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Critical Environmental Justice Studies

Michael Brown was an African-American teenager living in Ferguson, Missouri. On August 9, 2014, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed him, sparking worldwide outrage at the seemingly unending series of police shootings of African-Americans. When protesters took to the streets of cities around the US and the world to declare that “Black Lives Matter,” they and those who were the targets of police shootings were frequently referred to as “animals.” Juana Gutiérrez is the daughter of a Mexican farmer; she immigrated to the US at age fifteen. She started an organization called Mothers of East Los Angeles (MELA), which has fought to keep prisons from being built in her city and around the state of California. Nicholas Morrissey was an inmate at a state prison in LaBelle, Pennsylvania, who suffered from a chronic illness he believes was caused by the fact that the prison is next to a coal ash dump. Foad al-Amodi is president of the fishermen’s syndicate in Khan Younis, a town in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. His livelihood is threatened because the fish that he and his customers depend upon are dying from exposure to the massive volume of sewage that flows into the Mediterranean Sea – a result of the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has prevented the purchase of much-needed equipment to upgrade Gaza’s waste management system. Havah Ha-Levi was a Jewish Israeli woman who lived in a kibbutz near an old Palestinian Arab village, Sarkas, which was destroyed and converted into a garbage dump. In her memoir she writes, “Yet I remember. I testify.” State-sanctioned police killings of black people. Prisons and jails. The Israel/Palestine conflict. Each of these cases reveals how human suffering and social inequality also are sites where that pain is intimately linked to the harm visited upon fragile ecosystems and other animals. And each of these cases speaks to the ways that ordinary people and, in some cases nonhumans, have worked for environmental and social justice.

Human societies have always been deeply interconnected with our nonhuman relations and with ecosystems, but today those relationships are witnessing greater frictions, tensions, and harms than ever before, prompting scholars to label this epoch the Anthropocene because of the dominance of the human species on planet Earth. And while that dominance has led to incalculable damage to ecosystems and to human societies as well, the opportunities for addressing these problems and challenges are within our grasp, if we only dare to break out of conventional modes of thinking and action. The harms suffered by ecosystems today are closely linked to and mirror the harms experienced by the most marginalized human beings across the planet – what many scholars call the problem of environmental injustice. For example, where we find rivers dammed for hydropower plants we also tend to find indigenous peoples and fisherfolk, as well as other working people, whose livelihoods and health are harmed as a result; when sea life suffers from exposure to toxins such as mercury, we find that human beings also endure the effects of mercury when they consume those animals; and the intersecting character of multiple forms of inequality is revealed when nuclear radiation or climate change affects all species and humans across all social class levels, racial/ethnic groups, genders, abilities, and ages. The power (or agency) of the more-than-human world is on display here as well when, for example, nuclear radiation or extreme climate patterns are triggered by human actions and then, in turn, exert their own force on various bodies, spaces, and ecosystems. The agency of human beings is evident when people imagine and work to bring about a different set of relationships with each other and with the more-than-human world through art, protest, music, research, planning, and other forms of action.

Environmental justice struggles reveal how power flows through the multi-species relationships that make up life on Earth, often resulting in violence and marginalization for the many and environmental privileges for the few. But environmental justice struggles are also evident – if we are paying close attention – within spaces of conflict and collaboration that are not always typically defined as “environmental.” Consider, for example, the roles that land, air, water, and nonhuman species play in the Black Lives Matter movement, in the construction and maintenance of the US prison industrial complex, and in religious and ethnic conflicts in Israel and Palestine. I draw on each of these examples in this book to explore the future of environmental justice research and politics. One path toward this future is made clearer through what I call Critical Environmental Justice Studies.

In our book Power, Justice, and the Environment,1 Robert Brulle and I used the term “Critical Environmental Justice Studies” to call for scholarship that builds on research in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies by questioning assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field, by embracing greater interdisciplinarity, and moving toward methodologies and epistemologies including and beyond the social sciences. A number of other scholars have adopted this term as well, as they work to expand the academic field and politics of environmental justice.2 In the rest of this chapter I offer an overview of some key ideas and advances from the field of EJ studies and introduce the concept of Critical EJ Studies as a way of pushing the ideas and potential of earlier generations of EJ studies into new and productive directions. I view Critical EJ Studies not as an alternative to earlier-generation EJ studies, but as an extension of that foundational scholarship.

Environmental Justice Studies: An Overview of the Field

Why Critical Environmental Justice Studies? In order to answer that question, I must first offer an overview of the field of Environmental Justice Studies. But before one considers the scholarly research on the topic of environmental justice (EJ), we must begin with the EJ movement. The US EJ movement gained visibility and strength beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as activists and movement networks confronted a range of toxic hazards that were disproportionately located in communities of color (while the closely related Anti-Toxics movement was concentrated primarily in white working-class neighborhoods). This movement fused discourses of public health, civil and human rights, anti-racism, social justice, and ecological sustainability with tactics such as civil disobedience, public protests, and legal action to prevent the construction or expansion of unwanted and controversial facilities and developments such as landfills, incinerators, mines, and chemical plants. Activists also demanded that owners of existing facilities improve their operational safety, reduce pollution levels, and provide economic benefits to and offer power sharing with local residents or face the threat of being shut down. This movement sought to openly integrate campaigns for justice on behalf of vulnerable human beings with the goal of ecological sustainability.3 From the movement’s early days, activists sought environmental justice not only through shutting down polluting facilities, but also by demanding and creating access to parks and green space and affordable, healthy foods,4 safe neighborhoods, and for climate-related policies and practices that are socially just and ecologically sustainable.5 Thus even during its earliest days, the EJ movement articulated a transformative vision of what an environmentally and socially just and sustainable future might look like, at the local, regional, national, and global scales. For example, during the historic Environmental Justice Summit conference in 1991, participants drafted what became known as the Principles of Environmental Justice, which not only embrace a synthesis of anti-racism and ecological sustainability but also support anti-militarist, anti-imperialist, gender-justice politics. The Principles also recognize the inherent and cultural worth of nonhuman natures.6

The EJ movement is largely comprised of people from communities of color, indigenous communities, and working-class communities who are focused on combating environmental injustice, racism, and gender and class inequalities that are most visibly manifested in the disproportionate burden of environmental harm facing these populations. For the EJ movement, the battle for global sustainability cannot be won without addressing the ecological violence imposed on vulnerable human populations; thus social justice (that is, justice for humans) is inseparable from environmental protection.

What Is Environmental Justice?

EJ Studies scholar Robert Bullard defines environmental justice as the principle that “all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations.”7 The US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) definition further elaborates on this principle by defining environmental justice as:

The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Fair treatment means that no population, due to policy or economic disempowerment, is forced to bear a disproportionate share of the negative human health or...