Mapping for change: Balancing big and small data in documenting environmental (in)justice in a small Canadian city

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Environmental Justice

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1958) exposed environmental racism and prefigured the tenants of environmental justice by depicting the impacts of poverty and environmental degradation on communities of color. Thirty years before the rise of the current environmental justice movement, Hansberry’s play details the intersectional aims of environmental justice by centering women's experience, by making connections between the health and well-being of women and children, and the larger environment. In this way, an ecodramaturical lens illuminates the power and potential of theatre to inspire civic action. Hansberry’s play stands as a keystone in the rhetorical architecture of the environmental justice movement, which insists that environmental policy must include consideration of where people live, work, play, and worship.  As a historiographic lens, ecodramaturgy can (re)illuminate canonical plays to show their ecological through-lines. Examining the representation of life experience, asking questions about the welfare of bodies, families, and communities affected by racism and economic injustice, ecodramaturgy illuminates canonical plays in new ways, revealing how ideologies of domination and white supremacy that have caused both social and ecological havoc across the land. Rob Nixon (2013) identifies the environmental degradation resulting from longstanding patterns of U.S. imperialism as “slow violence” perpetrated on the world’s poorest and most vulnerable communities. As the environmental justice movement would argue some 30 years later, Hansberry’s play makes clear that environmental health and social justice are inextricably linked, and that ecological concerns must be understood as intertwined with economic justice as well as gender and racial equity. Below, I examine the way environmental and social justice concerns came together in this hallmark play, revealing a (then) radical ecological viewpoint that the environment is coupled with human health and welfare. I contend that the white supremacy that the Youngers face when they plan to move to a new home not only constitutes systemic environmental racism but reflects and arises out of the historic abuse of land and bodies on which the U.S.extractive economies depend. My analysis traces the subtle ways those legacies infect and damage the day-to-day lives of those who carry the disproportional burdens of that historic abuse. I foreground clues to the ecologies represented on stage, including human bodies and habitat, in order to examine the environmental implications of the Youngers’ struggle and racial and class-based oppression and hierarchies the play represents. Hansberry’s claim to homeplace in the milieu 1950s foreshadows the principles of environmental justice in prescient ways.

On the coastal plain of eastern North Carolina, families in certain rural communities daily must deal with the piercing, acrid odor of hog manure—reminiscent of rotten eggs and ammonia—wafting from nearby industrial hog farms. On bad days, the odor invades homes, and people are often forced to cover their mouths and noses when stepping outside. Sometimes, residents say, a fine mist of manure sprinkles nearby homes, cars, and even laundry left on the line to dry.1 Today’s industrial-scale farms—called concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—house thousands of animals whose waste is periodically applied to “spray fields” of Bermuda grass or feed crops.2,3 The waste can contain pathogens, heavy metals, and antibiotic-resistant bacteria,4,5 and the spray can reach nearby homes and drinking water sources. The odor plume, which often pervades nearby communities, contains respiratory and eye irritants including hydrogen sulfide and ammonia.6,7,8 A growing body of research suggests these emissions may contribute not only to mucosal irritation9 and respiratory ailments10 in nearby residents but also decreased quality of life,11 mental stress,12,13 and elevated blood pressure.14 The home of a minority family in Kenansville, North Carolina, situated next to a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. Dust, odors, and manure from CAFOs can reach nearby residents’ homes, including their laundry. Although the Midwest is the traditional home for hogs, with Iowa still the top-producing state, North Carolina went from fifteenth to second in hog production between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.15 This explosive growth resulted in thousands of CAFOs located in the eastern half of the state—squarely in the so-called Black Belt, a crescent-shaped band throughout the South where slaves worked on plantations.16,17 After emancipation many freed slaves continued to work as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. A century later, black residents of this region still experience high rates of poverty, poor health care, low educational attainment, unemployment, and substandard housing.18,19 The clustering of North Carolina’s hog CAFOs in low-income, minority communities—and the health impacts that accompany them—has raised concerns of environmental injustice and environmental racism.20 As one pair of investigators explained, “[P]eople of color and the poor living in rural communities lacking the political capacity to resist are said to shoulder the adverse socio-economic, environmental, or health related effects of swine waste externalities without sharing in the economic benefits brought by industrialized pork production.”21 Although North Carolina is not the only area with environmental justice concerns vis-a-vis CAFOs, it has become one of the best studied.

Roundtable on the Pandemics of Racism, Environmental Injustice, and COVID-19 in America

Review: <i>Katrina: A History, 1915–2015</i>, by Andy Horowitz

This study examines local news reporting about the Flint water crisis. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with local reporters to explore journalistic practices and perceptions of the crisis. The study utilised a framework grounded in concepts from community journalism and crisis reporting, as well as environmental justice and racism scholarship. The qualitative thematic analysis centres around four themes: coverage practices and professionalism, resources and challenges, connections to place, and environmental justice and racism. The results reveal that the crisis served as a catalyst for some news organisations to make substantial investments in their newsrooms; but this was not the case for small organisations that depend mostly on grant-funding. Local reporters generally claimed that despite their attachment to the Flint community, they maintained their normal journalistic standards. However, some reporters struggled to separate their personal experiences from their professional practices, evidence consistent with prior studies on crisis reporting. Reporters demonstrated empathy towards victims impacted by the water crisis, and this heightened their distrust towards official sources and motivated their outreach efforts. Finally, for those reporters, their ideologies were largely consistent with both historical and emerging claims on environmental justice and environmental racism, that persons of colour, minority populations, and poor neighbourhoods in cities are more likely to suffer from environmental hazards compared to white and more affluent communities. Suggestions for crisis reporting in environmental justice contexts are discussed.

The town of Guiyu, located in the Guangdong Province in China, has been highly polluted by the electronic and electric waste (e-waste) recycling industry since 1990s and is now experiencing rigorous environmental governance. Migrant women workers in Guiyu are particularly vulnerable towards the effects of local environmental pollution and degradation in both their working and living spaces. The serious environmental governance carried out by the central and local governments in recent years also has brought them more risks than benefits. In this project, I aim to use feminist theory of intersectionality to analyse the social and environmental injustice experienced by migrant women workers in Guiyu. I shall mainly explore three questions: how power relations within different systems of oppression intersect to produce and maintain the social and environmental injustice they are faced with, how the intersectional power relations facilitate or restrict the formation of their agency, and to what extent intersectional solidary and alliance can be achieved to make profound political changes. The feminist theory of intersectionality has been emphasised by many scholars to analyse the complex environmental injustice phenomena nowadays. Literature review shows that there are mainly three related themes in existing intersectional environmental justice studies: the formation of environmental injustice, the agentic orientation of vulnerable groups, and the political dynamics and possibilities. These three themes correspond well to the theoretical framework of power over, power to, and power with. However, I argue that a more textured and solid way of applying intersectionality to environmental justice studies should be embraced to capture more fully how power works intersectionally. Based on an in-depth critical ethnographic research at Guiyu, I shall supply a contextualised and textured analysis on these three themes, waving together theories from environmental justice, intersectionality, power, agency, coalitional politics, and global e-waste politics. Firstly, in terms of the production of social and environmental injustice, I argue that incorporating the multi-dimensional perspective of intersectionality is particularly important. It allows us to capture the multiple faces of power based on different social categories and have a fuller picture of the complicated ways in which they are intersected. Secondly, I argue that we should embrace a more complicated understanding of the “intersectional agency” as a result of persistent negotiations from the dominated with the intersected, multiple faces of power based on different social categories. The “intersectional agency” against social and environmental injustice among migrant women workers in Guiyu is more complicated and even internally tense instead of being an intact whole. Thirdly, I argue that it is critically important to avoid portraying intersectional solidarity among different activists and movements as an inevitable and automatic outcome of the intersected systems of oppression. The case of Guiyu shows that there are different types of obstacles and challenges to build intersectional politics on the ground. Overall, the analysis of migrant women workers at Guiyu helps not only expand our understanding and theorising of environmental justice, intersectionality, and power, but also open more possibilities, visions, and challenges for us to promote environmental and political changes.

Promoting Action Ecology Research Through Integration of Environmental Justice in Undergraduate Ecology Education

This study places toxic pollution incidents within the theoretical framework of “slow violence” and “necropolitics,” revealing that environmental injustice can be overlooked, or even concealed, leading to greater damage. Additionally, ways to counter slow violence are explored. Each point is illustrated in Susanne Antonetta’s environmental autobiography Body Toxic, which talks about the author and her neighbors’ experience with the effects of exposure to toxic chemicals, analyzed here as a form of slow violence. As a result, it becomes apparent why long-term exposure to toxic substances should be deemed slow violence, and the exact way in which this kind of violence exerts itself. Slow violence is structural and gradual, and has historically been the result of economics dictating government policies, often at the cost of health. Therefore, the process of causing slow physical and mental harm to those living in ethnic and deprived areas, as in the case of Antonetta and her neighbors, needs to be examined within the theoretical framework of necropolitics. Slow violence is an environmental injustice that is intensified and perpetuated by racial and social inequality, and this study considers how it can be countered and overcome.

Environmental injustice is part and parcel of the fundamentals of international and domestic environmental law. In South Africa, section 2(4)(c) of the National Environmental Management Act 107 of 1998 (NEMA) establishes environmental justice (EJ) as part of the environmental management principles to direct decision-making. This is particularly relevant because of the country’s legacy of continuing environmental injustices and inequalities, especially concerning natural-resource dependent services and benefits. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 further establishes a developmental local government (DLG) of which the objects are to ensure a safe and healthy environment, sustainable delivery of services, promotion of social and economic development as well as public participation in decision-making. These objects are complemented by section 24 environmental right in the Bill of Rights. Municipal service delivery of water and sanitation, electricity, land matters and municipal health, should supplement, not compromise the state of local communities' environment and access should be equal. The absence of the latter may result in the form of environmental injustice as has been described by authors such as Bullard, McDonald and Schlosberg. In the event of service delivery-related environmental injustices, it is to be expected that communities must have remedial options available. One of which may be accessible to the judicial system. Therefore, this paper focuses on and explains the role that Municipal Courts specifically may play in fortifying the relationship between municipal service delivery and improved grass-root level environmental justice in South Africa. The underlying question is whether such courts can be agents of (environmental) change where local communities are exposed to environmental harm as a consequence of the failure of municipal services or the environmentally harmful actions of other community members or local industries.

In the winter of 2022, I had planned a place-based literature course on Providence at the Rhode Island School of Design. A series of outings formed the backbone of the class: my aim was to have students connect to the place where they lived through experiences like standing atop the landfill to understand the afterlife of their waste and touring a colonial house to trace the violent foundations of the city's wealth. Instead, due to the omicron-variant surge, the course was largely conducted over Zoom and all but one outing became virtual. I found that a disorienting, nearly absurd sensation clouded the course when we discussed places that we should have been inhabiting together; instead of bridging the distance between the texts and the world, in the end, the course only accentuated that distance. Postcolonial/ecocritical place-based teaching is challenging for the precise reason that it is based on place and our places are changing now more than ever. And yet, as the kind of teaching the planet needs becomes more difficult, it also becomes more essential. In his foreword to Teaching Post colonial Environmental Literature and Media, Graham Huggan asserts that "teaching is the most valuable thing we postcolonial/environmental scholars R e v ie w

This article provides a genealogy and analysis of the concept of a sacrifice zone. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article traces the origins and transformation of sacrifice zones from (1) a livestock and land management concept into (2) a critical energy concept during the 1970s, (3) an Indigenous political ecology concept in the 1980s, and, finally, (4) an environmental justice concept in the 1990s and beyond. The article identifies the concept’s core content and argues in favor of calling sites of concentrated environmental injustice sacrifice zones, over alternatives such as “fenceline communities” or “dumping grounds,” in part because the concept of sacrifice, derived from the Latin “to make sacred,” is polysemous, signifying both violent victimization and sacred life. This explains why some activists have employed the sacrifice zone concept to generate a positive vision for transforming sacrifice zones into sacred zones. This analysis of the concept’s development through time, social friction, and geographic mobility advances efforts to broaden environmental justice theory from a focus on distributive justice to critical and constructive engagement with culture and religion. The article pursues one implication of this study by suggesting an amendment to the concept of “slow violence”: environmental injustice is better theorized as “slow sacrifice”—a political ecology of life and death, the goal of which is to concentrate death in some places so that other places might experience full, sustainable life. Such a theory makes visible a wider set of existing cultural and religious responses to environmental injustices.

Environmental justice is a term that includes both exposure to environmental ‘bads’ as well as access to environmental ‘goods’ which might be unequally experienced by different socio‑economic groups. In other words, environmental justice scholars study whether everybody can have an equal right to a healthy, nurturing environment which supports their development and well‑being. The environmental justice movement arose in response to the so‑called ‘environmental racism’ in the USA which affected communities of blue‑collar workers, people with lower income and of Afro‑American, Asian, Latin or native origins. Although initially environmental (in)justice was rooted in racial discrimination in the USA, nowadays it encompasses a wider range of issues, including problems at the local and global level, from degradation and pollution of natural resources to aspects related to spatial planning. Unequal access to environmental amenities – such as green spaces – was not the main focus of the discourse, however, it is gaining attention nowadays, especially in the context of urban environment. Urban green spaces influence health and well‑being of urban residents, but access to them can be uneven in terms of socio‑spatial heterogeneity. Growing challenges of living in cities, related to, among others, climate change, densification or sprawling of developments, urban heat islands, and other nuisances, require sustainable management of green spaces and provision of equal (socially just) access to benefits provided by these areas. Moreover, another important aspect of the discussion is linked to potentially beneficial planning decisions (e.g. increasing availability of urban green spaces) and their long‑term consequences, which may eventually lead to gentrification and increased social inequalities (environmental injustice). Complexity of the problem related to availability of green spaces in cities needs an interdisciplinary approach which combines ecological, spatial and socio‑economic aspects. The article reviews the current state‑of‑the‑art literature in the field of environmental justice, with particular emphasis on green space availability in the context of urban environment.

Spatial planning based on environmental justice is a key activity in the process of the provision of equal rights to live in a safe environment and possess the opportunities of using it. Irrational development of land containing historical earth surface contamination constitutes a severe threat to the health safety of residents, and it may consequently lead to slow violence. This paper’s objective is to identify districts of Warsaw where the phenomena of environmental injustice and slow violence in post-industrial areas occur and fill in the indicated knowledge gap in such issues in Poland. The aim is also to answer the question as to whether contamination of the pedosphere and changes in land use in brownfields have a considerable effect on differences related to the health safety of residents of particular districts of Warsaw. The results of analyses of correlations of soil environment risk, health safety of residents, social, and planning conditions show that, in districts with a large share of areas included in the register of historical earth surface contamination, higher-than-average soil environment risk occurs, and it is related to the transformation of brownfields. Wola is a district affected by the phenomenon of slow violence and environmental injustice. According to the research, Wola is an area of accumulation of the highest levels of soil contamination, as well as some of the least favorable indices of health safety of residents and social conditions (in the case of both, Wola takes the second position). It is also a place of dynamic, unplanned transformations of brownfields, resulting in the “discovery” of historical earth surface contamination at the stage of the investment process. As evidenced based on the example of Wola, lack of spatial planning in contaminated areas leads to the exposure of their residents to a higher soil environment risk that may result in reduced health safety and the occurrence of slow violence. Therefore, rational planning of development of land containing historical earth surface contamination, with consideration of the aspects of health safety of residents, is an instrument of provision of environmental justice in terms of access to healthy life and residential environment.