The new politics of environmental degradation: un/expected landscapes of disempowerment and vulnerability

Anna Willow

doi:10.2458/v21i1.21135

Abstract

Acknowledging environmental degradation as a profoundly political phenomenon, this article examines how uninvited environmental change transforms people's understandings of and relationships to the natural world. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in a semi-remote Canadian Anishinaabe community and among Euro-American residents of Ohio who oppose local shale energy development, I trace parallels between the disempowerment and vulnerability experienced by people with very different assumptions about the world and their place in it and very different positions within the global political economic system. While environmental justice scholars have revealed compelling correlations between social and environmental inequity, I argue that investigating environmental degradation's sociocultural impacts among relatively privileged groups can encourage more dynamic explorations of conjoined environmental/social/political systems and expose ongoing structural shifts. My comparative analysis seems to suggest that ever-increasing segments of the world's population now contend with environmental challenges that they did not authorize, and do not benefit from. I thus conclude by calling for additional investigations of environmental degradation in unexpected places and the implications of extensive inequity for global sustainability.Key words: Energy, environmental degradation, environmental justice, fossil fuels, hydraulic fracking, landscape, North America, shale gas

Highlights

These are the words of three middle-class Ohio residents struggling to make cultural sense of ongoing and impending environmental changes they feel powerless to stop
I consider the perspectives of Ohioans who oppose shale energy development in order to facilitate a comparative analysis of how two very different populations have responded to uninvited changes in what I call their landscapes—their processual and contextual culturally-conceived material worlds (Bender 2002; Cosgrove 1984; Hirsch 1995; Mitchell 1994; Stewart and Strathern 2003; Willow 2011)
As detailed in Willow et al (2014), content coding of transcribed interviews and industry documents revealed six themes used to describe how ways of experiencing and imagining the environment are changing as a result of ongoing or impending natural gas extraction: legacy, way of life, disempowerment, vulnerability, displacement, and prosperity. This analysis suggested that people who are differently positioned in relation to shale energy development are making cultural sense of Ohio's changing environment in very different ways, which appear to be rooted in dissimilar understandings of human-environment relationships and influenced by contemporary sociopolitical arrangements that guide environmental policy and industry activity (Willow et al 2014)

Summary

Introduction

These are the words of three middle-class Ohio residents struggling to make cultural sense of ongoing and impending environmental changes they feel powerless to stop. I consider the perspectives of Ohioans who oppose shale energy development in order to facilitate a comparative analysis of how two very different populations have responded to uninvited changes in what I call their landscapes—their processual and contextual culturally-conceived material worlds (Bender 2002; Cosgrove 1984; Hirsch 1995; Mitchell 1994; Stewart and Strathern 2003; Willow 2011). Social scientists have become somewhat used to seeing peoples who are marginalized or peripheral bearing a disproportionate share of global capitalism's environmentally damaging byproducts. Fighting this problematic pattern is, after all, what the environmental justice movement is all about. Acknowledging environmental degradation as a profoundly political phenomenon, I propose that even as distinctive historical and cultural contexts set these situations apart, common perceptions of disempowerment and vulnerability seem to suggest extensive systemic changes, as growing numbers of people from increasingly diverse walks of life are being forced to face immediate—and often very serious—environmental challenges that they did not authorize and do not benefit from

The politics of environmental degradation

Findings

Conclusion