Critical Environmental Justice Research Articles

Occupy Climate: Social Movement-Building in Literature, Politics, and the Arts

Abstract New books by Shelley Streeby, Robert Marzec, and Ashley Dawson point the way toward a cultural criticism for the climate change era. In its own way, each seeks to change the methods of literary and cultural studies, to change the form of the academic monograph, and to encourage a just transition from the radically unequal and ecologically injured world of the now. All three can be seen as contributing to the social and academic movement known as Environmental Justice or Critical Environmental Justice. All three evoke, to some extent, earlier, experimental scholarly works influenced by or generative for the Occupy movement, writings by theorists and practitioners of tactical media like McKenzie Wark and Ricardo Dominguez, and such popular radical thinkers as Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, and Winona LaDuke. Finally, all three books emerge, somewhat unexpectedly, from literature departments, raising the question of what we mean by literary and cultural studies at this moment in the eclipse of humanism by planetary geology and posthumanist philosophical thought.

Conflicting urban and rural territorial livelihood metabolisms: The “explosion” of the “sustainable” urban-industrial pulp complex in Bahia – Brazil

The search for sustainability, particularly in an urban context, is in full swing. Based on a review of mainstream environmental management and the critical environmental justice perspective, this analysis proposes that concepts of space, territory, and livelihood which are operating at the interface of the social and physical world, offer possibilities to understand urban and rural metabolisms in a global context. The second part of the paper focuses on the main obstacles to achieve sustainability, arguing that the underlying causes for conflicts between urban and non-urban traditional territorial livelihood metabolisms are not being adequately addressed. The challenges of implementing sustainability often involve dealing with dynamic contradictory processes with unpredictable outcomes. Therefore, sustainability should not be seen as a certain state of the society, but as a kind of structuring structure characterized by the necessity of permanent rearrangement. Finally, to make this finding more applicable, we present seven parameters to evaluate socio-spatial relationships as a dialectical cognitive framework for planning towards more sustainability and environmental justice. The application of these parameters has been tested on the “sustainable” pulp industry in Bahia – Brazil, which is often regarded as sustainable due to certification by the Forest Stewardship Council.

David Naguib Pellow, What is Critical Environmental Justice?

David Naguib Pellow, What is Critical Environmental Justice?

David Naguib Pellow,What is CriticalEnvironmental Justice?

David Naguib Pellow,What is CriticalEnvironmental Justice?

David Naguib Pellow: What is Critical Environmental Justice?

David Naguib Pellow: What is Critical Environmental Justice?

TOWARD A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES

AbstractIn this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term “Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. I do so by (1) adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and (2) focusing on the case of Black Lives Matter and the problem of state violence.

TOWARD A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES: BLACK LIVES MATTER AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE CHALLENGE-CORRIGENDUM

TOWARD A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge David N. Pellow Department of Environmental Studies , University of California , Santa Barbara Abstract In this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term “Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. I do so by (1) adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and (2) focusing on the case of Black Lives Matter and the problem of state violence. Keywords: Environmental Justice , Black Lives Matter , State Violence , Racism , Speciesism , Scale , Expendability , Indispensability INTRODUCTION Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a social movement centered on the problem of state- sanctioned racist violence. The movement began as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a man who killed Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year old African American boy in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. From that moment on, social media, mainstream media, and the Black Lives Matter movement would routinely inten- sify the national focus on racialized state-sanctioned violence when yet another video or testimony surfaced featuring an African American being shot, beaten, choked, and/or killed by police or White vigilantes. The role of social media tech- nology was pivotal. As one writer put it, “Social media could serve as a source of live, raw information. It could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. And it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives . . .” (Bijan 2015 ). BLM co-founder Alicia Garza explained what the movement stands for: “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black Du Bois Review, (2016) Page 1 of 16 . © 2016 Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 1742-058X/16 $15.00 doi:10.1017/S1742058X1600014X

Enacting Environmental Justice Through the Undergraduate Classroom: The Transformative Potential of Community Engaged Partnerships

In this paper, we document our efforts, as activist scholars, to cultivate among our liberal arts students a critical environmental justice consciousness through engaging with community organizations. We detail our efforts to make the classroom a space in which to engage environmental justice beyond a narrow and short-term focus on the disproportionate impact of environmental harms in low-income and minority communities to a more expansive and consistent attention to histories of inequality and processes of marginalization. We argue that community engaged partnerships afford opportunities for educators to combine theory with practice and disrupt students’ assumptions about what or who constitutes the environment. Our socially privileged students, in gaining a better understanding of structural/historic privilege and how their own positionality implicates them in environmental injustice, have been able to re-evaluate and reframe their political and theoretical commitments and carve out meaningful ways to contribute to environmental justice work.

Summary on the First Annual Symposium on Environmental Justice and Environmental Health Disparities in Maryland and DC

Statistics have demonstrated that although we have progressed toward reducing environmental health disparities in the United States, there is still much work to be done. Health disparities result from multiple factors including poverty, environmental threats, inadequate access to health care, and individual and behavioral factors. In an effort to address environmental justice and environmental health disparities in the state of Maryland and Washington, DC, community members, researchers, public health practitioners, policymakers, students, and advocates along with the Community Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Health (CEEJH) team gathered for the First Annual Symposium on Environmental Justice and Environmental Health Disparities in Maryland and DC in December 2012. The goal of the symposium was to establish and sustain a community engaged research enterprise on critical environmental health disparities and environmental justice issues, to raise the visibility of racial and ethnic environmental health disparities and feasible solutions with Marylanders, DC residents, and regional stakeholders, and facilitate action for change. The sessions included topics on the regional watersheds, built environment, toxic chemicals, traffic and air pollution, law and policy, best practices, and community-based participatory research. As a result of the successful meeting, an environmental justice coalition in the Maryland and Washington, DC region was established.

Comment from the Field

On April 19 2013-after three years of traveling through bar conversations, texts, and status updates [... refusing] the usual routes of academic knowledge, accumulating meaning the ephemera of conference chatter, social networking, and other queer gatherings (Johnson and McRuer 130)-Cripistemologies came to the metropole (New York University). The conference version of Cripistemologies was hatched the spirit of the roundtable that opens the first part of this double issue of the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. The roundtable questions were pre-circulated to conference participants and sponsors; the purpose was further inquiry rather than canonization (or, as keynote Mel Chen put it, finding a shared space which we all fling ourselves into the mudpool hoping that there will be some generative intellectual- affective, albeit slippery, contact). Chen's lecture on Cripistemological Brain Fog considered the many possible implications of epistemology/cripping epistemology: cognitive difference and neuroatypicality, distributed cognition and becoming together, brain fog and not knowing.1 With a self-declared feral approach-ranging across cognitive linguistics, feminist science studies, queer of color critique, disability theory, critical animal studies, environmental justice, and new materialisms-Chen spoke against the paradigm of compre- hension, an inclusion or summary that necessarily excludes; a quantifiable mental ability to receive and contain ideas (think comprehension test); a single line of thought.2Lisa Duggan, Robert McRuer, and I co-organized the Cripistemologies conference to address points of overlap and contention between gender and sexuality studies and disability studies. The conference was hosted by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, with co-sponsorship from the Council for the Study of Disability as well as a dozen other departments and programs, at NYU and beyond. Pre-registration was required due to limited space, and approximately 85 people were present-mostly students and academics, but also artists, activists, and staff from Visual AIDS. Panels were convened around themes in the neighborhood of disability studies (Sedgwick qtd. Johnson and McRuer 130): one on injury, illness, and chronic pain; another on trans and intersex scholarship and embodiment. The day closed with interactive performance, which raised the question: What do people do at conferences?McRuer introduced the first panel, Cripistemologies, with a history of the term and a preview of the }LCDS issues. Although had already found its way into academic publications-through the work of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, among others-it is still not clear how the term will change as it travels through formal, para-, and non-academic channels. Following McRuer's opening remarks, Aly Patsavas and Katerina Kolarova gave snapshots of their articles. Patsavas defined cripistemology as a mode of thought that combines the process of 'cripping,' which 'spins mainstream representations or practices to reveal able-bodied assumptions,' [Sandahl] with a philosophical commitment to 'standpoint epistemology,' which acknowledges that the subject positions from which we produce knowledge matter. Her cripistemology of pain surfaced through a critical reading of her own pain journals, kept over a fourteen-year period. Contrary to mainstream theory, Patsavas argued that pain is fact leaky, shareable, and produced relationships as much as individual bodies. Kolarova discussed the rehabili- tative affects and discourse that characterize the post-socialist Czech Republic. Drawing on the work of Jose Munoz, she suggested that crip horizons might be excavated from the past and from what goes unnoticed the present.Disability studies has been slow to respond to Susan Wendell's 1989 call for a theory of disability that includes illness and disease: illness is relatively absent from the 2013 edition of The Disability Studies Reader; the field of medical humanities has staked a claim to the study of disease, contradistinction to disability studies; and scholars continue to test new terms, such as debility, that are either broader reach or more culturally and historically specific than disability,3 The second Cripistemologies panel directly confronted Injury, Illness, Chronic Pain, and Disability Studies. …

Introduction: Critical Environmental Justice Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Introduction: Critical Environmental Justice Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Ecologia política, justiça e educação ambiental crítica: perspectivas de aliança contra-hegemônica

Objetivamos com o presente artigo trazer alguns argumentos e contribuições teóricas que sustentam a pertinência da articulação entre a denominada educação ambiental crítica e o movimento de justiça ambiental, em decorrência da aproximação no modo como definem as causas da crise atual, estabelecem estratégias de luta social e defendem o projeto societário anticapitalista. Essa articulação não só é oportuna para os processos de superação das relações sociais alienadas destrutivas da natureza, mas também reforça uma perspectiva da ecologia política, para a qual as determinações são materiais e de classe. Nos três movimentos - educação ambiental crítica, justiça ambiental e ecologia política - ocorre um processo argumentativo contínuo de ressignificação ideológica da questão ambiental, agindo como contraponto das interpretações hegemônicas do senso comum acerca do fenômeno socioambiental. Todos possuem elementos em comum que conformam o amálgama mediante o qual se pode efetuar a crítica e operar politicamente a favor da transformação social.

Hazardous wastes, industrial disasters, and environmental health risks: local and global environmental struggles

PART I: HAZARDOUS WASTES, DISASTERS AND HEALTH RISKS Sociology of Hazardous Wastes, Disasters, and Risk Hazardous and Toxic Wastes as Social Problems Taxonomy of Hazardous Wastes PART II: ELECTRONIC WASTES, PERSISTENT ORGANIC POLLUTANTS, AND HEALTH EFFECTS Electronic Waste: The Dark Side of High-Tech Revolution Environmental Health Risks of Persistent Organic Compounds PART III: CONTAMINATED COMMUNITIES AND REGULATORY RESPONSES Communities Contaminated by Toxic Wastes and Industrial Disasters: Selected Cases The Regulatory Frameworks PART IV: CONCLUSION Critical Environmental Justice Movement

Medicine Food: Critical Environmental Justice Studies, Native North American Literature, and the Movement for Food Sovereignty

Abstract The notion that people have a sovereign “right to food” is affirmed in an array of international instruments including the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas began formally organizing around the concept of food sovereignty thirty years before the adoption of UNDRIP by convening meetings and summits that called attention to the ideologies and external forces that have been threatening indigenous food systems for hundreds of years. Aware of these hemispheric organizational activities, a number of Native North American poets and novelists began writing poetry and novels that illustrated the historic relationship between indigenous peoples and the foods that are culturally and nutritionally necessary to their survival. In this essay, I read Winona LaDuke's Last Standing Woman and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes as “case studies” that contribute to critical env...

Ambivalent Landscapes: Environmental Justice in the US–Mexico Borderlands

How can a single landscape, a shantytown on the US–Mexico border, symbolize environmental devastation for some and progress and ‘the good life’ for others? Our analysis of this landscape and the people who are a part of it highlights the complexities of the environmental justice movement in the current era of neo-liberal economic policies. Although the colonia that we studied, Derechos Humanos, is located on top of an abandoned landfill near an open sewage canal, living here represents a step forward for many residents. However, to many US environmentalists, this landscape represents a toxic wasteland and the people living here are simply victims of border industrialization. Contributing to critical environmental justice studies, our analysis of Derechos Humanos highlights the injustices of the global political economy, creative responses to these forces by individuals most adversely affected by them, and the potential limitations of conventional framings of environmental justice and mainstream Northern environmentalism.

What Winning Looks Like: Critical Environmental Justice Studies and the Future of a Movement

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the environment is becoming an ever more present concern. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour both foreground images of melting glaciers, dying coral, and people in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans stranded on their roofs as evidence that we have reached a pivotal moment in human history. DiCaprio quotes United Nations estimates, which predict that ignoring the threats presented by global warming could result in more than 150 million refugees and a rapidly increasing extinction rate by the middle of this century. The subtitle of DiCaprio s documentary presents the audience with a choice: face catastrophe or Turn Mankind's Darkest Hour into Its Finest. The film features leaders from environmental and social justice fields (who even ten years ago may not have imagined working closely together) discussing how to turn crisis into possibility. These experts talk about their own research and innovations and refer to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are working to build carbon-neutral cities and create zero emissions transportation. They acknowledge, however, that it will take more than technology to make a difference; it will take leadership and it will take ideas that emerge from a deep encounter between our values, our experience, and the monumental social challenges we face.