“Environmental Justices”: What We Have Learned from the Taiwanese Environmental Justice Controversy

Abstract

Abstract This article looks into the way the concept of environmental justice (EJ) has been shaped and then reshaped in Taiwan. Analyzing the Lanyu controversy shows that EJ as a discourse is not static but dynamic. That is, the term of EJ can be invested with different meanings in different social spaces. Owing to differentiated social, political, economic, and cultural processes, in some regions of Taiwan race and equal treatment/distribution may not be considered the most important issue. In the controversy over nuclear waste other critical discourses also have the potential to foster alternative versions of EJ. Different conceptions of EJ are hybridized in local campaigns. By attending to these meanings, we attempt to provide a multi-faceted understanding of EJ rather than simply labeling the issues touching on Lanyu as an EJ concern. At the end of this article, we suggest that activists and scholars in Taiwan should prepare a set of policies, rather than a single policy, to make EJ a reality.