Environmental Justice

Concepts, Evidence and Politics

Gordon Walker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136619236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Umwelt- & Energiepolitik

Environmental justice has increasingly become part of the language of environmental activism, political debate, academic research and policy making around the world. It raises questions about how the environment impacts on different people's lives. Does pollution follow the poor? Are some communities far more vulnerable to the impacts of flooding or climate change than others? Are the benefits of access to green space for all, or only for some? Do powerful voices dominate environmental decisions to the exclusion of others?

This book focuses on such questions and the complexities involved in answering them. It explores the diversity of ways in which environment and social difference are intertwined and how the justice of their interrelationship matters. It has a distinctive international perspective, tracing how the discourse of environmental justice has moved around the world and across scales to include global concerns, and examining research, activism and policy development in the US, the UK, South Africa and other countries. The widening scope and diversity of what has been positioned within an environmental justice 'frame' is also reflected in chapters that focus on waste, air quality, flooding, urban greenspace and climate change. In each case, the basis for evidence of inequalities in impacts, vulnerabilities and responsibilities is examined, asking questions about the knowledge that is produced, the assumptions involved and the concepts of justice that are being deployed in both academic and political contexts.

Environmental Justice offers a wide ranging analysis of this rapidly evolving field, with compelling examples of the processes involved in producing inequalities and the challenges faced in advancing the interests of the disadvantaged. It provides a critical framework for understanding environmental justice in various spatial and political contexts, and will be of interest to those studying Environmental Studies, Geography, Politics and Sociology.

1

Understanding environmental justice

This book is about the intertwining of environment and social difference – how for some people and some social groups the environment is an intrinsic part of living a ‘good life’ of prosperity, health and well-being, while for others the environment is a source of threat and risk, and access to resources such as energy, water and greenspace is limited or curtailed. It is also about how some of us consume key environmental resources at the expense of others, often in distant places, and about how the power to effect change and influence environmental decision-making is unequally distributed. Most fundamentally, it is about the way that people should be treated, the way the world should be.

The term that best captures this set of concerns is environmental justice. These two words have become used in many different ways – as a campaigning slogan, as a description of a field of academic research, as a policy principle, as an agenda and as a name given to a political movement. Emerging from its origins in anti-toxics and civil rights activism in the US to produce what some have seen as one of the most significant developments in contemporary environmentalism, environmental justice has become increasingly used as part of the language of environmental campaigning, political debate, academic research and policy-making around the world. As we shall see, we can now find examples of environmental justice language being used in countries as diverse as South Africa, Taiwan, Israel, Germany, Australia, Brazil and Scotland, and with reference to issues from the local street level through to the global scale. It has, as Agyeman and Evans (2004) argue, provided a ‘vocabulary of political opportunity’ and an important way of bringing attention to previously neglected or overlooked patterns of inequality which can matter deeply to people’s health, well-being and quality of life.

This, as part of the discourse of contemporary political life, makes environmental justice significant and worthy of attention. More fundamentally, though, focusing on environmental justice provides a route into examining important aspects of how people think, reason and act in relation to environmental concerns. Justice does and should matter, as much to our environmental concerns and experiences as to others. And as we shall see, working out exactly how justice or fairness matters, and the parameters within which claims and judgements of environmental inequality and injustice can be made, provides just as much scope for deliberation and debate as more familiar and established justice concerns.

The scope of environmental justice

In this book I aim to explore the diversity of ways in which environment and social difference are intertwined and how the justice of their interrelationship matters. As environmental justice language has moved spatially around the world and across scales to include global concerns, so the scope of what has been positioned within an environmental justice ‘frame’ has expanded and diversified (Holifield et al. 2010; Sze and London 2008). In its early formulations in the US in the 1980s, environmental justice activism and research focused pretty narrowly on the relationship between race and poverty and the spatial distribution of waste and industrial sites producing pollution impacts, including accusations that a form of ‘environmental racism’ deliberately targeting poor black communities in locating polluting sites was at work (see discussion in Chapter 4). Whilst this is still an important and distinctive theme, over the ensuing 30 years far more has been encompassed.

A review in 2005 of the content of environmental justice activist group websites in the US identified 50 distinct and varied environmental themes (Benford 2005), including transport issues, food justice, deforestation, lead poisoning, bio-piracy and transportation. Looking to the research literature, a similarly expansive field of study is encountered (see Table 1.1). The forms of social difference that have been featured in recent environmental justice research (the left-hand column in Table 1.1) include, for example, questions of age, the environmental rights of indigenous people, gender differences, the environmental and participatory concerns of disabled people and responsibilities to future generations. The range of environmental concerns that have featured in the environmental justice research literature (the right-hand side of Table 1.1) is now vast – from landfills to oil extraction, lead in paint to whaling, wind farms to hog farms – and covers a wide diversity of environmental risks, benefits and resources.

Table 1.1 The social and environmental dimensions of recent environmental justice research

Social dimensions	Environmental dimensions
Race	Air pollution	Greenspace
Ethnicity	Accidental hazardous releases	Outdoor recreation
Class	Waste landfills	Mineral extraction
Income	Waste incinerators	Hog industry
Deprivation	Contaminated land	Emissions trading
Gender	Brownfield land	Oil drilling and extraction
Single parent families	Urban dereliction
Households in social housing	Lead in paint and pipes	Access to healthy food
Older people	Flooding	Fuel poverty
Children	Noise	Wind farms
Indigenous peoples	Drinking water quality	Nuclear power stations
Disability	River water quality	Climate change
Deafness	Transport	Trade agreements
Special needs	Forest fires	Alcohol retail outlets
Future generations	Whaling	Biodiversity and genetic resources
	Wildlife reserves
	Agriculture	Genomics
		Land reform

In later chapters we will examine a selection of these environmental concerns in some detail – waste, air pollution, flooding, greenspace and climate change. In each of these we will consider some of the evidence of unequal patterns and experiences for different social groups, and the arguments and claims that have been made in research and in environmental campaigning. Some of this evidence and argumentation is striking and compelling, and some enormously important work has been undertaken over recent years to show how environmental inequalities are experienced, how they are caused and how people’s living conditions, access to environmental resources and access to basic democratic rights need to be addressed. However, such material will not be presented uncritically, and throughout the book I am hoping that readers will be encouraged to think about what is being asserted and argued and to develop their own critical evaluations as to its meaning and importance.

In this vein, the book has a broader aim of developing analytical insight and understanding in an academic field that sometimes lacks a more critical edge. This is to be achieved by tracing the growth, spread and evolution of environmental justice activity over recent decades, examining some of the vast range of evidence, arguments, explanations and demands that have been put forward, and considering the implications that then follow. Some key questions underpin this endeavour:

• Is there one definition of what constitutes environmental justice (and injustice) or are there many potential different ones? As the language of environmental justice has evolved from its origins in the US and become used in many different places, contexts and circumstances, what does this imply for what environmental justice is taken to mean?
• How can we pick our way through the many types of environmental inequalities and forms of justice and injustice now being examined around the world and work out a way of categorising, comparing and evaluating what is at issue?
• What are the methods through which evidence of environmental inequalities is being produced and what are the complexities involved in applying these methods and making sense of the evidence?
• Are there ways in which we can analyse the evidence or ‘knowledge claims’ being made by an environmental group, a scientist or a local resident and understand why evidence is disputed and disagreements erupt?
• What alternative explanations are there of the processes that have produced and sustained patterns of inequality and injustice in different contexts?

These questions all encourage an analytical take on the meaning of environmental justice and require tools for the critique and evaluation of what is being argued for and about. In the rest of this chapter the first steps towards developing this approach and towards answering some of these questions will be laid out. Two key ideas will first be discussed – framing and claim-making – before focusing on how environmental justice can be defined and understood. Through this discussion I introduce some important ideas for the rest of the book.

Framing

The notion of an ‘environmental justice frame’ has already been referred to and will be a recurrent reference point throughout the book. Concepts of frames and framing have taken root in various areas of social science but have been particularly powerful in the analysis of social movements or ‘collective action’, including that of the environmental justice movement (Capek 1993; Faber 2008; Taylor 2000). Framing is a notion that recognises that the world is not just ‘out there’ waiting to be unproblematically discovered, but has to be given meaning, labelled and categorised, and interpreted through ideas, propositions and assertions about how things are and how they ought to be. By implication there is not just one interpretation of the world available, but alternative versions, multiple versions (the many alternative religions are an obvious general example). Applying this multiplicity to environmental justice concerns, we can see how a pattern of environmental inequality might be interpreted as ‘just how things normally are’, as the outcome of how the market economy works, or as the result of systematic discrimination and injustice. A ‘problematic’ environmental risk may be interpreted as something to be managed through good science, or as the consequence of the capitalist pursuit of profit by some at the expense of others, or, indeed, as not a problem at all.

Social movements, such as the environmental justice movement, actively try to persuade others of their preferred frames of meaning, interpreting what is wrong with the world and advocating change (Benford and Snow 2000). Some of these framings are quite radical in making a case for a different way of organising society and addressing environmental concerns. But they are not alone in this endeavour. Others engage in their own work of framing – governments and political parties do it all the time, as do the media and corporate actors. Frames are contested and argued about and counter-frames are deployed to challenge dominant or threatening alternatives. An example is provided by Shibley and Prosterman (1998) in their analysis of competing frames in media coverage of childhood lead poisoning. They trace the difficulties environmental justice activists have in establishing a framing of lead poisoning as a threat to health that is particularly acute for some children in US society, rather than as a ‘silent epidemic’ that is a risk to all children which stands as the dominant frame.

Academics engage in framing as well. There is an academic frame of work on environmental justice that I am writing within, which has certain shared ideas, terms and conventions, even if I might be trying to stretch and interpret these in particular ways. What is interesting about the frames that come to be is where they have come from, what they include and leave out, and what difference they make. Also of interest is how they appear in different forms in different places and how they evolve and become more or less powerful and relevant in the processes that they themselves are part of. At various points in this book I will be asking these questions, not only in Chapter 2, which is most directly concerned with tracing the appearance and evolution of the environmental justice frame within political activity around the world, but also in other chapters as particular topics, approaches and contexts are considered.

Claim-making

A second term that will be widely used throughout the book is claim-making.¹ This, like framing, is used to emphasise that there are many different ways in which we can try to make sense of, or make claims about, the world around us. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, claims about environmental justice can have different elements or components to them, and analytically we can identify these and categorise and evaluate them. For example, and to draw on the topic of Chapter 5, a claim about the justice of distribution of air quality in a city might involve:

• claims about concentrations of air pollutants and how these are concentrated in particular parts of the city;
• claims about the vulnerability of old, young or poor people to the health effects of polluted air;
• claims about responsibility for the production of the poor air quality;
• claims about why the distribution of poor air quality is unjust or unfair;
• claims about what would constitute a just or fair way of addressing this situation.

Such elements of claim-making are open to further analysis to bring out, for example, how they are drawing on particular types of quantitative or qualitative evidence, particular concepts of justice or particular notions of responsibility. There is too much here to cover fully at this point, but the different possibilities are important, as are the ways different elements are combined in claim-making and how these combinations might become more or less effective in achieving the aims of the actors involved.

One of the basic combinations that is often made within justice claim-making is to link evidence of a condition of inequality with a normative position on what is just or unjust (see the later discussion of the distinction between inequality and injustice). Box 1.1 shows four examples of such combi...