The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice

Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, Gordon Walker, Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, Gordon Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367581121
• eBook ISBN: 9781317392811
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice presents an extensive and cutting-edge introduction to the diverse, rapidly growing body of research on pressing issues of environmental justice and injustice. With wide-ranging discussion of current debates, controversies, and questions in the history, theory, and methods of environmental justice research, contributed by over 90 leading social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and scholars from professional disciplines from six continents, it is an essential resource both for newcomers to this research and for experienced scholars and practitioners.

The chapters of this volume examine the roots of environmental justice activism, lay out and assess key theories and approaches, and consider the many different substantive issues that have been the subject of activism, empirical research, and policy development throughout the world. The Handbook features critical reviews of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodological approaches and explicitly addresses interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and engaged research. Instead of adopting a narrow regional focus, it tackles substantive issues and presents perspectives from political and cultural systems across the world, as well as addressing activism for environmental justice at the global scale. Its chapters do not simply review the state of the art, but also propose new conceptual frameworks and directions for research, policy, and practice.

Providing detailed but accessible overviews of the complex, varied dimensions of environmental justice and injustice, the Handbook is an essential guide and reference not only for researchers engaged with environmental justice, but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for policymakers and activists.

1
INTRODUCTION

The worlds of environmental justice

Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty and Gordon Walker

Introduction

Although some three decades have passed since the term environmental justice began mobilizing activists and making headlines – along with related terms like environmental racism, environmental equity, and environmental inequality – the conditions it names remain just as relevant today. During the period of time when we were compiling the chapters for this handbook, the US city of Flint, Michigan attracted international media attention for its lead-contaminated drinking water (also see the special issue of Environmental Justice, volume 9, issue 4). If the concepts of environmental justice and environmental racism had faded somewhat from North American public discourse and consciousness in recent years, the Flint water crisis brought them decidedly – and distressingly – back in. Flint has a majority African American population and a notoriously high rate of poverty, and the toxic burden of the lead pollution fell disproportionately on low-income African American children and their families. This distributive injustice was compounded by egregious procedural injustice, as residents’ concerns about the highly corrosive water were repeatedly dismissed by state officials, several of whom subsequently received indictments for misconduct in office, tampering with evidence, and other criminal offences. Moreover, the Flint water crisis is by no means an isolated incident or an anomaly. As this book goes to press, the rallying cry of environmental justice can be heard in protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation (North Dakota, US), in the closure of London’s City Airport by activists from Black Lives Matter UK, in the Ecuadorean president’s call to institute an international court of environmental justice, and in countless lower-profile community struggles throughout the world.

Environmental problems, from water and pollution to biodiversity loss and global warming, have the capacity to affect all of us. However, as the Flint water crisis and other contemporary struggles so starkly remind us, they do not affect us all equally, or in the same ways. Nor do we have equal power to decide solutions to these problems, or to take the necessary action to solve them. This unequal and differentiated positioning, which typically places the heaviest environmental burdens upon marginalized, disadvantaged, and less powerful populations, forms the central premise of the problem of environmental injustice and the hope for environmental justice as its solution.

The aim of this handbook is to present a broad overview of the diverse, rapidly growing body of research on issues of environmental justice and injustice, both to introduce new scholars to the field and to help orient the agendas of experienced researchers. From its origins in grassroots activism and engaged sociological scholarship, primarily in the US, environmental justice (EJ) research has generated what is now a vast, multi-disciplinary literature encompassing a wide range of issues and politics in countries throughout the world. Initially focused on environmental hazards and pollution, the scope of EJ activism and research has now expanded to encompass almost everything that is unsustainable about the world, including rampant industrialization, resource depletion, energy use, consumption patterns, food systems, access to environmental amenities, and public policies that adversely affect minority, Indigenous, and low-income communities, other vulnerable groups such as disabled, immigrant, and linguistically isolated populations, as well as future generations.

Although this handbook is intended for a wide variety of audiences, from academics and students to practitioners, policymakers, and activists, we need to be clear from the outset that it is not a handbook of political tactics, community-organizing strategies, legal solutions, or best practices for public policy. These topics would no doubt require handbooks of their own, with a rather different set of authors. The purpose here, in keeping with the objectives of the Routledge handbook series, is more modest and narrowly focused: to present an introduction, guide, and reference to current debates, controversies, and questions in academic EJ research.

Of course, as EJ scholarship has spread to countries and regions throughout the world (Walker & Bulkeley 2006; Carmin & Agyeman 2011; Schroeder et al. 2008; Reed & George 2011), this academic literature has now become so large and diverse that no single handbook could cover it in its entirety. Although we have sought to present the topic with as much breadth as feasible, constraints of space and time make it impossible to be exhaustive and comprehensive. In addition, EJ continues to evolve as a concept and as a research agenda, and to some extent this handbook will inevitably be limited to presenting a snapshot of the field at one particular point in time. As we have put the handbook together new papers have appeared that seek to challenge received wisdoms in EJ research and push in new directions – see, for example, Velicu and Kaika (2015); Jamal and Hales (2016); and Mennis et al. (2016). However, despite these limitations, we challenged our authors not only to introduce and critically assess the current state of the art, but also to set an agenda for the future. In our view, the Handbook also makes it clear that the present moment is particularly rich and important for EJ research. For one thing, it is no longer a new field; it has had time to develop and evolve, in multiple contexts and directions. EJ scholarship now engages with and contributes to a wide array of social, political, legal, ethical, and geographical theories. It draws on and helps advance an increasingly sophisticated and diverse collection of methodological approaches. Finally, it addresses a growing variety of substantive issues in an expanding range of geographic settings.

The objective of the Handbook is to provide a critical introduction to these theories, approaches, issues and contexts, with a focus on what makes each distinctive. For example, quantitative, qualitative and mixed methodological approaches of various kinds, as well as different disciplinary or transdisciplinary perspectives, allow us to ask and answer distinctive questions and provide different insights about EJ. The same goes for different substantive issues; for instance, such problems as toxic waste, air pollution, depletion or degradation of water resources or threats to biodiversity – each present distinctive injustices, and for each the meaning of EJ may look slightly different. Moreover, as much prior work has now shown, the meanings and dimensions of EJ have undergone changes as the concept has travelled to different places. Theorists have argued that among the key distinguishing features of EJ are its plurality and multivalence (Schlosberg 2007; Walker 2012), and we have sought in the Handbook to emphasize and elaborate this remarkable pluralism. This extends to our roster of contributing authors, which includes social scientists, natural scientists, humanists and academics from law, public health, planning and other professional disciplines, recruited from almost every continent.

In the remainder of this chapter, we begin by briefly situating EJ research with respect to its historical origins and key premises. We follow this with an introduction to the structure and themes of the volume, closing with a call for renewed commitment to research dedicated to both critically engaging with environmental injustice, and advancing its eradication.

Situating environmental justice research

Origins

In the US, the most widely recognized landmarks of the pioneering stage of environmental justice research were published during the 1980s, prompted by instances of grassroots activism. These include sociologist Robert Bullard’s (1983) classic study of the distribution of solid waste sites among communities of colour in Houston, Texas, as well as a regional study by the US General Accounting Office (1983) to follow up on issues raised in historic protests against the siting of a hazardous waste dump in Warren County, North Carolina. Such work set the stage for a national-scale investigation by the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) Commission on Racial Justice (1987), which found the presence of hazardous waste facilities and toxic waste sites to be significantly associated not only with lower household income and housing values, but above all with higher percentages of people of colour. The UCC analysis both inspired new studies – some of which challenged its findings and others which supported them – and helped bring environmental racism and injustice to the federal agenda by the early 1990s (see, e.g., Bryant & Mohai 1992).

Since that time, the research literature on EJ has grown and diversified tremendously, and it has become the central focus of entire journals, such as Environmental Justice and Local Environment. Within the academy, EJ research has never been confined to a single discipline, and as a result it has invited diverse methodological and theoretical approaches and perspectives. In the US, sociologists such as Robert Bullard, Bunyan Bryant, Paul Mohai, and Beverly Wright played central roles both in setting the research agenda and applying this research to influence public policy (Cable et al. 2005). A crucial part of this agenda – to which geographers, economists, legal scholars, political scientists, historians, public health scientists, urban and regional planners, ecologists and others have also made key contributions – has always been the quantitative and spatial analysis of distributive EJ. Other sociologists, later joined by anthropologists, environmental historians, geographers, political scientists, and scholars from fields such as communication, rhetoric, literature, women’s studies and gender and sexuality studies, ethnic studies, and American studies, produced some of the pioneering studies of EJ as a social movement and discourse (e.g. Čapek 1993; Taylor 2000). Qualitative approaches to research, including ethnographic, archival, and cultural studies methods, have been particularly prominent in this tradition. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary projects have also become increasingly important, involving collaborations both among academic disciplines and between academics and non-academics. Accompanying this methodological pluralism has been a remarkable geographic diffusion of EJ research, which, as this Handbook makes evident, has now become common in countries throughout the world.

The meanings of environmental justice

The terms environmental justice and environmental injustice have always resisted straightforward definition (Holifield 2001; Schlosberg 2007; Phillips & Sexton 1999; Sze & London 2008). This is in part because they serve a variety of functions; for example, they can serve as descriptive terms for observable or measurable states of affairs, as normative terms condemning present conditions and naming desired outcomes for the future, or as political terms deployed to name substantive problems and antagonists, mobilize activism, and justify advocacy for particular policies and laws (Walker 2012). Initially associated most prominently with inequitable distributions of waste and pollution, the terms have also come to encompass a wide variety of substantive problems, struggles and aspirations. The classic document Principles of Environmental Justice, a product of the 1991 First National People of Colour Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, DC, exemplifies this broad scope, addressing issues ranging from protection from hazardous waste and nuclear testing to self-determination and opposition to military occupation. As EJ terminology has spread spatially and evolved temporally, it has taken on new political meanings, embracing still more issues and aspirations depending on the particular contexts (Walker 2009; Schroeder et al. 2008; Sikor 2013). With this expansion of meaning, the question of “justice for whom” has also become more complicated. In some settings, such as politics and policy in the US, the language of EJ has traditionally focused on racialized minority groups and low-income populations. But the term’s diffusion in other settings has raised questions about whether other groups of people might also be considered victims of environmental injustice – and indeed, whether EJ and injustice are also terms that should be extended to nonhumans (see, e.g., Schlosberg 2007).

In addition to engaging with its multiple definitions, scholars have increasingly addressed and theorized the multidimensionality of the justice in environmental justice. In addition to distributive justice, which remains a key focus of much quantitative and spatial analysis, a growing body of literature now attends to procedural and participatory justice, justice as recognition, and justice as capabilities, as well as the interrelations among these dimensions (Schlosberg 2007; Walker 2012).

Structure and rationale of the volume

The process of editing this handbook reminded us that it is impossible, even in a large volume, to do full justice to environmental justice. We had neither an infinite word count nor an infinite timeline to work with, and the authors we invited or considered had constraints of their own. We sought to capture as much of the breadth of the field as possible, but we realized early in the process that there would inevitably be omissions. One reviewer of the book proposal, for example, suggested that the volume include the following, whether as chapters or as topics: “weapons production and war, biotechnology, nanotechnology, nuclear power, green energy and biofuels, peak oil and oil vulnerability, green infrastructure, mining, farm chemicals, obesity and food deserts, natural hazards (e.g. earthquakes), urban agriculture and community gardens, industrial ecology, asbestos, medical technology, bio-prospecting and coal seam gas/shale oil.” Some of these issues feature in the book; others unfortunately do not. All of these topics are worthwhile and important, but some of them are still emerging as EJ issues – perhaps in a few years they will be essential to a new volume or edition.

The same goes for regions of the world. As hard as we tried to represent every corner of the globe, there was not enough room to include all of the places in which EJ activism and scholarship are taking place. In addition, in some locations – above all, the US – EJ is a well-established field with numerous active scholars, while in others it is still in its infancy. We regretted, for example, that we could not include chapters devoted to Pacific Island states – facing unique threats to their existence in climate change – to the former Soviet states of northern Asia, or to the countries of northern Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia (see, e.g., Kuletz 2002; Omer & Or 2005; Agyeman & Ogneva-Himmelberger 2009). Even within continents or regions represented in the Handbook, we had to exclude far more than we wanted; sub-Saharan Africa, for example, has seen a blossoming of EJ scholarship in recent years to which this volume unfortunately cannot do justice (see, e.g., Myers 2008; Tschakert 2009; Margai & Barry 2011; Makene et al. 2012; Martin et al. 2014; Kubanza & Simatele 2016). In other cases, such as Latin America and South Africa, excellent book-length collections have already been produced (McDonald 2002; Carruthers 2008). For these reasons, readers should view the sections and chapters as representative rather than comprehensive.

The volume consists of four main parts. Part I begins with a chapter by Laura Pulido, who combines a reflection on her personal history with EJ with an argument for increased attention to the implications of changing racial formations for the efficacy and potential of the movement. It then works through key theories and approaches informing EJ scholarship, covering different perspectives on the dimensions of EJ, theories that bring specific insights into the production of injustice, and analytical frameworks that have been applied to revealing the tactics and strategies of activist work.

The first section within Part I presents discussions of a range of theories relevant to the analysis of EJ as a movement and phenomenon. Two chapters focus on dimensions of social movement theory, as applied to analysis of EJ movements. Dianne Sicotte and Robert Brulle present a broad overview of the different varieties of social movement theory that have informed EJ scholarship, from the field’s origins to the more recent emergence of transnational and climate justice movements. David Pellow then focuses on one framework within social movement theory, arguing for a model of political opportunity structures more attentive to race and gender, the role of the nonhuman, and opportunities beyond the state. The following subsection introduces a set of contrasting approaches to explaining and addressing environmental injustices. William Bowen assesses the prospects of rational cho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figure
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the worlds of environmental justice
• Part I Situating, analysing and theorizing environmental justice
• Part II Methods in environmental justice research
• Part III Substantive issues in environmental justice research
• Part IV Global and Regional Dimensions of Environmental Justice Research
• Index