The classic example of environmental injustice, as described in Gordon Walker’s paper “Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental Justice” (Walker 2009), pertains almost exclusively to proximity and distribution in the sense that spatial analysts draw a circumference around a feature in the landscape such as a polluting industry and compare this to patterns of race. In this way, environmental justice is evaluated along these two axes: race and proximity and the analysis generally stops there. Walker argues for an deeper and expanded definition of justice to include aspects of recognition (linguistic associations, stigmas, places where the character of people or place are misrecognized) and procedure (barriers to being a part of the power structures or decision making of a place) in addition to a deeper understanding of the nuances of distribution.
Using Walker’s framework, I set out to find examples of environmental injustice related to my personal interests of landscapes of the American West. The two examples I found differed substantially from the “classic” version of urban distributional justice. First, both of my cases of environmental injustice in the American West are located in rural regions. Secondly, these cases concern issues of procedural and recognition injustice more so than distributional.
The case study, “Articulations of Place, Poverty, and Race: Dumping Grounds and Unseen Grounds in the Rural American Northwest” by Lawson et al., compares regions with high percentages of poverty in the American Northwest, choosing to focus on a county in southern Idaho and a county in eastern Montana. Using a mixture of ethnographic interviews and quantitative economic data, Lawson et al. chose to compare places where the impoverished population was predominately white with places with impoverished populations of color. The authors distinguish three categories of place: “dumping grounds,” “playgrounds,” and “unseen grounds.” Rivers County (name changed in paper to protect privacy of individuals) in southern Idaho the authors classify as a “dumping grounds.” The economy of Rivers County is predominately agricultural, relying heavily on Latino/a labor as a result of migrations from Mexico in the 1940s-1960s to rural agricultural industries of potatoes and sugar beets in this region. Migrant agricultural workers live in labor camps and have very limited access to basic needs and amenities. One anecdote in particular, a Latino city councilman who overcame extraordinary political and social barriers to gain political power and representation, stands out as an example of procedural injustice.
The second case study from this paper focused on a community in eastern Montana the authors classify as an example of “unseen grounds.” Even the word “unseen” is connected to the word “recognition,” apt evidence that backs up Walker’s argument for an expanded definition of justice:
A third mode of articulation of rural places with neoliberal restructuring emerges in out research: unseen grounds. Unseen grounds are economically and politically constructed as “off the grid,” literally bypassed by globalized circuits of capital or wealthy, educated in-migrants. Unseen grounds are excluded from circuits of capital in ways that limit options for these places and deepen poverty. Unseen grounds have economies still reliant on historically important activities, such as ranching, railroads, and mining, despite the fact that they are barely viable. Such places have some combination of remoteness from current capital circuits, fragile ecologies, out-migration, and little political power. In contrast to either playgrounds or dumping grounds, we argue that unseen grounds have struggled and failed to draw new investments as the viability of existing economic activities dwindles. In different ways that either Rivers of the playgrounds, the historical geographies of unseen grounds link these places to prior rounds of colonization and capital accumulation in ways that now serve to disarticulate them from contemporary flows of investments and settlement. (Lawson et al. 2010, 667)
Unseen grounds are anachronisms, perhaps misrecognized as relics of some romanticized past instead of a defunct community severed from any real connection with contemporary globalized markets. There is a quality of invisibility to them, living ghost towns.
The anachronistic quality of Lawson et al.’s unseen grounds is inverted as an amenity in J. Dwight Hines’ ethnography “In pursuit of experience: The postindustrial gentrification of the rural American West” (Hines 2010). Also set in Montana, Hines’ study focuses on the phenomenon of rural gentrification. This concept is not new. As the ski resort of Sun Valley, Idaho gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, wealthy New Yorkers like Doris and Phez Taylor were among the many who “abandoned promising careers elsewhere for the combination of greater psychic and smaller monetary rewards” (Rothman 1998, 197). Hines explores this group of people in a town in Montana with close proximity to wilderness areas, ski resorts, and with historic features such as the train depot. These are people who hold advanced degrees and have abandoned city life in favor of a rural experience, often in their late twenties and early 30s and with the intention of raising children in a more appealing setting. This trend is called ex-urbanism. With internet access and airports close by, many of these middle-class ex-urbanites are able to maintain their high-power careers in economic consulting or Hollywood from afar by frequent travel. In the same way that Dean MacCannell writes about the modern leisure class in his classic work The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (1976), Hines describes the pull of ex-urbans to the rural communities of places like Livingston, Montana as the attempt to produce and consume experience, a hallmark of the modern and post-modern middle classes desire to communicate status via experience and lifestyle as opposed to goods.
Between these two papers, many big words stand out. However, the one that seem to frame and connect the large-scale implications of these examples the most is neoliberalism. Lawson et al. defines neoliberalism as the following:
Neoliberalism refers to practices that promote market triumphalism and liberal individualism via deregulated markets and unrestricted competition, alongside the attenuation of public welfare expenditures. (Lawson et al. 2010, 656)
A rural agricultural community dependent on migrant workers to work in the fields is just one link of the global markets of food production and global migrations. Similarly, the mobility and pursuit of cache and status by the upper-middle class is also connected to the peripheralization of industries to locations outside of the US and the transition of the US economy to that of service rather than production.
In this way, the environmental injustices I have explored as examples of rural (as opposed to urban) injustices related to recognition and procedure are connected to global patterns of capital and economic philosophies. Here, big words are able to connect the situations of small and isolated communities to a global scale. Juxtaposed, these two papers highlight two sides of the same region along an economic continuum (poverty vs gentrification). Here, we can see Walker’s expanded definition at work in the human geographies of the American West as rural spaces and places are recognized, misrecognized, colonized, and invisible.
Works Cited