Environmental Justice Scholarship Research Articles

Constructing insignificance: critical race perspectives on institutional failure in environmental justice communities

ABSTRACT Environmental justice (EJ) literature rarely offers an explicit theory of race to explain processes of disparate environmental exposure and recourse in non-white and low-income communities. Failing to do so, analyses of environmental inequality risk eliding a central driver of environmental racism. Based on a case study of a contested birth defect cluster in California, this article traces the ways in which the evidence of environmental health harms are rendered conceptually invisible by the institutions mandated to protect public health and the environment. Turning to a theoretical model of contested illness mobilization, I demonstrate the value of critical race perspectives to clarify the production and maintenance of intersecting, cumulative harms without recourse in communities of color. Centered on racially veridical analyses, EJ scholarship can more precisely analyze the recalcitrance of dominant group interests. Ultimately, this enables theorization of the distinct landscape of exposure and recourse in subaltern versus favored bodies and space.

Using an intersectional approach to advance understanding of homeless persons’ vulnerability to disaster

ABSTRACT Too often groups deemed as ‘vulnerable’ are homogenized in terms of their characteristics and experiences leading up to, during and after disaster. Although important exceptions exist, the identities of members of marginalized groups such as homeless populations are frequently homogenized in practice without regard for the intersecting traits and contextual factors that result in unequal disaster and environmental outcomes. This paper explores the utility of an intersectional approach to analyze the complexity of lived experiences within homeless communities during disaster. I use qualitative methodologies, including unstructured and semi-structured interviews, focus groups and participant observation, to better understand the intersecting identities of homeless participants and their experiences during the 2013 Colorado floods. Throughout the paper, I argue for the merits of using intersectional approaches to analyzing the complex lived experiences of vulnerable groups during disaster. The conclusion presents a call for further integration of intersectional analyses into disaster and environmental justice scholarship.

Environmental Justice and Regional Political Ecology converge in the other California

This article illuminates the value of the concept of the region in political ecology and environmental justice studies by presenting three arguments about the role of regions in environmental justice social movements engaged in climate change mitigation in California's San Joaquin Valley. First, regional planning agencies and environmental justice advocates are engaged in conflicts over not only the content of regional climate change plans, but the very definitions of region and the authority used to put these regional visions into action. Second, regional organizing provides environmental justice movements with new opportunities to address regional economic patterns and to negotiate with regional planning agencies, both of which influence local manifestations of environmental injustice. Third, regional strategies raise significant dilemmas for these movements as they try to sustain engagement across extensive spatial territories and engage with a broad set of policy and economic protagonists. Together, this analysis demonstrates that a dynamic approach to regions, regionalism, and regionalization can assist political ecology and environmental justice scholars in their common aim of understanding the co-production of social and environmental inequity and collective action to change it.Key Words: Environmental justice, regional political ecology, climate change mitigation, regional planning, rural community development

The socio-exposome: advancing exposure science and environmental justice in a postgenomic era

We propose the socio-exposome as a conceptual framework for integrative environmental health research. Environmental scientists coined the term ‘exposome’ with the goal of inventorying and quantifying environmental exposures as precisely as scientists measure genes and gene expression. To date, the exposome’s proponents have not thoroughly engaged social, scientific, theoretical, and methodological expertise, although the exclusion of sociological expertise risks molecularizing complex social phenomena and limiting the possibility of collective action to improve environmental conditions. As a corrective, and to demonstrate how ‘omic’ technologies could be made more relevant to public health, our socio-exposome framework blends insights from sociological and public health research with insights from environmental justice scholarship and activism. We argue that environmental health science requires more comprehensive data on more and different kinds of environmental exposures, but also must consider the sociopolitical conditions and inequalities that allow hazards to continue unchecked. We propose a multidimensional framework oriented around three axes: individual, local, and global, and suggest some sociomarkers and data sources that could identify exposures at each level. This framework could also guide policy, by creating a predictive framework that helps communities understand the repercussions of corporate and regulatory practices for public health and social justice.

Environmental justice and rural studies: A critical conversation and invitation to collaboration

Environmental justice and rural studies: A critical conversation and invitation to collaboration

Environmental justice, capabilities, and the theorization of well-being

Environmental justice (EJ) scholarship is increasingly framing justice in terms of capabilities. This paper argues that capabilities are fundamentally about well-being and as such there is a need to more explicitly theorize well-being. We explore how capabilities have come to be influential in EJ and how well-being has been approached so far in EJ specifically and human geography more broadly. We then introduce a body of literature from social psychology which has grappled theoretically with questions about well-being, using the insights we gain from it to reflect on some possible trajectories and challenges for EJ as it engages with well-being.

From Toxic Sites to Parks as (Green) LULUs? New Challenges of Inequity, Privilege, Gentrification, and Exclusion for Urban Environmental Justice

As marginalized neighborhoods benefit from cleanup and environmental amenities often brought by municipal sustainability planning, recent trends of land revaluation, investments, and gentrification are posing a conundrum and paradox for environmental justice (EJ) activists. In this article, I examine the progression of the urban EJ agenda—from fighting contamination to mobilizing for environmental goods and resisting environmental gentrification—and analyze how the EJ scholarship has reflected upon the complexification of this agenda. I argue that locally unwanted land uses can be reconceptualized from contamination sources to new green amenities because of the displacement they seem to trigger or accelerate.

Assessing the environmental justice consequences of flood risk: a case study in Miami, Florida

Recent environmental justice (EJ) research has emphasized the need to analyze social inequities in the distribution of natural hazards such as hurricanes and floods, and examine intra-ethnic diversity in patterns of EJ. This study contributes to the emerging EJ scholarship on exposure to flooding and ethnic heterogeneity by analyzing the racial/ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics of the population residing within coastal and inland flood risk zones in the Miami Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), Florida—one of the most ethnically diverse MSAs in the U.S. and one of the most hurricane-prone areas in the world. We examine coastal and inland flood zones separately because of differences in amenities such as water views and beach access. Instead of treating the Hispanic population as a homogenous group, we disaggregate the Hispanic category into relevant country-of-origin subgroups. Inequities in flood risk exposure are statistically analyzed using socio-demographic variables derived from the 2010 U.S. Census and 2007–2011 American Community Survey estimates, and 100-year flood risk zones from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Social vulnerability is represented with two neighborhood deprivation indices called economic insecurity and instability. We also analyze the presence of seasonal/vacation homes and proximity to public beach access sites as water-related amenity variables. Logistic regression modeling is utilized to estimate the odds of neighborhood-level exposure to coastal and inland 100-year flood risks. Results indicate that neighborhoods with greater percentages of non-Hispanic Blacks, Hispanics, and Hispanic subgroups of Colombians and Puerto Ricans are exposed to inland flood risks in areas without water-related amenities, while Mexicans are inequitably exposed to coastal flood risks. Our findings demonstrate the importance of treating coastal and inland flood risks separately while controlling for water-related amenities, and recognizing intra-ethnic diversity within the Hispanic category to obtain a more comprehensive assessment of the social distribution of flood risks.

Canon Formation in the Study of the Environment in China and Taiwan

In his article "Canon Formation in the Study of the Environment in China and Taiwan" Peter I-min Huang discusses how the canon of ecocriticism taught in English studies in China and Taiwan is becoming increasingly of a local perspective by scholars who publish in Mandarin, address environmental issues specific to Mainland China and Taiwan, and thus engage with ecocriticism based on local perspectives rather than Western ones. The study and teaching of English-language literature in China and Taiwan inevitably encounters charges of neocolonialism or other argumentation that it is being used in ways that betray the legacy of past colonialist and imperialist projects. However, a growing number of ecocritics, animal studies scholars, environmental justice scholars, and ecofeminists are resisting using English for the promotion of social and political equality and they call for a middle ground between both human and other-than-human interests, capacities, and creativities.

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

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

Toward an Integrative Framework for Environmental Justice Research: A Synthesis and Extension of the Literature

Over three decades, environmental justice scholarship has examined justice movements through diverse perspectives shaped by their research traditions and disciplinary boundaries. This article distills three themes of justice from these research traditions in order to propose a four-dimensional environmental justice model. The proposed model includes four justice-seeking strategies—cultural justice, material justice, processual justice, and political justice—that movement groups adopt to mobilize their claims. I apply this model to the study of an environmental movement in Land Between the Rivers, Kentucky. Research findings from the case study concludes that movement strategies are plural and changeable and that justice is best conceived as a repertoire of justice-seeking strategies that are influenced by political alliances, economic preconditions, and cultural contexts.

From Desert Dust to City Soot: Environmental Justice and Japanese American Internment in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

Environmental justice scholars such as Vandana Shiva and Robert D. Bullard explain that people of color, the poor, and women suffer disproportionately from ecological crises, a reality made dramatically evident by Karen Tei Yamashita in Tropic of Orange (1997), which charts the interrelated lives of seven racially marginalized characters as they navigate a polluted urban landscape. Yamashita’s intricate narrative draws an important environmental connection between seemingly incongruent social phenomena to reveal that environmental justice is not only a recent urban struggle but also one that is rooted in the past with long-term physical and psychological effects. For example, Julie Sze, in a pioneering essay that calls attention to the “emerging literature of environmental justice,” offers an analysis of Tropic of Orange that illuminates an environmental connection between historical and contemporary issues of colonialism and labor for women of color in its examination of the characters Rafaela and Emi (40). This essay introduces yet another set of historical and contemporary issues that are foundational to an environmental justice reading of Yamashita’s novel: the past trauma of Japanese American internment and the contemporary homelessness of sansei Manzanar Murakami, who is named for one of those internment camps. In addition, this essay argues that crossgenerational effects of environmental injustices are revealed in the character of his granddaughter, Emi, who refuses to acknowledge the painful internment history she has inherited. While this internment history may seem peripheral to the central plots of Tropic of Orange, it is referenced throughout the novel. Most notably, this history is alluded to every time Manzanar’s name appears on the page. Consequently, Japanese American incarceration haunts Yamashita’s characters and readers throughout the book. Internment’s history of land theft and displacement, severe degradation of living and working conditions, and long-term psychological trauma, this essay will show, constitute important environmental justice issues for Manzanar and Emi, issues which, in a Japanese American context, have been and continue to be largely ignored. Yet consideration of these issues for Japanese Americans is crucial not only for

Extending a Geographic Lens Towards Climate Justice, Part 1: Climate Change Characterization and Impacts

AbstractThere has been a recent increase of interest within the academic literature on the justice issues posed by climate change and the human responses to its present and forecasted effects. This literature is partially shaped by debates from environmental justice scholarship, but also has roots in various subfields of geography. In two parts (here and in a subsequent article), we review and synthesize the recent literature by asking what climate justice concerns have been identified within three related realms: (i) the characterization of climate change itself and the assignment of responsibility for that change; (ii) the differential or uneven impacts of climate change; and (iii) the actions taken to address the problems associated with climate change, including mitigation and adaptation. Here, in Part 1, we provide a basic outline of justice concepts; we address the characterization of climate change and the associated discursive framings; and we discuss the uneven impacts of climate change with a focus on the conceptualization of vulnerability. We suggest that the field of geography has much to offer to the debate on climate justice because of its unique understandings of the human‐environment relationship based on a longstanding engagement with the spatiality and scale of environmental change, the corresponding human impacts, and the conceptual inseparability of nature and society. We identify, across Part 1 and Part 2, the need for a more comprehensive theory of justice to inform climate justice considerations – one that pays more attention to linked procedural, recognition, and scalar concerns.

Justice as Measure of Nongovernmental Organization Success in Postdisaster Community Assistance

Through exploring multiple contemporary conceptions of justice, this article illustrates that justice matters when considering outcomes in nongovernmental organization (NGO) assistance. In environmental justice (EJ) scholarship, the term justice has been underproblematized, assuming a tacit understanding of the concept as fairness or equitable distribution of environmental harms. Using the rebuilding of two heavily damaged poor and minority neighborhoods in post–Katrina New Orleans as case studies, this article makes evident the different conceptualizations of justice embedded within the strategies and techniques of NGOs and community organizations. Examining both practices and outcomes, I argue that the definition of justice that NGOs implicitly or explicitly adopt in their strategies and technologies of assistance can lead to very different results in postdisaster neighborhood revitalization. For science and technology studies, conceptions of justice can help articulate a more critical social science that opens up the descriptive/normative divide. This is important in thinking about equitable social change and allied policy—as it applies not only to NGO assistance but also to other science and technology issues that intersect with marginalized communities as well.

Changing Knowledge, Local Knowledge, and Knowledge Gaps

Procedural justice, or the ability of people affected by decisions to participate in making them, is widely recognized as an important aspect of environmental justice (EJ). Procedural justice, moreover, requires that affected people have a substantial understanding of the hazards that a particular decision would impose. While EJ scholars and activists point out a number of obstacles to ensuring substantial understanding—including industry’s nondisclosure of relevant information and technocratic problem framings—this article shows how key insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) about the nature of knowledge pose even more fundamental challenges for procedural justice. In particular, the knowledge necessary to inform participation in decision making is likely not to exist at the time of decision making, undermining the potential for people to give their informed consent to being exposed to an environmental hazard. In addition, much of the local knowledge important to understanding the consequences of hazards will develop only after decisions have been made, and technoscientific knowledge of environmental effects will inevitably change over the period during which people will be affected by a hazard. The changing landscape of knowledge calls into question the idea that consent or participation during one decision-making process can by itself constitute procedural justice. An STS-informed understanding of the nature of knowledge, this article argues, implies that procedural justice should include proactive knowledge production to fill in knowledge gaps, and ongoing opportunities for communities to consent to the presence of hazards as local knowledge emerges and scientific knowledge changes.

Extending a Geographic Lens Towards Climate Justice, Part 1: Climate Change Characterization and Impacts

There has been a recent increase of interest within the academic literature on the justice issues posed by climate change and the human responses to its present and forecasted effects. This literature is partially shaped by debates from environmental justice scholarship, but also has roots in various subfields of geography. In two parts (here and in a subsequent article), we review and synthesize the recent literature by asking what climate justice concerns have been identified within three related realms: (i) the characterization of climate change itself and the assignment of responsibility for that change; (ii) the differential or uneven impacts of climate change; and (iii) the actions taken to address the problems associated with climate change, including mitigation and adaptation. Here, in Part 1, we provide a basic outline of justice concepts; we address the characterization of climate change and the associated discursive framings; and we discuss the uneven impacts of climate change with a focus on the conceptualization of vulnerability. We suggest that the field of geography has much to offer to the debate on climate justice because of its unique understandings of the human-environment relationship based on a longstanding engagement with the spatiality and scale of environmental change, the corresponding human impacts, and the conceptual inseparability of nature and society. We identify, across Part 1 and Part 2, the need for a more comprehensive theory of justice to inform climate justice considerations – one that pays more attention to linked procedural, recognition, and scalar concerns.

Justice in development? An analysis of water interventions in the rural South

AbstractThis paper explores a fruitful convergence between the distributive and procedural dimensions of environmental justice theory and current debates in the field of development studies over capitals and capabilities, institutions, and discourse formation to shed new light on natural resource management projects in the developing world. Specifically, we document the planning and implementation of two types of water interventions in two contrasting regions: watershed development programmes in northeast India and small reservoirs in sub‐Saharan West Africa. We find that there is a contradiction between the inherently political nature of water interventions and the fact that such projects remain grounded in apolitical, technical and managerial narratives. In contrast to the new semantic of development, this depoliticization results in the near absence of attention paid to procedural (participation and empowerment) and distributive (equity) justice concerns and in local actors having to revert to covert ways to achieve their ends. A constructive dialogue between development studies and environmental justice scholars can offer a fresh look on the society‐environment nexus in the developing world.

A Life Cycle Approach to Food Justice: The Case of Breastfeeding

Abstract The focus on food within environmental justice scholarship and activism has rapidly advanced as issues such as differential access to healthy food, the distribution of hunger and obesity, and the working conditions of agricultural workers have garnered much deserved attention. This has spawned a new research agenda under the moniker of “food justice.” In this article, we contend that food justice research can benefit from employing the “environmental inequality formation” approach outlined by Pellow, which argues that environmental inequalities are the product of historical processes which involve multiple stakeholders with varied motives. Most importantly for this article, however, is his contention that these inequalities need to be addressed via a life cycle approach. We take this directive literally, and employ a cradle to the grave approach to food justice, or what we call the food cycle. This approach highlights how food inequalities occur in different ways and rates at different stages in ...

Brownfields Gentrification: Redevelopment Planning and Environmental Justice in Spokane, Washington

This article examines the relationship between brownfields redevelopment and urban gentrification processes. Examples from both the national environmental justice literature as well as a short case study from Spokane, Washington illustrate that the redevelopment of contaminated brownfields is central to gentrification processes and that justice advocates need to be aware of gentrification processes in brownfields communities. Brownfields—or contaminated postindustrial property—environmental justice scholars have found, are overwhelmingly found in low-income and minority communities. Federal brownfields redevelopment initiatives emerging in the mid 1990s have aimed to remedy these issues by remediating and redeveloping tainted sites, thus creating an urban landscape that poses fewer risks to environmental health and has improved the economic viability of brownfields communities. While brownfields redevelopment can “fix” many environmental justice problems, it also can create different issues, including gentrification, that threaten low-income communities. The article contends that since gentrification processes often have both social and environmental dimensions that are closely intermingled, environmental justice scholars should more closely examine socio-environmental issues such as gentrification in their research and advocacy.

Introduction: The Evolution of Environmental Justice Activism, Research, and Scholarship

This article argues that there is a long history of environmental racism in American society. The first part of the article briefly discusses some of the environmental practices that discriminated against and negatively impacted people of color. It also discusses the responses of people color to these inequities. The second part of the article examines the rise of the contemporary environmental justice movement. This portion of the essay also looks at the evolution of environmental justice scholarship. It argues that despite controversy over the assertion that race and class are related to the siting patterns of hazardous facilities, most studies support the claim.