Lessons in Environmental Justice. Группа авторов
Part III, chapters focus on the intersection of state agencies, policy, and environmental justice. With exclusive access to EPA staff, Jill Harrison asks in Chapter 8 why government agencies have been so slow to bring about meaningful environmental justice change for affected communities. Harrison suggests that government agency staff engage in racialized claims and actions that defend existing regulatory practice and undermine proposed environmental justice reforms. In so doing, they bolster a regulatory system that has long disproportionately protected white middle-class and wealthy communities. Drawing from an understanding of racial capitalism, and using Actor Network Theory, Cristina Faiver-Serna explores in Chapter 9 the ways in which the state is deeply entangled with racial capitalism to reproduce environmental racism, expressed in disproportionate asthma incidents in the Latinx community of Long Beach, California. Chapter 10, by Oday Salim, focuses on the case of the Flint water crisis and the law's ability to address environmental injustice in such cases.
The chapters in Part IV examine environments of (in)justice and activism. In Chapter 11, George Lipsitz examines the intersection between housing, health, and race. Using a social ecology framework, Lipsitz connects individual ills to discrimination; collective, cumulative, and continuing ideologies; structures; and systems. In Chapter 12, Elizabeth Hoover explains how environmental justice impacting Indian Country needs to be considered through the unique colonial history and relationship that tribes have with the United States and Canada, and their status as sovereign nations. Using three case studies, Hoover explains that in order to achieve true food sovereignty for Native communities, tribes need to be able to define their own standards for health and well-being, and demand environmental conditions that support their Indigenous food systems. In Chapter 13, Sarah Rios examines the prison as an egregious environment of injustice and racism. Rios shows how the siting of prisons in the Central Valley of California has placed inmates in proximity to noxious industries such as agricultural operations, chemical waste evaporation from oil well water ponds, ammonia gases from dairies, and open dust fields. These multiple exposures have contributed to the gestation and dissemination of Valley Fever in California’s prisons. In Chapter 14, Beth Rose Middleton Manning, Kaitlin Reed, and Deniss Martinez reveal how processes of settler colonialism harm both water and Indigenous peoples. For many Indigenous communities, Middleton Manning and her co-authors argue, environmental justice struggles began with the invasion and colonization of our lands. Using various examples, including the protests at Standing Rock, efforts to recognize the rights of the Klamath River, and re-storying the Sierra Nevada, Middleton Manning et al. explain how Indigenous peoples across the globe are standing up to protect water relatives and future generations.
In the final section of the book, Part V, you will find chapters that discuss new frontiers and old questions regarding environmental justice. In Chapter 15, Ingrid Waldron provides a detailed case study of the fight against environmental racism in two African Nova Scotian communities in Canada. Waldron locates her analysis of environmental racism within Canada’s settler-colonial existence. She concludes that addressing environmental racism in Nova Scotia and Canada must acknowledge and address structural as well as environmental determinants of health, and it must involve the community in consultations and monitoring to right the impacts of environmental racism. Whereas the other chapters in this text focus more explicitly on environmental justice, Chapter 16, by João Costa Vargas, delves more deeply into an enduring pattern of imposed and global marginalization on black communities that precipitates and normalizes environmental injustices. Using the framing of antiblack genocide in the United States and Brazil, Costa Vargas argues that, from residential segregation, to police brutality, to blocked access to well-being and quality medical care, and to exposure to environmental toxins, black people were never meant to survive. Julian Agyeman and Stephen Zavestoski examine in Chapter 17 how urban sustainability efforts are creating new forms of environmental injustices and racial segregation in the city. They conclude that as private interests use the rhetoric of sustainable, livable, and smart cities to gain more and more influence in urban planning and development, the environmental justice movement must adapt through a combination of drawing on lessons learned from the movement’s early history and innovating new ways of identifying the earliest possible signs of speculative investment and then build coalitions capable of placing social equity at the center of such projects. In Chapter 18, David Pellow frames Black Lives Matter as an environmental justice movement. Black Lives Matter has become one of the most important sources and sites of racial justice struggle in the early 21st century. It has built on the long history of anti-colonial/decolonial resistance movements among Indigenous people, people of color, and their allies for the past half millennium. Pellow develops the critical environmental justice studies framework as a way of contextualizing environmental justice studies and the problem of environmental racism, and as a tool for rethinking the Black Lives Matter movement. As with all the other contributions to this edited volume, Pellow’s intersectional analysis provides a novel and generative space for thinking about new ways to engage a range of social and environmental justice movements in the 21st century.
1 From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter
Robert D. Bullard
Photo 1.1: Houston protests against the Whispering Pines Sanitary Landfill that was the subject of the Bean et al. v Southwestern Waste Management Corps. lawsuit—the nation’s first lawsuit to challenge environmental racism using civil rights laws.
Photo by Robert D. Bullard, 1978.
This introductory chapter lays the foundation for understanding environmental justice from its early roots in the modern civil rights movement to the current-day Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. It also explores how the environmental justice framework redefined environmentalism and challenged institutional racism and the dominant environmental protection paradigm. The chapter uses an environmental justice framework to examine the location of polluting facilities; government response to natural and human-made disasters; and the application and enforcement of laws, policies, and regulations governing equal protection and civil rights. The environmental justice framework rests on developing tools and strategies to eliminate unfair, unjust, and inequitable conditions and decisions. It also attempts to uncover the underlying assumptions that contribute to and produce inequality, including differential exposure, unfair treatment, and unequal protection. The framework brings to the surface the ethical, moral, and political questions of “who gets what, when, why, and how much?”
Various movements over the decades have challenged structural racism that devalued blacks and other people of color and their communities. These movements challenged the underlying assumptions that contribute to and reproduce inequality. The modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was largely an anti-racism and anti–white supremacy movement. The 1970s and 1980s ushered in a more focused era of targeting unequal and unfair pollution burdens borne by poor people, people of color, and other vulnerable populations—including children. The 1990s and 2000s expanded the equity and justice lens to include issues ranging from health equity, parks and green space, food security and healthy food access, sustainability, climate change, community resilience, racial profiling, policing, and criminal justice.
Legacy of the Modern Civil Rights Movement: 1950s and 1960s
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