Environmental justice and rural studies: A critical conversation and invitation to collaboration

Abstract

Journal of Rural Studies 47 (2016) 381e386 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud Environmental justice and rural studies: A critical conversation and invitation to collaboration David N. Pellow Environmental Studies Program, University of California Santa Barbara, United States Loka Ashwood and Katherine MacTavish have done an outstanding job of editing a collection of papers by a group of scholars who have produced groundbreaking work on myriad rural dimensions of environmental justice scholarship and politics. To my knowledge, this special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies is the first of its kind, and it is truly timely. These contributors bring a range of research methods, epistemologies, disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and emphases on a broad and varied set of landscapes and geographies unlike any project I have seen in the field of EJ studies. Ashwood and MacTavish's introduction to this volume of- fers a deeply insightful conceptual framework through which to view the links among rurality, democracy, inequality, and envi- ronmental justice. Their analysis of de Tocqueville's concept tyr- anny of the majority is momentous and offers a productively unsettling framework for thinking through the problem of nation- states with respect to future scholarship and politics focused on environmental (in)justice in rural, urban and other settings. In what follows, I offer my thoughts on the significance of each of these papers and the volume as a whole. As a number of the authors in this special issue point out, the rural dimensions of environmental justice studies have long been present, but generally only in the background, rarely foregrounded, centered, or taken seriously as a social, ecological, cultural, eco- nomic, and political category that shapes EJ struggles everyday. For example, many of the early environmental justice movement bat- tlegrounds in the U.S. took place in rural communities like Warren County, North Carolina and Kettleman City, California. But the dominant framing of those cases was around racial and class in- equalities, while the spatial relationships and tensions between urban and rural communities was rarely sufficiently theorized. This special issue of the Journal of Rural Studies features innovative and path-breaking scholarship that seeks to bring the rural to the center of EJ studies and engage this category in all of its complexity. I often describe myself as an environmental sociologist, as do a number of senior environmental justice studies scholars. Environ- mental sociology emerged as a response to the increasing evidence that urbanization and industrialization were producing severe ecological consequences around the globe. Environmental E-mail address: pellow@es.ucsb.edu. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2016.06.018 0743-0167/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. sociology is a field that owes much of its origins to rural sociology and rural studies and has, until recently, struggled to gain a foot- hold at the center of the discipline of Sociology. Ironically, one of the fields that arguably gave environmental sociology a much- needed shot in the arm and heightened visibility in recent yearsdEnvironmental Justice Studiesdhas also contributed to shifting its attention away from rural spaces toward urban centers. That would not be a concern if EJ studies scholars were paying serious and close attention to the ways that urban and rural spaces are inextricably linked and bound up in intricate and highly uneven and unequal processes. But that focus has been largely absent in the literature. Interestingly, a close relative of EJ studies is Food Justice studiesdan emergent field that brings together many of the prac- tices we traditionally associate with rural spaces such as agricul- ture, food production, and distribution with urban community politics (Alkon and Agyeman, 2011; Anguelovski, 2014). Through food justice work, people from urban communities of color are collaborating with people of color and white allies in both urban and rural settings across this country to reconnect with rural spaces, traditions, and knowledge, thereby blurring the lines be- tween the urban and rural, and consumer and producer. Increas- ingly, EJ studies is taking a closer look at Food Justice Studies for direction on this point and could be a critically important window and pathway for bridging rural studies and EJ scholarship (as the contributing authors to this special issue have done so well). To be fair, there are a number of notable EJ studies that are based on rural or largely rural areas that merit some mention here. Bullard (2000) classic Dumping in Dixie chronicles the struggles of a number of African American communities in the Southern U.S., including Emelle, Alabama; Alsen, Louisina; and Institute, West Virginia, and Timmons Roberts and Melissa Toffolon-Weiss's (2001) Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline centers its anal- ysis on several rural EJ struggles in the state of Louisiana. Recent research on EJ and water management conflicts in the Sacramento- San Joaquin Delta region of California (Sze et al., 2010) and on pesticide drift in and around agricultural communities of California (Harrison, 2011) reveal that basic access to safe water, soil, and air is not enjoyed by many communities of color in rural America. His- torian Richard Mizelle's (2014) Backwater Blues, is a re-reading of the 1927 Mississippi Flood through an EJ lens. That flood killed untold numbers of people and revealed the depths of