Lessons in Environmental Justice. Группа авторов
this unfolding story. Soon after that, I accepted an invitation from CTCAG/FUSE to do a sociological study of the community that would help document and analyze what was happening there.
Documenting Thecarver Terrace Case
My mother could outwork me two to one…. She went down weighing 98 pounds before her death…. She was telling it in church, and she was shouting to it on Sunday, she was telling them all, it’s poison over here that’s killing people, EPA is lying to us! When we had a march out here in the neighborhood, she was one of the first, and she marched all the way in every march. Once I lost her to the chemicals here—and I know that’s what it was, you know, no one has to second guess—I made her a promise that I would never let her down, and I would never stop the fight. The more involved I am, the more that part of her is living.
On a hot July day, Patsy Oliver drove me through the neighborhood, narrating a house-by-house story of economic and medical disasters. The catalogue of shattered dreams was disheartening. By then, some houses had been on the market for as little as $7,000, and worsening floods had invaded part of the neighborhood. Oliver herself had replaced the floor in her home for the third time and had lost her mother, Mattie Warren, to cancer in the previous year. It was one of many sudden deaths that shocked the community.
Loss came in so many forms that it would be easy to focus only on that part of the story. But the residents’ resolute fight for social and environmental justice is just as remarkable. Over a period of many months, during short, intense research trips scheduled between my work obligations, I interviewed residents, attended many types of meetings, pored over documents, and thought hard about what EJ means in practice. I continued to visit the community during the transition to a buyout, and afterward I located and reinterviewed a number of families in their new homes. Using qualitative research methods, I did my best to create a holistic case study that would offer comparisons to other communities and preserve some of the unique details of this one. Like many of my colleagues, I hoped that my research, teaching, and writing about EJ would make some positive difference.
Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism
In the 1980s and 1990s, different narrative strands were coming together around the concept of environmental justice, including one focused on environmental racism. At that time, environmental racism most often referred to the disproportionate targeting of minority communities for toxic burdens (like the siting of landfills, incinerators, or toxic industries). Warren County, North Carolina, became an iconic place symbolizing the coming together of the civil rights movement and the EJ movement when in 1982 African American residents engaged in direct action protests against the EPA-approved placing of a landfill with contaminated waste in their area despite the potential health hazards (see Chapter 1 in this volume).
In his 1990 book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, Robert Bullard not only researched the pattern of disproportionate impact on minority communities but also engaged in active outreach to affected communities (including Carver Terrace) to make the research usable in a fight against environmental racism. As Dorceta Taylor (2000) and others have pointed out, mainstream organizations focused on reducing human damage to the environment (often construed as “wilderness”) but ignored social justice issues and the everyday spaces where people live. Thus, an EJ agenda was badly needed.
Although early images associated with environmental racism often emphasize black communities, the environmental racism component of EJ had a wide umbrella that included many other people of color—among others, Latinos, Native Americans, and U.S. Asian and Pacific Islander communities. For example, the SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP), active since the 1980s supporting the rights of communities of color in the U.S. Southwest, easily found a place under this banner. In 1990, organizers in the Native American community formed the Indigenous Environmental Network. Also in 1990, SWOP wrote a now-famous letter to the so-called Group of 10 mainstream environmental organizations (for example, the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation), which were predominantly white and male, pointing out their exclusionary structure and issues. Responding to grassroots pressure, some of the Group of 10 began to diversify their organizations and issues. In a key development in 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit met in Washington, D.C., and adopted 17 principles (Principles of Environmental Justice, 1991). This would prove to be a transformative and radical reframing of environmental justice.
Framing Theory, Social Movements, and Environmental Justice
When I first encountered framing theory, theories of social movements had become very focused on “resource mobilization,” or the so-called nuts and bolts of organizing—leadership and organizational skills, fundraising, mobilizing constituents, and the like. Although these are important, the equally significant issues of symbolic meaning and identity had taken a back seat. Noticing this gap, sociologist David Snow and his collaborators developed a theory of framing that focused on the social construction of meaning and its links to social action. They defined frames as “‘schemata of interpretation’ that enable individuals ‘to locate, perceive, identify, and label’ occurrences within their life space and the world at large. By rendering events or occurrences meaningful, frames function to organize experience and guide action, whether individual or collective” (Snow, Rochford, Worden, & Benford, 1986, p. 464). In other words, interpretive frames serve the dual purpose of constructing meaning and offering strategies for action. Just like a frame around a picture, meaningful frames highlight certain elements of reality and affect how we look at (and act in) the world. A successful frame must “resonate,” that is, it has to ring true and feel authentic to those who embrace it, individually and collectively.
Snow and Benford (1988) identified three types of “core framing tasks”: diagnostic framing (analyzing a problem and identifying its causes); prognostic framing (envisioning plans for a solution); and motivational framing (providing a motive for action). Any viable social movement, they argue, needs to perform these framing tasks to mobilize supporters. To address an injustice, we try to figure out who (or what—but there is always a “who,” as Lois Gibbs pointed out) is causing it and what we can do to change it. To actually change it, you have to believe that it’s possible and that you should take action. As Carver Terrace residents found out, this is much easier if you aren’t facing the problem alone; connecting with others provides experience, motivation, and courage to carry out all three framing tasks. You need courage when you challenge a powerful social hierarchy built around inequalities of gender, race, class, and more. Adopting a collective action frame is also often linked to a reframing of personal identity. The #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement (BLM) provide excellent examples of powerful collective action frames that are also deeply personal. The same can be said about the EJ frame.
Importantly, frames don’t just automatically “snap into place.” Social movement scholar Aldon Morris (1986) reminds us that the nonviolent protest frame, for which the civil rights movement is so well known, was initially not widely embraced by African Americans in the South, who saw being unarmed in the face of armed opponents as a potential death sentence. Successful framing is always a product of meaningful social interaction. Also, framing is not a purely rational process. Rather, an injustice frame is frequently connected to a strong sense of “moral outrage,” “a ‘hot’ cognition…that is emotionally charged” (Taylor, 2000, p. 511). A resonant frame channels emotions in a particular direction. The polarization in the United States during the Trump presidency illustrates all too well the competing frames that resonate among his supporters and opponents, amplified by social media networks.
Framing has multiple purposes: presenting issues to the public (for example, presenting climate change in a convincing way); emphasizing certain collective strategies among a movement’s own participants and supporters (for example, validating direct action protest as the best choice); and influencing the social construction (reframing) of personal identity (for example, coming to see oneself as an EJ activist).
Framing theory has greatly influenced my work. I wrote that