Environmental Justice Activists Research Articles

A Seat at Whose Table? Analyzing Detroit’s Community Benefit Ordinance as a Tool for Environmental Justice

The Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as the “just treatment and meaningful involvement” of all people in the decisionmaking that affects the environment and human health. Since the origins of the modern American environmental justice movement in the 1980s, activists have emphasized the importance of self-determination. Environmental justice requires that decision making processes center the voices of the individuals impacted by decisions made about the distributions of environmental assets and harms. There is a significant challenge, however, in designing community engagement practices that meaningfully involve community members. Since the 1990s, community benefits agreements have been heralded as an effective tool of community and grassroots control over development projects. In 2016, Detroit became the first city in the country to adopt an ordinance mandating the use of community benefits agreements in qualifying developments. This Note endeavors to analyze Detroit’s community benefits ordinance as a tool for achieving environmental justice by examining where the ordinance succeeds in empowering community control over environmental decision making and falls short of this potential. Examining Detroit’s community benefits ordinance in the context of the larger environmental justice movement provides a rich opportunity to consider what communities stand to gain, and lose, when public participation is funneled through formalized legal processes, and what avenues environmental justice activists can explore to ensure that community members are meaningfully involved in decisions that intimately impact them.

DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: POLICIES, PRACTICES, AND VISIONS

Environmental media scholars have long drawn attention to the physicality of digital systems, situating their work as part of the infrastructural turn (Larkin, 2013; Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Star, 1999). Contrary to the prevailing “cultural imagination of dematerialization” (Starosielski, 2015), digital supply chains – from data centers to AI systems to consumer electronics – depend on minerals, water, land, labour, and energy (Crawford, 2021; Cubitt, 2016; Hogan et al., 2022). This growth-based model of digital technology is based on assumed access to resources, implicating it in the extractive global economy shaped by ongoing colonial violence (Liboiron, 2021; Spice, 2018). Transdisciplinary scholarship on the intersection of digital technologies and the environment has looked at online organizing and digital climate change action (McLean & Fuller, 2016; Pearce et al., 2019), indigenous resistance and data sovereignty (Duarte, 2017; Kukutai & Taylor, 2016), the environmental impacts of large-scale data centers (Hogan, 2015; Velkova, 2016) and alternative social media (Laser et al., 2022), and what "responsible digitalization" could look like (Dwivedi et al., 2022). Building on already existing work that critically examines the material implications of digital infrastructures, this panel asks what environmental justice means in relation to digital technologies. Turning against the language of revolution that too often gets leveraged by Big Tech to describe the latest "disruptive" technology that is allegedly going to solve the world's problems (Geiger, 2020; Tabel, 2022), we foreground subversive practices, regulatory interventions, and grassroots organizing and vision building as emancipatory alternatives to a for-profit, monopolized internet. From a theory of change that seeks to understand and challenge the extractive nature of digital technology production from all angles, we shed light on reform, repair, refusal, and resistance as paths for transformation. Zooming in on Southeast Louisiana where hundreds of petrochemical processing and manufacturing facilities are located, the first paper examines how Internet access can be reimagined in landscapes shaped by extractive economies. The paper analyzes the challenges that activist and research groups face when using Internet of things (IoT) devices for real-time environmental sensing of air quality due to underdeveloped Internet infrastructures in a region that is becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change. The second paper engages with the material footprint and environmental implications of computing hardware production. It looks at the "Right to Repair" as one approach that challenges corporate control over design and obsolescence of electronic devices. By comparing examples of recent legislation in the EU, India, and the US, and analyzing them through the lens of design justice and discard studies frameworks, it argues that Right to Repair needs to be complemented by a substantial change in industry norms and practices rather than simply attempting to delay the disposal through repair by consumers. The third paper examines community resistance to data centers in the United States. In the past years, activists have framed their resistance to data centers along three critiques, namely noise pollution, resource consumption, and lack of public input to permitting processes. The paper investigates how environmental justice activists use formal legal and regulatory processes such as public meetings, petitions, lawsuits, public records requests to organise against new data center developments, and the challenges they meet as part of their organising. The fourth paper presents a "feminist principle of the internet on the environment" that was developed over several years in transnational collaborative work by practitioners. It addresses the interconnections between gendered online violence against land and environmental defenders on large social media platforms and on-the-ground resistance to extractive industries and outlines a new emancipatory vision for a different internet that centers planetary care and justice for communities and ecosystems. The fifth paper presents an analysis of the Internet Architecture Board's (IAB) workshop on "Environmental Impact of Internet Applications and Systems", held online in December 2022. It uses an infrastructural lens to analyze which politics are embedded and missing from industry responses to the sector's environmental harms. While international regulatory bodies are slowly coming to terms with the environmental impacts of distributed digital networks, the paper argues that the proposed sustainability solutions are as of yet too narrow in scope.

Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism

Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism

“You’re Asking Me to Put into Words Something That I Don’t Put into Words.”: Climate Grief and Older Adult Environmental Activists

ABSTRACT Globally, climate change is leading to environmental crises, which activists have been fighting against for decades. Social scientists have rarely considered older adults as environmentalists and their feelings about climate change. Most studies focus on younger people’s emotions or concerns about environmental crises. The purpose of this study is to explore the emotional responses and coping strategies related to environmental degradation of older adult environmental activists. We conducted a qualitative research study with 20 participants who were over the age of 60 years, engaged in environmentalism and living in Kansas, USA. We utilized thematic analysis to identify the following themes: a) Emotional Experiences of Environmental Destruction, b) Destruction of Specific Landscapes, and c) Coping Strategies including Environmental Justice Activism. Despite navigating the emotions of loss and grief in response to the destruction of specific places and certain political concerns, often without the language or concepts of environmental grief, these participants have and continue to direct their efforts toward protecting the environment. They have contributed for decades in the hopes of preserving the Earth for future generations and eagerly seek engagement with younger activists to both share grief, and, more importantly, do the work that needs to be done.

Review: Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism, by Tracy E. Perkins

Review: <i>Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism</i>, by Tracy E. Perkins

Political violence and mobilisation in Brazil’s Amazonian region during Bolsonaro’s government (2019–2022)

In recent years, Brazil has experienced rising violence against activists and increasing deforestation levels in the Amazon. The processes leading to those events are not new. However, various discourses and events have intensified and underpinned extractive interests during Bolsonaro’s government. Hence, this article analyses the relationship between the State and activists in the Brazilian Amazon region between 2019 and 2022. It focuses on three regional paradigmatic case studies: (1) the ongoing gold miners’ (garimpeiros) invasion of the Yanomami territory; (2) the arrest of four environmentalists accused of setting fire to the forest in 2019; and (3) the murder of the journalist Dominic Phillips and the Indigenist Bruno Pereira in 2022. The case studies utilise publicly available data from reports, interviews, press releases and newspaper articles. Our main objective is to provide an overview of the characteristics of an increasingly antagonistic relationship between activists and the State. Drawing on those cases, the article builds on mobilisation theories, particularly Political Process Theories. Our central argument is that there are evident differences in the forms of repression activists face during far-right governments. This context shapes activism distinctively in the Amazonian region because violence routinely challenges social and environmental justice activism. Moreover, the current violence points to broader social questions and struggles between activists and agents of repression.

Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism. By Tracy E. Perkins

Journal Article Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism. By Tracy E. Perkins Get access Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental Justice Activism By Tracy E. Perkins (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022. ix + 281 pp. Photographs, map, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95, paper.) Eileen McGurty Eileen McGurty Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA emcgurty@jhu.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Western Historical Quarterly, whad057, https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whad057 Published: 03 May 2023

Evaluating Meaningful Engagement Under Environmental Justice Mandates: A Case Study of California’s SB1000 Implementation in Santa Ana

California Senate Bill 1000 (2016) requires that general plans include environmental justice strategies and policies that address the needs of Disadvantaged Communities (DACs). This article draws upon principles for engagement developed by environmental justice activists to explore Santa Ana’s 2014-2020 general plan update and understand whether SB1000 contributed to meaningful engagement in DACs. A review of planning documents and interviews with key informants reveals that the initial general plan framework was captured by NIMBYs and that the City was unable to pivot to meet SB1000 mandates. Moreover, the City resisted activist and State demands to halt general plan adoption amid COVID-19. Ultimately, in the case of Santa Ana, SB1000 has not led to meaningful engagement with disadvantaged communities.

Environmental Justice: Where It Has Been, and Where It Might Be Going.

Taking stock of environmental justice (EJ) is daunting. It is at once a scholarly field, an ongoing social movement, and an administrative imperative adopted by government agencies and incorporated into legislation. Moreover, within academia, it is multidisciplinary and multimethodological, comprising scholars who do not always speak to one another. Any review of EJ is thus necessarily restrictive. This article explores several facets of EJ activism. One is its coalitional and "inside-outside" orientation. EJ activists are constantly forming alliances with other stakeholders, but these coalitions do not flout the importance of engaging with formal institutions. The review next turns to one set of such institutions-the courts and regulatory agencies-to see how well EJ claims have fared there. I then survey scientific findings that have been influenced by EJ. The review concludes with future directions for activists and scholars to consider: the changing nature of EJ coalitions, fragmentation within EJ and with other fields, the historical roots of environmental injustice, and opportunities for stronger infusion of the EJ lens.

Policing Environmental Injustice

Environmental justice (EJ) activists have long worked with abolitionists in their communities, critiquing the ways policing, prisons, and pollution are entangled and racially constituted. Yet, much EJ scholarship reflects a liberal Western focus on a more equal distribution of harms, rather than challenging the underlying systems of exploitation these harms rest upon. This article argues that policing facilitates environmentally unjust developments that are inherently harmful to nature and society. Policing helps enforce a social order rooted in the ‘securing’ of property, hierarchy, and human-nature exploitation. Examining the colonial continuities of policing, we argue that EJ must challenge the assumed necessity of policing, overcome the mythology of the state as ‘arbiter of justice’, and work to create social conditions in which policing is unnecessary. This will help open space to question other related harmful hegemonic principles. Policing drives environmental injustice, so EJ must embrace abolition.

Environmental justice and the state

In this article, I address a set of recent publications that explicitly critique U.S. environmental justice (EJ) movements and scholars for looking to the state for protection from environmental harm. These publications have argued that U.S. EJ movements and scholars have become preoccupied with seeking justice through state institutions instead of through other routes of change, that they do so principally through overly cooperative practices that cede the terms of debate to the state, and that engaging with the state inherently perpetuates injustice. Their arguments make important, incisive contributions to EJ studies and raise sobering questions about EJ activists’ engagement with the state. In this article, I highlight some of these contributions, but I also critique their arguments on two grounds: First, drawing on various studies, I argue that these publications’ empirical characterizations of EJ activism understate the diversity of tactics EJ activists use. Second, I argue that they treat the state as a wholly and inevitably repressive instrument of capital, and that this leads them to make politically problematic recommendations that dismiss the ways in which states also serve other ends, can be made to do so more meaningfully, must be made to do so, and are being made to do so. Reductionist characterizations of the state too easily dismiss the prospects for change through the state—including reforms that are modest but nevertheless reduce harm as well as “nonreformist reforms” that more fundamentally support justice, all of which can be pursued through both collaborative and confrontational practices. I draw on recent theoretical and empirical research from political ecology, political geography, and Native American and Indigenous studies—scholarship that treats the state in a more relational fashion and which intersects with or exists largely outside of EJ studies—to theorize my arguments and provide illustrative examples.

From Kern Island to the Streets of Bakersfield: Logics of Contamination, Embodied Empiricisms, and the Afterlives of Reclamation

California’s arid San Joaquin Valley was once inundated by lakes and wetlands. Through settler colonial discourses of contamination, a network of canals and aqueducts drained these lakes and wetlands in the late nineteenth century. Now, the Valley’s air and water are contaminated by pesticides, nitrates, and hydrocarbons from oil extraction and large-scale agriculture. Building from archival research and participant observation with environmental justice activists, this paper bridges settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies, work on racial capitalism, and feminist science studies to investigate logics of contamination in the production of private property through hydraulic projects. California’s hydrologic history shows that ideas of contamination were contested alongside emergent ideas of the racialized body. Hydraulic infrastructure, then, was not only an economic project but functioned within a larger logic of contamination that further articulated racial formations and settler sovereignty claims. Yet chemical contamination can also induce futurities, intimacies, and collectivities in powerful ways, as environmental justice activists in the valley consistently highlight. I argue that a critical analytic of contamination can trace how racial categories are ecologically produced and reconfigured, not only through differential relationships to land, but through changes in the land itself.

The Future of Divestment: Proliferations of Counter-Hegemonic and Post-Extractive Divestment Movements

Fossil fuel divestment has quickly become the largest divestment campaign in history, drawing attention to the large discrepancy between national climate commitments and the continued support of the fossil fuel industry. Yet, fossil fuel production and emissions continue to escalate rapidly. Our question is: what's next for the divestment movement? We propose a conceptual framework that identifies two waves of divestment leadership in which public pressure campaigns move towards targeting the extractive economic structures and predatory behaviors that permit fossil fuel extraction, and unsustainable resource extraction more generally, to continue without limit. Building on the three waves model of divestment, we postulate that a fourth wave of fossil fuel divestment organizing has already begun, one that focuses on banks, insurers, and other financiers of fossil fuel projects. Further into the future, we envision a fifth wave of divestment campaigns, whereby divestment is used in climate and environmental activists' arsenal to target firms that engage in environmentally damaging and unjust behaviors such as destructive mining activities, overconsumption, predatory debt or arbitration processes, or Indigenous rights violations. While divestment is not a panacea and does not displace the work of existing post-extractive or climate justice campaigns, we argue that divestment is a powerful tool that can be used to complement and amplify the work of environmental justice activists in other contexts beyond fossil fuels. This paper offers actionable suggestions for current and future activists and frames divestment as a tactic that will proliferate within other environmental movements in the transition towards a post-growth economy.

Sites of Resistance, Acceptance, and Quiescence Amid Environmental Injustice: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Sustainability Under Neoliberalism

In this introduction to the special issue, we consider the state of theory and scholarship around environmental justice activism. We examine trends in environmental justice (EJ) research, observing that much work has been done on sites of resistance—where collective organizing or mobilization rejects or limits environmental harms and related policy decisions. However, relatively little work has been done on sites of quiescence or ambivalence—where people may not mobilize against or fight environmental harms. Similarly, sites of acceptance—where groups actively mobilize to support risky industries or other forms of extractivism and exploitation—remain under-explored and under-theorized. These gaps have important impacts, including a lack of inquiry around the ways neoliberal ideologies and policies may have shaped EJ activism. This special issue aims to address these gaps, and this introduction works to theorize and conceptualize a spectrum of EJ action. Specifically, we make two contributions toward better understanding sites of resistance, acceptance, and quiescence in EJ studies. First, we identify a range of pathways that implicate communities in forms of environmental (in)justice. We identify particular mechanisms of resistance, quiescence, and acceptance related to each pathway. Second, we present a framework to facilitate nuanced analyses about what communities reject or accept. Communities may, after all, respond to extractivism and neoliberalism as distinct, rather than always congruent, processes. We include previews of each article in the special issue, identifying how they contribute to these analytical and theoretical advancements. We relate these observations to real world EJ concerns and the need for urgent, just, and transformative social change.

Landscape Assessment of the U.S. Environmental Justice Movement: Transformative Strategies for Climate Justice

The environmental justice movement (EJM) in the United States has grown in size and in its cultural and political importance in climate and environmental policy circles. This growth has meant that the organizations and leaders that make up the EJM and their respective areas of focus are also evolving. The social movement capacities of the EJM are important predictors of the future success of the movement as the climate crisis bears down on vulnerable communities worldwide. As a part of designing a leadership program for environmental justice (EJ) activists based at The New School, this landscape assessment surveyed and interviewed more than 200 EJ movement activists across the country to explore the priorities, strategies, challenges, and social movement capacities of the EJM. The study reveals that EJM activists work across a diverse set of issues and rank climate justice among their highest priority issues. They overwhelmingly rely on base building, coalitions, and organizing strategies to do their work. In reflecting on the movement's contemporary approaches, activists articulated the importance of shared frameworks such as climate justice to shift popular narratives and action on climate change. The climate justice frame reflects a critical, intersectional, and reconstructive conceptualization of the climate crisis that requires disrupting the status quo approaches to climate change. The study points to some of the challenges and opportunities ahead for realizing such a contentious and transformative climate justice vision led by EJM activists in a moment of expanding political opportunity and risk.

Environmental Justice Challenges to International Economic Ordering

The relationship between trade, investment, and environmental protection is complex, and environmental activists have engaged with international economic law in a wide variety of ways. Some environmental activists have sought to use trade systems as leverage to advance environmental protections aims, while others have been concerned about how international economic law constrains unilateral national environmental action. The dominant account of the harmonization of economic and environmental norms and the promotion of sustainable development through trade and investment is challenged by sobering statistics of ecological decline. In the face of intersecting ecological, economic, and social crises facing the global community, the often-marginalized critique developed by environmental justice activists of neoliberal globalization and the legal regimes that enable it is more urgent than ever. These perspectives and voices—which sometimes align with other environmental activists and sometimes directly oppose market-orientated environmental agendas—have been marginalized in the scholarship on international economic law, but offer an indispensable resource for imagining more equitable and ecologically just forms of global economic cooperation. This essay shows how environmental justice activists have enacted a powerful politics of refusal, resisting international economic law as well as articulating visions of how to achieve systemic change and sustainable societies based on environmental, social, economic, and gender justice and peoples’ sovereignty.

Hope, interreligious democracy, good ancestors, and gossamer threads: A response to Valerie Miles‐Tribble's distinguished faculty lecture

AbstractIn this response to the 46th Annual Distinguished Faculty Lecture by Valerie Miles‐Tribble at the Graduate Theological Union, I reflect on four questions: (1) What practices can help us cultivate and restore hope when our hope inevitably wanes? (2) How do we vigorously, even relentlessly expose injustices (and our complicities with them) even while we seek to fire the creative energies we need to come up with solutions? (3) How can we, imperfect as we are, be good ancestors or—as the indigenous environmental justice activist Winona LaDuke phrases it: “Be the ancestor our descendants would be proud of?” (4) Where are we threadbare, and what is the thread like that each of us is contributing to the tapestry?

Ecocinema, Slow Violence, and Environmental Ethics:

In the Anthropocene epoch, slow violence triggered by human-caused environmental disaster is omnipresent across the globe. By forming an alternative media-spectatorship/readership in a media-saturated, fast-changing world, ecocinema can potentially help create an ecocentric environmental ethics, allowing us to question long-held notions of anthropocentrism, speciesism, and other ecological issues. Analyzing two documentaries, A Plastic Ocean and Silent River, this paper investigates the efficacy of the narratives of ecocinema as a powerful cultural and political text in making environmental slow violence perceptible to human imagination and in taking us one step further to environmental justice activism. The study will also examine the way in which water answers back to the environmental injustice triggered by humans through retaliation and revenge, appropriating and expanding Rob Nixon’s idea of slow violence and Jane Bennett’s concept of thing-power. Closely reading the portrayal of water as a dynamic entity in these two visual texts, this paper argues how the intrinsic value and the agency of water can reveal to humans the problems connected with their strong anthropocentric environmental ethics.

Exploring Gender, Power, Nature, and Global Politics with Woman at War

The 2018 Icelandic film entitled Woman at War deals with one of the common tensions explored in feminist literature, that of a woman being forced to choose between a public/political life and private/family life. In this case, the public life is one as an environmental justice vigilante, and the private life is becoming an adoptive mother of an orphan from the 2014 Ukraine crisis. Additionally, the film explores tensions between agency and structure, humanity and nature, and the developed world and global south. Beyond providing examples for understanding these key dichotomies, the movie also sets the stage for asking more critical questions. This article explores the rich symbolism and intriguing questions raised by the film and connects the film to pedagogical goals, including addressing issues of environmental justice and political activism from a feminist lens and with a global perspective. We also provide a practical instructor guide with discussion questions and suggested readings.

Life and Death in Louisiana’s Petrochemical Industrial Complex

This photo essay traces the historical geography of Norco, Louisiana—heart of Louisiana’s petrochemical industrial complex. Norco, named for the first oil company sited there (the New Orleans Refinery Company), is the quintessential Louisiana petrochemical town, neither exceptional nor provincial, a place that for generations has been a nexus of struggles between racial capitalism’s extractive drive and the demands for collective life encapsulated in slave uprisings and environmental justice activism. Moreover, the fact that by the late 20th century, petrochemical pollution made the best path forward for residents of the historic Black freedom neighborhood Diamond was by fighting for relocation raises critical questions about the life and death work of just transition from oil capitalism.