Environmental Justice Scholarship Research Articles

Relocating occupation: A critical environmental justice analysis of the US military migration from Okinawa to Guåhan

The US military buildup across the Pacific is an ongoing colonial project reproducing oppressive power structures, human rights violations, and systemic environmental injustices. As the United States bolsters its Pacific presence, islands and peoples living on them are particularly vulnerable. However, not all places face overtly growing military-colonial occupations. Following decades of substantial military presence in Okinawa, 2024 marks the beginning of a precarious troop withdrawal from the Japanese prefecture. This significant reduction in Marine Corps personnel is the result of decades of political activism by Okinawans, who have continually resisted occupation and longstanding patterns of violence and oppression. Yet these military forces are not just leaving, they are relocating. The withdrawal coincides with 5,000 Marines and a new base coming to Guåhan (Guam), a territory where about 30% of land is under military control. This article examines these processes of military buildup and relocation through a critical environmental justice lens. We expand upon research on these issues by centering the critical environmental justice pillars concerning intersectionality, multiple scales, state power, and indispensability. We analyze the interconnections between Okinawa and Guåhan and argue that environmental justice scholarship must consider global geopolitics, interconnectivity, and sovereignty to adequately approach environmental movements in the Pacific region. In addition, we demonstrate that environmental justice victories in non-self-governing territories remain vulnerable to reversal and we advocate for inter-island coalition-building to avoid passing environmental harms from one island to another.

Minoritised youth’s environmental justice priorities in a gentrifying context: brokenness and repair

ABSTRACT Youth engagement in urban planning research and practice can help reveal their distinct experiences, priorities, and provide direction for future action. Environmental justice scholarship has documented critical insights learned from youth co-researchers. This article adds to this tradition by exploring how youth in Austin, Texas, experience environmental injustice within the context of gentrification. Using photovoice methods, youth researchers identify and discuss these dual challenges. We illustrate how their emphasis on brokenness links and builds on environmental justice, repair and maintenance, and reparative literatures. Findings also highlight how youth actively work to improve their communities, challenging planning scholarship’s tendency to frame youth action as aspirational or as happening in structured, programmatic ways.

Re-attaching to coal in a Climate Emergency: The case of the Whitehaven mine

This paper draws on the concept of ‘attachment’ to examine pro-coal sentiment in Whitehaven – an English town at the centre of global political controversy because of a plan to open a coal mine in the area. Drawing on fieldwork data, I show that pro-mine persuasions among some residents are underpinned by a process of ‘re-attaching’ to coal. I argue that the case of the Whitehaven mine is a warning about how fossil fuels might re-emerge as promissory objects in other parts of the world, even when a transition away from fossil fuels has been completed. Paradoxically, the very disorientations and deepening traumas that climate change is causing threaten to spur on the rise of fossil fuel (re-)attachments. The paper also examines how pro-coal discourses linked to wider vested interests are received in a context where coal exists as ‘afterlife’. Consequently, local actors construct narratives that legitimise new coal extraction by (re)articulating discourses of delay. My findings are thus a reminder of the need to guard against over-valorising ‘the grassroots’, arguably a risk in environmental justice scholarship. I conclude by calling for further empirical research on the way attachments to high-carbon objects are (re/de)composed, an urgent task given the need for rapid societal decarbonisation – one which has received very little attention to date.

Assessing environmental justice contributions in research and public policy: an applied framework and methodology

ABSTRACT How can scholars and practitioners gauge the extent to which environmental justice (EJ) is present in research and policy? Through synthesizing the interdisciplinary environmental justice scholarship, we present a diagnostic framework for appraising the frequency and depth of environmental justice-based engagements in published academic research, with broader applications for gray literature, such as policy documents. We demonstrate how the diagnostic can be applied through a scoping review methodology for assessing EJ contributions in existing research on the Colorado River Basin – a global epicenter for intersecting climate change and water equity concerns. The results demonstrate that the existing literature mostly focuses on specific dimensions of justice and does not consider the interdependent nature of its multiple dimensions and measures. Overall, the applied diagnostic represents one approach for assessing EJ contributions, with important potential for informing research practice and public policy design.

Environment and Social Inequality

The American Behavioral Scientist ( ABS) was one of the first significant journals to publish a special issue on environmental justice (EJ). The influential volume, published in 2000, bore the title Advances in EJ: Research, Theory, and Methodology. The volume contained classic EJ theoretical essays such as Taylor’s “The rise of the EJ paradigm” and Pellow’s “Environmental inequality formation.” ABS has published other influential EJ scholarship since then.

More than just dying: Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental racism

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship has long done work in and on Black communities. Yet, the field’s engagement with critical race studies has been rather recent and limited. This paper questions what we learn about Black living from EJ scholarship. I argue that there are two main registers of Black living in EJ scholarship: dying and activism. I draw on Black feminist geographies to think and imagine EJ work that incorporates nuance to the modalities of Black life and futurity in the face of state-sanctioned environmental injustice. The goal of this is not to deter EJ scholars from exposing instantiations of environmental injustice in the world, nor to undermine the deadly realities of EJ communities. Rather, this paper pushes EJ scholars to be wary of essentializing Black communities to death and decay and urges these scholars to behold Black life and futurity experienced in close proximity to death in these spaces. I provide examples of Black living and making way for Black futurity that occurs beyond the registers of dying and activism in EJ communities, such as care, Black intellectual life, and refusal, registers made apparent through a Black geographies lens.

Every tree fixed with a purpose: Contesting value in Olmsted's parks

Olmsted was an influential landscape architect whose works include many parks, recreation grounds and more. Inspired by Romantic and transcendentalist thinkers, he developed ‘pastoral transcendentalism’, a style of designing parks that mimicked natural spaces to reproduce their values within cities. Although environmental justice scholars have pointed out how these designs limit access to parks, I argue that environmental philosophers have not adequately discussed Olmsted, particularly his axiology of nature. Reflecting on it reveals how environmental injustice consists not only of restricting access to nature to protect its essential value – for Olmsted, scenery that could induce a contemplative mindset – but in delimiting nature's value without consideration of how people actually appreciate it.

Exploring environmental justice in France: evidence, movements, and ideas

ABSTRACT This article explores the distinctiveness of French and francophone approaches to environmental justice. While off to a slow start, environmental justice research has received increased attention in France in the last 15 years. But there has been little to no attention to the French debates and movements in the English-language academic literature, with both bodies of knowledge largely evolving in parallel, conceptually and politically. This article attends to this gap by first taking stock of the empirical evidence of environmental injustices and inequalities in France. We then introduce some of the theoretical origins and discuss some of the main insights from the French literature in light of contemporary environmental justice scholarship. In so doing, our aim with this paper is to contribute to current scholarly efforts on diversifying the meanings and understandings of environmental justice in different academic and political contexts.

Color-blind racial ideology and beliefs about environmental inequality among local US government officials

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship argues that racial oppression by the state is central to the formation of environmental inequalities, calling into question reliance on the state to achieve environmental justice. Others argue that the state is not monolithic and is the only institution capable of wielding sufficient power to address environmental inequalities. I engage with this discussion through a survey of US local government officials (N = 691). I find that officials tend to engage in color-blind environmental racism; that is, officials tend to understand issues of environmental inequality through the lens of color-blind racial ideology. Findings support the arguments of critical environmental justice scholars who question the state’s inherent capacity to respond to issues of environmental racism. However, variance in officials’ views also suggest that the state is a site of political contestation with many officials both recognizing the reality of environmental inequality and racism and supporting government intervention to address it.

Understanding water security as an agenda of critical environmental justice (CEJ)

AbstractThe limitations of existing institutional and social structures and their discrete approaches to water management call for a holistic, trans‐disciplinary, and multi‐stakeholder approach to addressing water security concerns with a focus on water equity and justice. The need for forging partnerships and strengthening positive and meaningful cooperation among water, sanitation, and broader development communities operating across different levels and scales has been gaining greater currency in global water debates. In this scenario, emerging critical environmental justice (CEJ) scholarship has a focus on recognizing and analyzing the contextual/historical dimensions that are often mutually reinforcing, inseparable, and multiple oppressive structures that intersect to perpetuate marginalization at the cost of privileging powerful actors. Integration of the environmental justice concerns into the development plans, and plans would pave the way for improved interactions and synergies among water‐based institutions and communities affected by them. It is urgent to deepen the discourses and deliberations on CEJ directed towards addressing systemic inequalities and injustices prevalent in water security by putting “people before profit.”

Careful knowing as an aspect of environmental justice

ABSTRACT Environmental justice (EJ) issues commonly include contestation over knowledge claims. EJ scholarship tends to theorize these as issues of participation or recognition. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of community-led air monitoring, I show that frontline communities experience distinctly epistemic injustices, even in situations characterized by participation and recognition. These epistemic injustices, which include exclusion from judgment, inadequate epistemic resources, and denial of status as knowers, point to the need to expand definitions of EJ to include an account of epistemic justice. Departing from virtue-based accounts, I propose ‘careful knowing,’ or practices of empirical investigation and meaning-making responsive to the needs of marginalized knowers, as a remedy for epistemic injustices that occur in EJ settings. Context-specific by definition, careful knowing may include grounding epistemic judgments in the need for community health protection, expanding epistemic resources, and bolstering the confidence and status of marginalized knowers.

An insurrection in energy research: a dialogue between Carlos Tornel and Alexander Dunlap on energy justice, capitalist warfare & decolonization

ABSTRACT This interview discusses energy justice, the university, academic research and autonomous politics. This dialogue expresses concern with energy, but also environmental, justice scholarship and movements. This entails the failure to adequately connect the continuity between (neo)colonialism, capitalism and statism in theory and action, which simultaneously subordinates anti-authoritarian and autonomous politics to liberal academic frameworks (e.g. recognition, procedure, distribution). Extractive development is not adequately challenged by energy justice, meanwhile academic decolonial theory tend to ignore combative struggles and discussion in the Global South or North. Academic decolonial theory remains selective about struggles, simplifies them and/or remains detached from societies-in-movement, which results in tokenizing and ignoring the complexities of autonomous and insurrectionary struggle. Discussing a range of intense topics, this dialogue suggests the need to advance decolonial and anarchist critique of energy and environmental justice scholarship, suggesting the need to move away from justice framings and towards autonomous political conceptions.

The Bronx River and Environmental Justice Through the Lens of a Watershed

Environmental justice (EJ) in the United States has emerged and evolved in a range of ways. Although founded in explanations of distributional justice (i.e., place and proximity), scholars and activists have expanded our understandings of environmental (in)justice through ideas about recognition, participation, capabilities, and more. In this article, we seek to complement and extend this work by exploring EJ through the lens of a watershed. We consider the case of the Bronx River watershed where environmental injustices are not only proximate, they are also created and exacerbated through upstream/downstream relationships. In other words, the Bronx is at the receiving end of upstream environmental governance, where various forms of pollution are introduced and flow downstream, contributing to already-existing injustices. This perspective suggests the importance of a multiscalar EJ approach that brings attention to the problems created when diverse municipalities share a single watershed, and resulting environmental harms are disproportionately felt by downstream communities. We argue that there is a need to expand the canon of EJ scholarship with a focus on justice in a watershed frame. We draw on both community science data and research as well as a collaboration with the Bronx River Alliance, an environmental and community organization, to emphasize the importance of public engagement in defining and solving environmental injustices.

Critical Heat Studies: Deconstructing Heat Studies for Climate Justice

Emergent planning strategies to address heat-driven health inequities are informed by studies examining how these distributional concerns relate to the urban built environment. Through a critical review, I argue that this ‘heat scholarship’ largely operationalizes heat as a disembodied, depoliticized, and ahistorical entity detached from lived experiences that connect the built environment with people’s health. This paper makes contributions across critical environmental justice scholarship and planning, providing a conceptual and methodological intervention through four ‘Critical Heat Studies’ principles: 1) Social production of heat, 2) Heat as a form of institutionally-sanctioned violence, 3) Intersectionality and heat epistemologies, and 4) Thermal (in)security.

Embodied geographies of environmental justice: Toward the sovereign right to wholly inhabit oneself

I introduce insights from Latin America and across disciplines to advance our understanding of environmental injustices as written on women's bodies. This paper will entice environmental justice scholarship into conversation with geography to stress how embodied geographies of environmental justice are necessary to understand the geographical, gendered, sexualized, and racialized arrangement of environmental injustices. Expanding Environmental Justice to incorporate the body through Segato's understanding of cuerpo-territorio, a concept that blends geography, territory, and the body, we blur the lines between public and private—emphasizing the role of the state and global capitalism in the subjugation of women and people of color. By asking who reproduces, what is reproduced, and where, in environmental justice work, we underscore that environmental matters are reproductive, and the disproportionate embodied consequences of environmental injustices on sexualized, gendered, and racialized bodies. This violence against feminized bodies is explained as the unintended consequences of global capital accumulation, but decolonial, queer, Black, and feminist geographical insights show how these are central for capital accumulation. Attending to the body as an important geopolitical site allows us to articulate mundane, everyday instances of environmental justice and reproductive justice as geopolitically important. I propose that Embodied Geographies of Environmental Justice that center the concept of cuerpo-territorio underscore that the physical territory of both environmental justice and reproductive justice struggles is in racialized and feminized bodies. By bringing in feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial understandings of production and reproduction, I provide a framework that allows for a global and nuanced understanding of gendered geographies of violence, environmental, and reproductive justice. A reading of a Moraga poem toward the end of the paper, demands that we attend to women of color theorizing their own experiences in radical and innovative terms that resist and transform oppressive relations offering possibilities for renewal, regeneration, and healing.

Viva Texas Rivers!: Adventure, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways ed. by Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester

Reviewed by: Viva Texas Rivers!: Adventure, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways ed. by Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester Chaney Hill Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester, eds., Viva Texas Rivers!: Adventure, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 2021. 316 pp. Hardcover, $29.95. As Clayton Maxwell in “The Lower Guadalupe River: A Return to the River” reminds us, it’s “good to take into account where you are from,” and the narratives in Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester’s collection Viva Texas Rivers!: Adventure, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways do just this (264). Davis is the literary curator of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University and the editor and author of eight books. Sam L. Pfiester is chair of the Wittliff Collections Advisory Council and has authored four novels. Pfiester and Davis, having met through their work with the Wittliff collections, both feel strongly that the waterways that support the life and lifestyle of Texans should be protected. Sponsored by the Wittliff Collections Literary Series in partnership with The Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University, Viva Texas Rivers! carries on the work John Graves started in 1960 with Goodbye to a River to educate, safeguard, and treasure Texas’s waterways. Pfiester and Davis put together this collection to bring to life the “‘spirit of place’ for dozens of Texas rivers and streams” and to highlight the unique qualities of each waterway (xvii). The collection of short stories, novel excerpts, republished periodicals, historical records, and poems is divided by region: East Texas, Central Texas, North Texas, West Texas, and South Texas. Viva Texas Rivers! begins with an “Invocation” by Chicana writer Carmen Tafolla entitled “This River Here” and closes with a “Benediction” by poet and author Pat Mora. Pfiester and Davis include texts from a diverse selection of writers, including Texas and national literary luminaries and historical figures such as John Graves, John James Audubon, Attica Locke, Billy Lee Brammer, Pat Mora, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, J. Frank Dobie, Larry McMurtry, Elmer Kelton, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sandra Cisneros, and Américo Paredes, among others. Each section opens with a fold-out map of [End Page 425] the region by artist and mapmaker Molly O’Halloran. These maps are worthy of praise and study on their own. Featuring the major and minor tributaries of many Texas rivers and streams, the cities built along their banks, and the highways that crosshatch them, these maps assist in the place-making the collection is invested in by showing the roots and routes of Texas’s many rivers and streams. Located at the end of the book is a useful appendix of local and national river and conservation advocacy groups. This list is a valuable tool for anyone looking to get involved in cleaning, protecting, and supporting their local or national waterways. Readers will gain a deep place-based understanding of the living routes that run in and out of Texas. As a reader, I began to see and understand the waterways that have sustained me every day, sometimes without me realizing it, in new ways. As Pfiester and Davis advocate in their introduction, these writings can help us learn “how to look, and how to see” Texas rivers and streams “not just [as] our present and past, but also our future” (xviii). Viva Texas Rivers! is for lovers of waterways and environmental advocates alike. Environmental justice scholars, organizations, and policymakers will find Pfiester and Davis’s collection inspirational and may even find a template for future work. This collection is also a great companion for instructors looking to teach on subjects related to critical regionalism, the formation of regional identity, environmental justice, river advocacy, or the intersection of western and southern literature. For readers of Western American Literature, Viva Texas Rivers! will prove to be an invaluable addition to the canon of Texas literature, bioregionalism, environmental literature, and western literature. [End Page 426] Chaney Hill Rice University Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...

Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

토픽 모델링을 활용한 국내외 정의로운 전환 연구동향 비교분석

Just transition originates from the labor movement urging to protect fossil fuel workers from the impact of low-carbon transition policies. It has evolved to address an integrated framework of climate, energy, and environmental justice during the transition to a low/zero-carbon society. Recent years have seen a rapid boom surrounding the theorization of just transition. However, relatively few studies have examined how the concept of just transition is applied to research across academic disciplines or under what research agenda just transition would encompass different concerns addressed by environmental, climate, and energy justice scholarship. Against this backdrop, this article sets out to investigate the main topics being discussed in just transition and climate-energy-environmental justice literature, and the similarities and differences between the global and Korean scholarship using topic modeling. The results demonstrate that city and local transitions have emerged as key topics while the focus of scholarly debates has shifted from regional pollution to global sustainability issues in the foreign literature after the Paris Agreement. In the Korean literature, institution-related topics rapidly increased after 2008, wherein green growth strategies were introduced. Yet, local issues, industry and jobs replaced these topics after the Paris Agreement. By comparing the results, the article draws implications for Korean scholarship to better understand just transition as an integrated framework of climate, energy, and environmental justice.

Defending the Commons: New Frontiers in Latin American Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Environmental Justice scholarship and action have different histories and genealogies. In this article, we combine our interdisciplinary formations in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and feminist political ecology to examine three case studies that show how place‐based communities understand, enact, and embody their struggle for environmental justice. We draw from Latin American and Caribbean scholarship on these issues and our experience in the field in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. Our cases reveal that environmental‐driven grassroots organizing has a territorial inscription articulated around the defense of the commons and life itself [the right to existence, as many communities frame it]. The cases reflect communities' complex histories of colonial occupation, capitalism, and development. At the same time, they shed light on the transformations people envision. Thus, while some of the communities' actions enact decolonial practices, others inhabit a more fluid space of political contestation.

Call for environmental justice amplification among ecology scholars and practitioners: A Black Ecology perspective

AbstractFor many ecologists, who do not identify as environmental justice scholars, the idea of including environmental justice into their work may not seem intuitive. This piece provides an overview of the foundations of environmental justice as a movement and as a branch of scholarship. The authors provide suggestions for how ecologists can include this area of scholarship into their work. Through this article, the authors hope to bridge the scholarly gap between environmental justice and ecology, using the lens of Black Ecology.