations with institutional policies, to open a debate on how to achieve a more “Just Earth System,” as a joint effort between the academia and social movements.2 Like many other scholars, we agree that the discourse on the Anthropocene (See Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” Global Change Newsletter 41 [2000]: 17–18) needs to include its terminological and substantial variants (See among the others, Donna J. Haraway. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. [Duke University Press, 2016]; Moore, Jason W. Moore, ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. [Pm Press, 2016]; Marco Armiero. Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. [Cambridge University Press, 2021]) that, in our view, uncover the existing as well as new forms of socio-ecological-spatial injustices.3 Simon Dalby. “Biopolitics and Climate Security in the Anthropocene.” Geoforum 49 (2013): 184–192.4 David Schlosberg. Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).5 Francesca Rosignoli. Environmental Justice for Climate Refugees. (London: Routledge, 2022).6 David Pellow. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity. 2017.7 Elisa Privitera, Marco Armiero, and Filippo Gravagno. “Seeking justice in risk landscapes. Small data and toxic autobiographies from an Italian petrochemical town (Gela, Sicily).” Local Environment 26 (2021): 847–871.8 Marco Armiero, Thanos Andritsos, Stefania Barca, Rita Bràs, Sergio Ruiz Cayuela, Cxaědas x Dedeoělu, Marica Di Pierri, et al. “Toxic Bios: Toxic Autobiographies—A Public Environmental Humanities Project.” Environmental Justice 12 (2019): 7–11.9 Laura Pulido. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism, Racial Capitalism and State-Sanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography 41 (2017): 524–533.10 Laura Pulido. “Conversations in Environmental Justice: An Interview with David Pellow.” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 28 (2017): 43–53.11 David Pellow. What Is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge: Polity. 2017.12 Jill Lindsey Harrison. “Environmental Justice and the State.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (2022); doi: 10.1177/2514848622113873613 The term resistant is to be understood in a broad sense: Cf. Camus, Albert. 1991. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. First Vintage International Edition, 13: “a man who says no. But whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes.”FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 16Issue 3Jun 2023 InformationCopyright 2023, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Francesca Rosignoli, Elisa Privitera, and Giusy Pappalardo.Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice.Environmental Justice.Jun 2023.171-173.http://doi.org/10.1089/env.2023.29016.frsPublished in Volume: 16 Issue 3: June 13, 2023PDF download