“We are not saying, ‘Take the poisons out of our community and put them in a white community.’ We are saying that no community should have these poisons”
( Foreman, 1998)
Group Members: Juliana Prendergast , Natalie Casson, Ivy Denham-Conroy
Definition
Environmental justice (EJ) has a few different definitions which explain the movement’s significance. These definitions revolve around the issues and principles about the distribution fairness. The EPA defines EJ as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of people of all races, cultures, incomes and educational levels with respect to the development and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (Bryant 2015). They believe that no group of people should bear a disproportionate share of negative environmental impacts like water pollution due to human’s actions on the world. A broader definition is the “cultural norms and values, rules, regulations, behaviors policies, and decisions that support sustainable development, so that people can interact with confidence that their environment is safe, nurturing, and productive” (Bryant 2015). EJ is not only concerned with the non human world but also examines social and political relationships that exist in the world. By using the lens of EJ, environmental scholarship is able to discuss topics that are more normally associated with anthropology such as racial inequality and population distribution. EJ shows the interconnectedness between human action and biophysical sphere.
Context
The EJ movement started in the 1980’s in the United States and has been directly linked to the Civil rights movement. The first EJ court case was Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation and it exemplified this new movement’s connection with the Civil Rights Movement. The case was focused around a primarily black neighborhood in Houston, Texas and the fact that it was sitting on top of an old waste dump site rife with environmental hazards including soil and water pollution. The plaintiffs stated that their civil rights had been violated. Although the plaintiffs lost, it is still a key EJ case and affirmed the movement’s connection with civil rights. While the movement originally focused on environmental racism issues, it shifted focus during the Bush Administration to environmental equality (Middendorf 2006). Globally, indigenous and marginalized peoples see this movement as an extension of colonialism and corporate globalization. Industrialized countries advocate for sustainable development and less developed nations see the movement as a block to progress even though in theory this movement should help them (Figueroa 2009). While the EJ movement started in the 80s, public awareness of the issues didn’t happen until Robert Bullerd’s Dumping in Dixie in 1990. This book showed the disproportionate impact of hazardous waste sites on minority communities. During the Clinton administration, the president instituted Executive Order 12898 which made sure that every federal agency was working towards EJ (Middendorf 2006). Mainstream EJ groups like the Sierra Club or Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are still working on improving federal agency EJ policies but this might prove difficult because of the mainstream groups’ inability to transcend race and class issues.
EJ is the idea of providing equal environmental resource allocation opportunities. Because EJ combines the ideas of environmental and social issues, it deals with equal protection under the law or preventative measures for disenfranchised communities. Today, we see disparities between wealthy and low-income and minority communities. In the short-term policies, regulations, funding, lack of resources, and structural issues lead them to suffer must from climate change, and in the long-term they will suffer the most due to lack of these resources (Bryant, 2015). The development of EJ has given current political institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the general public a vocabulary and framework in which we can discuss issues revolving around social justice. This has been beneficial today by allowing us to engage in professional discourse revolving around these issues and their interdisciplinary nature. For example, the ideologies of EJ and its purpose have led to further discourse of inclusion in decision-making within environmental dangers like pollution and protections: making sure the disenfranchised communities (who are often the most affected) have as much say as people from wealthy communities. Other important conversations that the ideas of EJ have created revolve around protections and ensuring that regulation and new environmental technologies, such as better waste disposal methods, can be utilized equally by all people.
Today, we can see EJ debates start to influence larger discourses surrounding environmental issues and social justice issues. We begin to see climate change causing severe weather influxes as carbon emissions and global temperatures continue to increase. This means we face a lot of environmental disasters, and these disasters tend to affect low-income communities much more. These places will also be the people that are more susceptible to damage, and it is these people living off low income wages that won’t be able to afford fixing damages created by these storms. For example, we see issues of families affected more heavily by natural disasters with storms like hurricane Katrina. Environmental discrimination will often times go against the 14th amendment’s Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, thus recently many EJ issues have been taken on by the courts system. In cases like Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation (1977) communities have pleaded environmental racism and injustice and the courts ruled in their favor declaring it overt racism going against the 14th amendment. United States citizens will also often fight for environmental equality via exercising their freedom of speech and through protests. For example, up until its closure in 2004, there was a landfill in Warren County, North Carolina that had toxic soil laced with polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB). This county was poverty-stricken and didn’t have the funds to protect itself from the dangers of these toxins that the state refused to close. So the people of the county and beyond rallied against it in protest until the toxins began to be treated in 2002, and the landfill itself closed in 2004 (Figueroa, 2009). EJ has also been used in specific global conferences to discuss the issue surrounding indigenous and marginalized peoples rights to equal environmental resources during the increasing development of the global south. Thus the ideologies of the EJ movement are being utilized and taken into account for policy development on a national and global scale.
Critique
In his article “Reconceiving Environmental Justice: Global Movements And Political Theories”, Young argues that the EJ movement focuses too heavily on the idea of “distribution.” He reiterates that EJ is commonly looked at through the lens of “distribution”, embodying that “inequitable share of environmental ills that poor communities, indigenous communities, and communities of colour live with” (Young 2007, 522). What Young claims is missing from the movement is the aspect of “recognition”, meaning that although the idea of distribution of environmental equality exists in theory, we will never be able to achieve it without fully recognizing the “diversity of the participants and experiences in affected communities.” ( Schlosberg 2007, 517). Participation in society politically is also a crucial aspect of justice, Young argues. “If you are not recognised, you do not participate” (Schlosberg 2007, 519).
A positive critique of the EJ movement comes from Dorceta E. Taylor from the University of Michigan, in her article, The Rise of the Environmental Justice Paradigm Injustice Framing and the Social Construction of Environmental Discourses. She discusses the importance of “Framing” within the EJ movement. “Framing” she says, “refers to the process by which individuals and groups identify, interpret, and express social and political grievances.” One of the major frames used in the EJ movement to efficiently bring people together and propel the movement forward is a “collective action frame” (Taylor 2000, 511) The three different elements that make up a collective action frame include injustice, agency, and identity. Injustice describes the heated fury and disapproval activists feel as a result of their political and social knowledge. Agency refers to the validation activists feel that leads them to feel empowered to change current policies and situations. Identity refers to the group of people activists identify with and the sense of connection they feel to the “we.” (Taylor 2000, 511) Taylor also argues that “Injustice frames are collective action frames that are used by movements to bridge the interests of individuals with those of the collective. At the time of this article, 2000, Taylor claims that a new facet of the Environmental Movement, the “Environmental Justice Paradigm” is emerging. Essentially, the Environmental Justice Paradigm is a new offshoot of the EJ movement that “extends the environmental frame by targeting people not normally recruited by reform environmental organizations—people of color, progressives, and Whites from working- and middle-class backgrounds.” (Taylor 2000, 566) So Taylor is arguing that the Environmental Justice Paradigm ties all three aspects of the collective action frame together to unite people of all backgrounds and socioeconomic classes. (Taylor 2000)
In his article, FORUM Environmental Justice, Local Knowledge, and Risk: The Discourse of a Community-Based Cumulative Exposure Assessment Jason Corburn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that measures of EJ, or lack thereof are largely a function of risk assessment. Risk assessment is a major dimension of environmental policy-making and has been been critiqued for perpetuating EJ, when really the conventional risk assessment process is currently lacking many aspects of anything close to equality. For example, in calculating risk assessment, the EPA’s “‘reference man’ for developing dose-response predictions has been described as ‘a seventy-kilogram man with the general biology of a Caucasian’” (Corburn 2002, 455). It has been generally assumed that all humans have the same susceptibility to diseases as the most sensitive animals tested. One investigation showed that “in a survey of occupational cancer epidemiological studies, only two percent of the studies had any analysis of the effects on nonwhite women and only seven percent addressed the effects of non-white men” (Corburn 2002, 455). This monocentric assumption does not account for the fact that “genetic, lifestyle, and socio-economic factors have all been shown to influence susceptibility to environmental pollutants.” So determinations of EJ are highly dependant on the quality of underlying risk assessment methods.
Conclusion
The core principal of EJ is to make sure that no one group of people is disportionately affected negatively by human action and are equally able to participate in a conversation about justice. The movement started in the 1980’s in the US when disenfranchised communities started to feel the negative impacts of human activities especially when looking at waste disposal. While EJ has shifted focuses, correlating with changes of presidential administration, there has always been strong ties with the Civil Rights Movement. Courts have played a large part in the path that EJ movement has taken. As for critiques of EJ, it is viewed positively for being framed in an inclusive way, through the collective action frame, and overtime developing into the movement it is today which includes people of all groups who were traditionally excluded in the conversation. It is negatively critiqued for not looking deeper past the distribution aspect and analysing the recognition of all communities and ensuring the participation of all people. Also, the EPA, has been critiqued within the category of risk assessment, for not taking into account a more heterogenous population while looking at pollutant in a given area.
EJ is a useful mentality and ideology to utilize properly; however, many people use the term without being truly aware of what it means. The term has expanded so much that many people simply associate it with the environmental protection movement without being aware of the social justice implications and intentions of the movement. EJ is inherently a movement of equitable environmental distributions rather than just strictly an environmental movement. In the past EJ has been flawed in the U.S. We have tended toward focusing on shallow EJ that looks at just race or just class. We would look for statistical correlations between areas where we see waste disposal and areas where we see a specific race or class were residing. That has adequately accomplished a few improvements within the U.S. but that way of looking for and ensuring equality doesn’t translate well to a global scale because of western ideologies the movement is based on. This is problematic as it is imperative to include EJ within discourse and regulation in developing countries to prevent further inequality. EJ is a great mindset to have individually, but in terms of its scale it is really only effective when it is institutionalized and people gain legal rights to prevention and protection from environmental waste. To properly institutionalize and shift this movement in a productive direction, we must set a specific definition that tackles EJ at a deep level. It must also focus on a combination of both race and class because in the past it has shifted focus and lacked a universal sense of equality for all people—which contradicts the core beliefs of the movement and takes away from it effectiveness.