Politics Of Environmental Justice Research Articles

One Justice for All? Social Dilemmas, Environmental Risks and Different Notions of Distributive Justice

A just or fair distribution of environmental bads and goods is important for solving environmental social dilemmas and is a core idea of environmental justice politics and research. Environmental justice is mostly associated with egalitarianism as the sole justice principle for all people. In contrast, we argue that it is important to uncover and consider heterogeneity in justice concerns to achieve socially accepted solutions to environmental social dilemmas. With noise pollution as an example, we explore citizens’ preferences for justice principles regarding the allocation of politically initiated environmental benefits. In our survey in four European cities, respondents were asked to choose between different outcomes of a program to reduce road traffic noise in line with the following four notions of distributive justice: equal shares, equal outcomes, the greatest benefit for the least advantaged (Rawls), and the greatest benefit for the greatest number (Bentham). We found that most respondents chose Rawls’ principle, a preference that was stable over time but weaker when explicitly introducing the veil of ignorance. The preference for Rawls notwithstanding, we observed substantial heterogeneity in justice preferences. Multinomial logit analyses of survey and geo-referenced data on noise exposure showed that respondents with a higher socio-economic status and lower exposure to traffic noise were more likely to choose Rawls’ principle. Taken together, our study confirms the prominence of Rawls’ principle, demonstrates empirically the heterogeneity of justice preferences, and calls for more direct measurements of such preferences in research on environmental social dilemmas, environmental justice, and beyond.

Transforming Sacrifice Zones into Sacred Zones

Through bringing Christian ethics into conversation with original fieldwork and archival research on environmental justice activists, this essay develops an ecopolitical theology and practice of environmental justice as the work of transforming “sacrifice zones” into “sacred zones.” Sacrifice zones are places of concentrated environmental injustice, where harmful toxins and ecological degradation are channeled to secure the social and ecological flourishing of other places. During the movement against the environmentally destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia, leading activist Robyn Kincaid borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr. and green economy visionary Van Jones to envision Appalachia’s transformation from a sacrifice zone into a sacred zone. This essay argues that Kincaid’s constructive conceptualization of sacrifice—“to make sacred”—holds promise for a Christian ethics and politics of environmental justice; develops its implicit theology; demonstrates its relevance beyond Appalachia; and contrasts it with climate politics as usual.

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Earth System at Risk: Challenging Environmental (In)Justice

Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice. By Cleo Wölfle Hazard

“Rivers matter for queer trans life,” begins Underflows: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, by Cleo Wölfle Hazard (3). The concluding sentence of the introduction responds: “Queer trans lives matter for rivers” (35). The interplay between these two ideas structures the book, which brings together feminist science studies, Indigenous science, queer theory, and river ecology to advance both a method and an overlooked research subject: the hidden yet vibrant movements—both material and political—that percolate beneath surfaces. For Wölfle Hazard, these underflows encompass both the unseen hyporheic zone beneath a river’s bed and “latent discourses that lie hidden or disregarded,” from queer and trans sciences, to the Indigenous protocols ignored by settler-colonial governance regimes (8). The concept of underflows unites these various concerns and guides Wölfle Hazard’s assertion of queer trans thought as a vital strategy for “transfiguring settler-colonial riverine science into a tool for justice” (8). Embodying a dynamic approach to the “promiscuous ecological productivity of amphibious landscapes,” Wölfle Hazard’s methodology is itself wonderfully promiscuous as it embraces the interplay between metaphor and materiality (xvii). For example, they figure their methodology as the “raindrop nucleus” of Indigenous and co-generated research methods surrounded by the “condensate” of “kitchen table ethnography”—a playful, queer, and feminist response to traditional field ethnography—along with queer trans critical physical geography and ecopoetics (28). This dynamic methodology yields an exciting study that traverses five sites of water conflict and river restoration along the US West Coast. Through an ethics of collaboration with human and more-than-human communities, Wölfle Hazard explores how rivers—through their simultaneous sense of direction and unruliness—embody “resistance to Manifest Destiny projects” (8). Chapter 1 engages “hyporheic imaginaries” and multispecies commons while thinking alongside salmon and beavers about riverine ecology in California’s Scott River. The second chapter imagines a field praxis informed by queer-trans subjectivities spanning “fishy feelings from the field to sites of scientific performance” such as conferences, journal articles, and policy debates (82). In Chapter 3, Wölfle Hazard traces the contours of queer trans collaboration with beavers, noting how beavers “flout boundaries” and inspire their human collaborators to do the same, suggesting a “beavery trans ethics” that rejects settler management regimes (123). Chapter 4 thinks alongside queer performances of grief and mourning as a way for ecologists to affectively attune to species extinction. In the subsequent chapter, subtitled “Cruising a Waterfront with José Esteban Muñoz,” Wölfle Hazard engages queer ecopoetics to theorize queer ecologies in urban river waterfront spaces. He reflects here on “cruising the Duwamish in search of its specific histories and futurities of resistance to enclosure,” while thinking alongside Indigenous and environmental justice politics (191). The epilogue introduces a new collaboration with Karuk practitioners along the Klamath River to develop a river model of justice. Even as the book is organized into discrete chapters, six prefatory sections titled “Underflow” invite ways of thinking under, through, and beyond the chapters.

Unsung Heroes or Exploited Workers? Latino Migrant Day Laborers in Post-Harvey Houston and Critical Environmental Justice

Unsung Heroes or Exploited Workers? Latino Migrant Day Laborers in Post-Harvey Houston and Critical Environmental Justice Daniel Olmos (bio) In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey devastated the Houston metropolitan area and caused approximately $125 billion in property damage, becoming one of the most costly storms in US history. Media outlets and observers attended to the serious socioeconomic plight of homeowners by highlighting the flooding of 150,000 homes and over 60,000 displaced people living in shelters and hotels, as well as featuring the historic role that social media played in connecting first responders to victims when emergency call systems overloaded.1 The storm acutely devastated lowlying areas of Houston, which is home to many disinvested and disadvantaged communities of color—the flooding and the lackluster state response led many to evoke the dramatic scenes of racialized abandonment during Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005.2 As global warming increasingly intensifies tropical storm systems along coastal regions in the US, climate justice movements insist that the most vulnerable and marginalized communities—also the least responsible for deeply-rooted systemic inequities—are also the most negatively impacted by the effects of global warming.3 While much scholarship has emphasized post-hurricane recovery efforts from the vantage point of Houston residents and businesses, little attention has been paid to the incorporation of Latino migrant day laborers as veritable “second responders” and, even less, as subjects of climate injustice and agents of environmentalism.4 Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm, dumped fifty inches of rainfall and thirty-three trillion gallons of water into major commercial, [End Page 46] industrial, and residential corridors of the Houston region. The spectacles of evacuation and rescue that dominated media representation of the storm during the four-day news cycle obscured the eventual arduous process of recovery, in particular the prevailing mode of disaster recovery based on the exploitation of precarious racialized migrant labor. In the aftermath, unregulated small contractors and individual homeowners recruited mostly Latino day laborers to clear out moldy dry walls, replace rotted flooring, demolish dilapidated structures, and clean hazardous facilities, often with little or sometimes no pay and frequently without proper workplace safety equipment and conditions. “People don’t analyze it. They don’t see the consequences,” Martin Mares, a Mexican immigrant day laborer who has lived in Houston since 1995, noted during the recovery efforts. “They go to work without knowing whether the business will even pay them.”5 The erasure of day labor exploitation was extended by the mass-mediated appeals to resilience and grit in the face of a non-responsive state, namely through hashtag campaigns like #houstonstrong that promoted a neoliberal “rebuild above all else” model of recovery.6 In this context, this essay posits that the devastation wrought on the greater Houston area in the wake of Hurricane Harvey revealed not only the increasing vulnerability of US coastal regions to catastrophic weather patterns as a result of accelerated climate change, but also the socioeconomic relations and structures of racialized exploitation necessary for post-disaster reconstruction. I focus on the role of Latino migrant day laborers in greater Houston’s post-Hurricane Harvey rebuilding efforts and the environmental injustice implications, including the situatedness of day laborers in the face of ecological devastation. In the spirit of what Sarah Wald, David Vazquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette articulate as emerging “Latinx environmentalisms,”7 and drawing on a critical environmental justice framework through a qualitative sociological approach, I examine the conditions under which Latino migrant day laborers experienced racialized, economic, and ecological injustice following Hurricane Harvey, and finally how their subjection and struggle for dignity embodies a critical environmental justice politics in a moment of profound ecological crisis. [End Page 47] From the Anthropocene to Critical Environmental Justice The recruitment and exploitation of Latino day laborers in post-Harvey Houston was structured within the anthropocene era. In 2000, Paul Crutzen and Eugene Strermer introduced the concept of the anthropocene to explain a new stage of geohistorical development characterized by human activity as a “major geological force” and influence on climate patterns.8 While the anthropocene has become a buzzword with many different meanings, the category has fundamentally identified humanity as...

Indigenous resistance, planetary dystopia, and the politics of environmental justice

ABSTRACT This article examines the critical interplay among Indigenous resurgence, settler colonialism, and the politics of environmental justice. Critical questions need to be asked: How are Indigenous political demands for decolonization taken up within the broader scope of impending planetary dystopia? How might ‘environmental justice’ work to (re)inscribe hegemonies of settler colonial power by foregrounding settler interests? This article takes up these questions vis à vis Standing Rock, paying particular attention to the way that the politics around water become reconfigured through notions of kinship, justice, Indigenous temporalities, and multiple frontlines. I argue that an anti-colonial indictment of environmental justice compels us to (re)imagine decolonial research/ praxis around environmental politics.

New directions in environmental justice studies: examining the state and violence

ABSTRACT The field of environmental justice studies has blossomed into a multidisciplinary body of scholarship in the last few decades with contributions across the social sciences, humanities, law, and the sciences. Our framing of environmental justice scholarship centers on the necessity of examining the role of state and institutional violence in producing environmental injustice through interlocking systems of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and enslavement. We link themes of violence and the role of the state in the expansion of environmental justice studies to the major topics of land and resource conflicts, prisons and incarceration, and emotions. We draw on this scholarship to explore how theories and politics of environmental justice are inflected by the constraints and leverage points within racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and the afterlives of enslavement. This paper offers an assessment of theoretical advances, and charts a course for next possible stages of the literature’s development and EJ activism.

The Visual Politics of Environmental Justice

AbstractThis article examines the visual politics at work in website photographs depicting environmental justice issues in the United States. Based on roughly 580 web-published photos collected from environmental justice organizations, the Environmental Protection Agency, the mainstream media, and traditional environmental organizations in the US, this article examines variations in how the subjects of environmental justice are represented and the potential meaning of these representations for viewers. The article identifies three particular photographic genres that serve as landmarks within the environmental justice visual terrain: the fence-line photo, the portrait, and the protest snapshot. Drawing on the literatures of environmental political theory and black visual culture, I position the photos of contemporary environmental justice within the larger discursive, visual, and political contexts that infuse them with meaning. In interpreting these meanings, I argue that a more inclusive socio-ecological politics requires visual strategies that resist racialized ways of seeing while making visible the injustice of disproportionate environmental impacts on low-income communities and people of color.

Electronic Waste and the Environmental Justice Challenge in Agbogbloshie

Abstract This article explores the promise and politics of environmental justice (EJ) in Agbogbloshie, a scrap market in Accra, Ghana, that has become a popularized zone of electronic waste (e-wast...

Global Electronic Waste, Third Party Certification Standards, and Resisting the Undoing of Environmental Justice Politics

This article provides a critical assessment of a shift in discourse and political actions taken by the Basel Action Network (BAN), the primary non-governmental organization involved in overseeing and regulating the international trade in hazardous wastes in general and electronic waste (e-waste) in particular. First, we review recent scholarship focused on changes in social movement tactics that more directly target corporate practices, specifically the rise of voluntary third party certification standards. In particular, we attend to early efforts of the global environmental justice movement to address the trade in hazardous wastes, including e-waste. Next, we discuss our research findings on the changes in discourse, strategy, and political demands of environmental justice activists engaged in e-waste recycling. These findings support other recent case studies that suggest that the development of voluntary third party certifications adopt neoliberal market logics and corporate governance practices. In a...

Law's rurality: Land use law and the shaping of people-place relations in rural Ontario

This paper considers law's role in constructing rurality in the context of land use disputes in Ontario, Canada. In particular, highly contested aggregate mineral developments are examined to demonstrate how legal and policy conceptions of the rural shape people-place relations to construct rurality as residual. In this context, rurality is considered as a dimension of a broadened and relational politics of environmental justice that extends to the more-than-human world. At the same time, this paper explores how environmental justice perspectives are critical to deepening and strengthening the transformative potential of rural land use and environmental activism. Land use conflicts are considered as one strategic opening for an ecologically just rural politics of place that can shift the way law structures relationships of rurality in particular places.

Political Ecologies of Electronic Waste: Uncertainty and Legitimacy in the Governance of E-Waste Geographies

Geographers broadly, and political ecologists in particular, have been at the forefront of analyzing the progressive linking of Northern consumption practices with livelihoods elsewhere, problematizing the devolution that places ‘citizen-consumers’, NGOs, and corporate actors as key political agents of protecting workers and environments, promoting ‘ethical’ trade, and ‘greening’ economies through their purchasing choices. Utilizing empirical work on the development of certification and labeling schemes designed to ensure the safe recycling of used electronics, or e-wastes, across a global supply chain, this paper extends lessons learned from these critical analyses of consumer politics to ongoing debates about e-waste, trade, and recycling. I highlight the ambiguities and democratic deficits that emerge from promoting global environmental justice politics through market-driven disposal choices. I analyze the practices of representation through which NGOs and institutions produce e-waste as an object of regulation/commodification that is amenable to consumer action and argue that there is a disconnect between the abstractions necessary to sell ‘ethical’ e-waste recycling and the nuances of place-specific recycling practices. Like other fair trade schemes, certifications for ethical electronics recyclers rely upon narratives, such as environmental justice, that construct the e-waste problem in ways that render it governable, or ‘legible’ in Scott's sense. However, given the complexity of global commodity-networks like those for used electronics, these governing narratives rely on abstractions that oversimplify and rework the fetish of what e-waste is, where it goes, and how it should be managed. In unearthing both what labels do as well as the silences and ambiguities embedded within them, the limits and opportunities of consumer-driven waste politics come more clearly into view.

Tower Neighborhood Revitalization in Toronto and Canadian Environmental Justice Politics

Abstract In 2008, Toronto's City Council agreed to support the Tower Renewal Project, an ambitious proposal to renew over 1,000 aging concrete high-rise apartment buildings constructed largely between the 1960s and 1980s in socially and economically marginalized areas across Toronto, Canada. Over 500,000 residents live in these comparatively affordable high-rise buildings. These structures now require significant environmental upgrades to conserve energy and reduce carbon emissions. In addition to proposing structural retrofits, the Tower Renewal Project is concerned with addressing environmental justice issues in high-rise neighborhoods such as the spatial organization of inequalities, transportation concerns, health inequalities, problems with existing zoning bylaws, and public participation. Despite the challenges to naming, framing, and applying the concept of environmental justice in Canada, this article argues that the Tower Renewal Project addresses environmental justice concerns and politics uniqu...

Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North‐east England

Abstract: In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio‐spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi‐scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north‐east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor‐network theory (ANT)‐inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an “assemblage” perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.

Actor‐Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political Ecology

Abstract: Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor‐network theory (ANT)—in particular, the agency of nonhumans—while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT—specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour—provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the social and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities.

Just waste? municipal waste management and the politics of environmental justice

Municipal waste management in the UK has undergone rapid transformation in recent years in pursuit of greater sustainability. In this paper we explore the environmental justice issues and tensions involved in this shift. After a brief overview of environmental justice debates and how they have been related to issues of waste management, we describe how the policies and processes underlying the transformation from an overwhelming dependence on landfill disposal towards more sustainable methods of management has been driven by European legislation embodying principles premised on fundamental environmental concerns of inter- and intra-generational equity. We analyse the key means through which these principles have been translated to restructure local authority practices and the environmental justice issues arising from the implementation of international policy in regional and local context. Finally, we reflect on the implications of this case study for implementation of policies intended to advance both sustainability and environmental justice.

Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes

Review: Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes By Barbara L. Allen Reviewed by Tom Fletcher Bishop’s University, Quebec, Canada Barbara L. Allen. Uneasy Alchemy: Citizens and Experts in Louisiana’s Chemical Corridor Disputes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. 224 pp. ISBN 0-262-01203-0 (cloth); 0-262-51134-7 (paper). US$55.00 cloth; US$22.00 paper. Having grown up in south Louisiana and gone on to specialize in the politics of environmental justice and hazardous waste, it was for me a real pleasure to read Barbara Allen’s remarkable book. Like her, I also have childhood memories of “malathion and magnolias” that have no doubt formed the basis for my own impressions of the chemical economy and its relationship to race, class and the environment. Uneasy Alchemy is more than a serious, scholarly work, which it is; Allen’s writing is also clear, approachable and tells a fascinating story that is filled with insightful observations as she interprets the contradictory landscape of that part of the world. For her, it is a “strange juxtaposition of important architectural artifacts and historic rural communities with ominously futuristic techno-cities of stacks and tanks, lights and towers” (p. xiii). The book begins with numerous layers of context, each of which is necessary to understand the complexities of environmental injustice. Most fundamentally, Allen explains the historical geography of the area as a way of understanding contemporary political economy and social relations that are somewhat unique in the American context. The 18th century Acadian settlements and the prevalence of property ownership among blacks, even during the antebellum period, are two of the more important distinctions that she elaborates along with the typically Southern injustices associated with the feudal society that formed the plantation economy and, of course, slavery. Moreover, while the postbellum period witnessed the freedom of slaves, it also brought various forms of external control over black property ownership. This continued during the 20th century when transnational petrochemical companies began to purchase former plantations. The result was that black communities became trapped amongst noxious forms of industrial production that ultimately degraded the quality of their only source of economic value, their land, as well as their physical wellbeing. The contemporary environmental justice movement thus emerged within this historical context in south Louisiana.

Scale frames and counter-scale frames: constructing the problem of environmental injustice

Abstract The concept of environmental injustice raises difficult questions about on how best to measure and address environmental inequities across space, and environmental justice politics are permeated by considerable debate over the nature and spatial extent of both problem and possible solutions. This paper theorizes the politics of environmental justice as a politics of scale in order to explore how environmental justice activists respond to the scalar ambiguity inherent in the political concept of environmental justice. With a case study of a controversy over a proposed polyvinylchloride production facility in rural Convent, Louisiana, I develop the concept of scale frames and counter-scale frames as strategic discursive representations of a social grievance that do the work of naming, blaming, and claiming, with meaningful reference to particular geographic scales. The significance of scale is expressed alternatively within these frames as an analytical spatial category, as scales of regulation, as territorial framework(s) for cultural legitimacy, and as a means of inclusion, exclusion and legitimation.

The Environmental justice reader: politics, poetics, & pedagogy

From the First National People of Color Congress on Environmental Leadership to WTO street protests of the new millennium, environmental justice activists have challenged the mainstream movement by linking social inequalities to the uneven distribution of environmental dangers. Grassroots movements in poor communities and communities of color strive to protect neighborhoods and worksites from environmental degradation and struggle to gain equal access to the natural resources that sustain their cultures. This book examines environmental justice in its social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions in both local and global contexts, with special attention paid to intersections of race, gender, and class inequality. The first book to link political studies, literary analysis, and teaching strategies, it offers a multivocal approach that combines perspectives from organizations such as the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and the International Indigenous Treaty Council with the insights of such notable scholars as Devon Pena, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Valerie Kuletz, and also includes a range of newer voices in the field. This collection approaches environmental justice concerns from diverse geographical, ethnic, and disciplinary perspectives, always viewing environmental issues as integral to problems of social inequality and oppression. It offers new case studies of native Alaskans' protests over radiation poisoning; Hispanos' struggles to protect their land and water rights; Pacific Islanders' resistance to nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste storage; and the efforts of women employees of maquiladoras to obtain safer living and working environments along the U.S.-Mexican border. The selections also include cultural analyses of environmental justice arts, such as community art and greening projects in inner-city Baltimore, and literary analyses of writers such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Barbara Neely, Nez Perce orators, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Karen Yamashita artists who address issues such as toxicity and cancer, lead poisoning of urban African American communities, and Native American struggles to remove dams and save salmon. The book closes with a section of essays that offer models to teachers hoping to incorporate these issues and texts into their classrooms. By combining this array of perspectives, this book makes the field of environmental justice more accessible to scholars, students, and concerned readers. CONTENTS Introduction: Environmental Justice Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy / Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel SteinEnvironmental Justice: A Roundtable Discussion with Simon Ortiz, Teresa Leal, Devon Pena, and Terrell Dixon / Joni Adamson and Rachel Stein Politics1. Testimonies from Doris Bradshaw, Sterling Gologergen, Edgar Mouton, Alberto Saldamando, and Paul Smith / Mei Mei Evans2. Throwing Rocks at the Sun: An Interview with Teresa Leal / Joni Adamson3. Endangered Landscapes and Disappearing Peoples? Identity, Place, and Community in Ecological Politics / Devon G. Pena4. Who Hears Their Cry? African American Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Memphis, Tennessee / Andrea Simpson5. Radiation, Tobacco, and Illness in Point Hope, Alaska: Approaches to the Facts in Contaminated Communities / Nelta Edwards6. The Movement for Environmental Justice in the Pacific Islands / Valerie Kuletz Poetics7. Toward an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism / T. V. Reed8. From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice / Julie Sze9. and Environmental Justice / Mei Mei Evans10. Activism as Affirmation: Gender and Environmental Justice in Linda Hogan's Solar Storms and Barbara Neely's Blanche Cleans Up / Rachel Stein11. Some Live More Downstream than Others: Cancer, Gender, and Environmental Justice / Jim Tarter12. Struggle in Ogoniland: Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Cultural Politics of Environmental Justice / Susan Comfort13. Toward a Symbiosis of Ecology and Justice: Water and Land Conflicts in Frank Waters, John Nichols, and Jimmy Santiago Baca / Tom Lynch14. Saving the Salmon, Saving the People: Environmental Justice and Columbia River Tribal Literatures / Janis Johnson15. Sustaining the Urban Forest and Creating Landscapes of Hope: An Interview with Cinder Hypki and Bryant Spoon Smith / Giovanna Di Chiro Pedagogy16. Teaching for Transformation: Lessons from Environmental Justice / Robert Figueroa17. Notes on Cross-Border Environmental Justice Education / Soenke Zehle18. Changing the Nature of Environmental Studies: Teaching Environmental Justice to Mainstream Students / Steve Chase19. Teaching Literature of Environmental Justice in an Advanced Gender Studies Course / Jia-Yi Cheng-Levine

Generating power: gender, ethnicity and empowerment in India's Narmada Valley

Current analyses of issues relating to ethnicity and empowerment are silent about the significance of the environment in shaping and being shaped by human relations. For its part, environmental policy research, with few exceptions, has also ignored the dynamics of identity construction and cultural values that inform human relationships with the environment and thus affect environmental sustainability. I address this gap in the scholarship through an analysis of the Sardar Sarovar Project [SSP] in India. I explore the interweaving of the constructions of gender, ethnicity and empowerment and their implications for a new politics of the environment - the politics of environmental justice. I argue that discourses of modernization underpin the arguments of all those who discuss the SSP, whether in favour or against.