Environmental Justice

International Discourses in Political Economy

Paul Thompson, Paul Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351311663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Environmental justice is one of the most controversial and important issues in contemporary social science. Volume 8 of the Energy and Environmental Policy series challenges our understanding of environmental justice in a global context. It includes theoretical investigations and case studies by leading authors in the field.

Global forces of technology and the development of global markets are transforming social life and the natural order. These changes require a critical examination of nature-society relations. Increasingly, modernization assigns the risks of modernity to those with the least power and greatest vulnerability to environmental harm. Conventional environmentalism, which focuses on critique of the effects of humanity against nature, is inadequate to the challenges of globalization. In particular, it fails to explain sources of persistent patterns of social injustice that accompany escalating environmental exploitation. As the capacity for environmental destruction expands, broader concerns about environmental injustice have come to the fore, including awareness of threats to whole cultures, ways of life, and entire ecologies. The volume's authors consider the links between expanded patterns of environmental injustice and the structures and forces underlying and shaping the international political economy.

Environmental injustice is examined across a variety of cultures in the developed and developing world. Through case studies of climate colonialism, revolutionary ecology, and environmental commodification, the global and local dimensions of the problem are presented.The latest volume in this important series demonstrates that environmental justice cannot be reduced to simple parables of indifference, prejudice, or appropriation. It forges understanding of environmental injustice as a development of international political economy itself. Likewise, initiatives on behalf of environmental justice are seen as elements of broader movements to secure self-determination in a globalizing world. This book will be of interest to policymakers, energy and environmental experts, and all those interested in the environment and environmental law. It provides new perspectives on the place of environmental justice in international political and economic conflict.

Part I
Defining the Discourse

1
A Brief on Environmental Justice

John Byrne, Cecilia Martinez, and Leigh Glover

Introduction

Contemporary usage of the term ‘environmental justice’ arose from resistance movements organized to expose the socially unequal environmental risks and effects of industrialization. While ‘atrisk’ communities had experienced the problem for much of the 20th century, documentation of environmental injustice as a legacy of industrialization has only occurred in the last 25 years through the pioneering studies of Bullard (1983, 1990, 1993, and 1994a), Gibbs (1982), Goldman (1991, 1993), Lee (1987,1993), and others. As a result, Bullard could draw on empirical evidence when stating (1993:15):

Communities are not all created equal. In the United States, for example, some communities are routinely poisoned while the government looks the other way. Environmental regulations have not uniformly benefited all segments of society. People of color (African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans) are disproportionately harmed by industrial toxins on their jobs and in their neighborhoods.

Inquiries into the causes and distribution of environmental injustice in the U.S. ranged from historical critiques of capitalism (Foster, 1994) to analyses of inequality founded in race, culture, and gender. A hallm ark of this research is that explanations moved beyond an exclusive focus on the class structure of industrial capitalism (Bullard, 1993: 22-24). The exchange of ideas on sources of environmental injustice prompted new questions that opened fresh avenues of inquiry into political economy.

By the late 1980s, structures of environmental injustice had been identified across the world. A globalized phenomenon of unequal risks and effects was revealed by writers such as Agarwal and Narain (1991), Bryant (1995), Esteva (1992), Hofrichter (1993), and Khor (1993). Their critiques pointed to a pattern of ‘environmental colonialism’ as an explanation for a worldwide condition of environmental injustice. Additional analyses by Crosby (1988), Alvares (1991 and 1995), Shiva (1991, 1994a, 1994b, and 1994c), Escobar (1995), and others suggested that unequal patterns extended biologically as well as socially, with the advance of modernization. Their critiques of ‘ecological imperialism’ suggested that threats to human livelihoods were coincident with threats to ecosystems. An important insight of this work is that it raised the prospect of altered biologies supporting a less diverse specie structure and a less diverse social structure.

Learning from the environmental justice debate, the discourse of political economy is presently searching for an appropriate understanding of national and global structures of ecological injustice. Below we review the evolution of the discourse on environmental justice in international political economy for the purpose of offering a context for the contributions to this volume.

Birth and Growth of a Social Movement

Conceptually, environmental justice has its roots in theories of social and political power and social movements. The priority placed on race, gender, and culture as explanations of environmental damage distinguish this movement from the more traditional political economy critiques of capitalism. The latter predicted patterns of environmental risk as outcomes of the logic of capital and explained demands for environmental justice as phenomena of class struggle. By contrast, the new theories of environmental injustice emphasize social and political power, in addition to class, as explanations of unequal environmental risk.

This turn in theoretical strategy recognizes that the toll of industrial life has continued to mount disproportionally, not only for workers and the poor, but also for women, indigenous cultures, and communities of color. Longstanding dominance of the American environmental movement by affluent, white, and middleclass communities with an agenda shaped largely by selfinterest and symbolic ecological issues, would now be challenged. Increased local protest in the 1960s and 1970s by communities of color, highlighted the awareness in these communities of the unequal hazards of industrialization. Through the studies of Bryant and Mohai (1993), Bullard (1983, 1990, 1993, 1994a, and 1995), Goldman (1991, 1993, Goldman and Fitton, 1994), Lee (1987, 1993), Pulido (1996), Wright (Wright, 1995; Wright and Bullard, 1990; and Bullard and Wright, 1987), and others, the racial geography of environmental hazards in the U.S. was exposed.

A breakthrough study by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, entitled Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (Lee, 1987), connected what had previously been largely isolated stories of risk into a racially identifiable pattern of injustice. While this pattern was of no surprise to communities of color, it was a revelation to policymakers and mainstream researchers. Of the many factors that might influence a community’s risk of exposure to toxic wastes, the study found race to be the most significant predictor. Those communities with the highest composition of residents of color were revealed to have the highest concentration of hazardous facilities. Every three of five African and Hispanic American communities had uncontrolled toxic waste sites in their midst, meaning that over 15 million African Americans and over 8 million Hispanic Americans live in the vicinity of such sites (Lee, 1987). A 1994 study by Goldman and Fitton (1994) updated these results and revealed that the percentage of people of color living in areas with commercial hazardous waste facilities had increased between 1980 and 1993, so that by 1993 people of color were 47% more likely to live near such a facility than in 1980.

As Gottlieb (1993), Faber (1998), Szasz (1994), and others noted, protests of this condition by grassroots groups com posed of workers, minorities, and women differed from those of mainstream environmentalism. Their interests were in correcting industrial causes that fouled the air and water, and which created extreme health risks through the spread of lead and radioactivity, pesticides, waste, and hazardous material. Unlike mainstream environmentalism, this movement located nature in the workplace, in the places we live, in the air we breathe, and the water we drink. For too long, many enviromental groups had ignored this nature in favor of the protection of untouched wilderness and endangered species.

Women were prominent in the rise of the new environmentalism as leaders and spokespersons (Hamilton, 1993; Krause, 1993, 1994). As Krause describes: “For women of color, it is the link between race and environment, rather than between class and environment, that characterizes […] environmental justice.” (1994: 270). Community and family health were directly affected by environmental injustice and some in the women’s movement sought to address the threat as part of a general effort to counter women’s historic exclusion from decisionmaking. Working class women had gone outside the traditional mechanisms in the past and used protests and other means to prompt action on behalf of community needs, thereby drawing attention to the inadequacies of traditional political processes. Womenled environmental activism would similarly go beyond convention to challenge linkages of color, gender, culture, and risk.

Another important dimension to this social movement has concerned worker’s risks. Research highlighted the dangers of working in industrial societies, especially in its factories and mills. Through the efforts of César Chávez and others seeking to organize agricultural labor, the effects of pesticides on farm workers became a central concern (e.g., Moses, 1993). Workers and their organizations could not rely on government and corporate action, instead having to gather knowledge of the risks of the industrial process directly, and using their own political power, in seeking corporate compliance with existing health and safety regulations, and in lobbying for workforce protection. For workers, therefore, “[e]nvironmental justice is not merely a battle against pollution, but a kind of politics that demands popular control of corporate decision making for workers and communities” (Mann, 1993: 177).

A key insight of this work has been to show that the patterns of inequality that marked economic and social relations in industrialized nations carried forward an expression in environmental conditions as well. Studies of race, class, and gender characteristics of atrisk communities have revealed undeniably unequal environmental threats of those most marginalized by the American political economy. Although limited in scope, studies by U.S. government agencies (notably EPA, 1992; GAO, 1983) have confirmed the general association of communities of color with contaminated areas. Failure to enforce existing antidiscriminatory policies has further added to the evidence of environmental racism. As Bullard has commented: “There is a growing movement to turn the current model of environmental protection on its head. It just does not work for many vulnerable populations … Government has been too slow in adopting a prevention framework for these groups.” (1994b: xvi).

One of the more damaging revelations from investigations into U.S. environmental injustice was the widespread non-enforcement of laws and regulations (e.g., GAO, 1983; Kratch et al, 1995; and Lavelle and Coyle, 1992). This failure of governance amounted to a political sanctioning of environmental injustice. Race was shown to be a particularly accurate indicator of enforcement failure; with communities of color found to endure disproportionately higher non-enforcement of laws intended to control industrial pollution. Clearly, the explanation lay within the routine practice of social institutions: “Racism plays a key factor in environmental planning and decisionmaking. Indeed, environmental racism is reinforced by government, legal, economic, political, and military institutions.” (Bullard, 1993: 17). As Bullard (1993) described, environmental racism is a consequence of people of color being excluded from decisionmaking by a system of statecorporate relations that extends from boardrooms of multinational corporations to local zoning boards. Accordingly, the affected communities who responded to these problems were motivated to seek political solutions: “What do grassroots leaders want? These leaders are demanding a shared role in the decisionmaking processes that affect their communities. They want participatory democracy to work for them” (Bullard, 1994b: xvii).

However, of all the social groups concerned with environmental justice, indigenous peoples may have the most at stake. Unless solutions to conflicts involving ‘commons’ resources of land, air, and water use explicitly address their needs, indigenous ways of life are irrevocably harmed. North American resource politics, for example, involves decisions over sovereignty and control of Indian lands and, therewith, cultural survival of Indian peoples. As Churchill (1993; Churchill and LaDuke, 1992), Deloria (1997), and others describe, the U.S. political economy depends on American Indian tribal lands for mining uranium and coal, testing nuclear weapons, and impounding rivers for hydroelectric power. The expropriation of Indian lands and resources has left a trail of toxic threats to Indian communities. But most significantly, it has blocked Indian self-determination.

Grassroots environmental protests have forced American society to recognize the conjunction of race, gender, indigenous culture, and class in contesting the landscapes and workscapes of environmental inequality. From this point onward, political economy must focus on this conjunction in order to explain the unequal pattern of environmental harm and risk. In this way, the critique of ‘environmental justice’ has emerged as a potent challenge for political economy.

Environment—Globalization Nexus

As the environmental justice movement gathered momentum and support in the industrial world, there was growing recognition that environmental inequality and racism was advancing around the world. Injustices could not be relegated to local failures in wealthy nations, but were symptomatic of systemic tendencies of globalization. The demand for environmental justice at an international scale became a concurrent concern of those interested in environmental dimensions of the global political economy.

Examination of the international patterns of environmental injustice was propelled by activists and scholars from the Third World, in particular, Bello (1992, 2000; Bello et al, 1982; and Bello and Rosenfeld, 1990), Escobar (1988, 1995, and 1996), Khor (1993), and Shiva (1991, 1994a, b, c, and 1998). This work revealed the roles of multinational corporations and international financial institutions in a sustained process of shifting environmental pollution from industrial to Third World countries. This has affected the fate of indigenous peoples in the exploitation of vast pools of commons resources in the Third World, and has reinforced imperialist tendencies of modern science and technology (e.g., Alvares, 1991; Nandy, 1992). Women and families have been shown to be particularly disadvantaged by environmental injustices in the developing world, despite muchheralded reforms of the sustainable development movement (Shiva, 1991, 1994a, 1998). Agarwal (1991) and Jain (1991), for example, have respectively described the ways in which women are affected by changes in fuel wood systems in rural south Asia. The famous “Chipko” protest movement, led by Indian women, to protect the traditional uses and ecological values of their forests is a prominent example of womenled environmental justice struggles.

Established environmental organizations became prominent in environmental justice issues and were particularly important in highlighting international themes. NGOs, such as Greenpeace,. NoNukes Asia Forum, Friends of the Earth, and the Third World Network, brought attention to nuclear energy risks, international waste trade, and the activities of multinational corporations in the developing world, and other issues.

A key concern in this new phase of inquiry has been the impacts of economic globalization on Third World communities and environments. Global production and consumption has been found to lengthen commodity chains, with the developing world supplying much of the raw materials. Globalization has also fostered greater capital mobility with multinational corporations shifting manufactaring locations to reduce production costs. For example, destruction and social crisis in Central America have been linked to that area’s relationship with foreign economic interests, as shown by Faber (1993). As an integrated feature of globalization, smokestack industries with histories of heavy pollution and rapid resource depletion have migrated to the Third World, along with trails of industrial wastes sent on journeys to the South for disposal.

Environmental problems such as stratospheric ozone loss, climate change, and declining biodiversity have also underscored the international dimension of issues of environmental justice. While global environmental degradation has been the result of historic patterns of exploitative practices by the industrial elite, inmost instances the consequences are or will be borne most heavily by poorer communities. Developing countries are especially vulnerable to environmental change because they have few erresources to respond to these problems. But more importantly, community livelihoods in the South depend to a greater extent on the health of natural environments than the technological enclaves of the North. Environmental degradation for these communities is not subject to repair in the manner of Northern solutions to remediate pollution problems.

Evidence on all these fronts point to the need to cast environmental justice in a global context, in addition to the community and national contexts that have already been established. The movement has now made it a priority to examine international structures of social and environmental exploitation for systemic linkages to patterns of injustice.

Environmental Colonialism

Research in political economy has long demonstrated the interrelation of the social and economic conditions of developing nations with the operations of the global economy. The Third World largely receives foreign investment when it can furnish cost advantages of cheap labor, land and raw materials. Corporate investment in the developing world is typically directed towards imitative industrialization, which can serve Northern needs for lucrative export markets. Carried with these patterns of development, however, has been a set of environmental structures that favor certain ecologies over others. While less investigated before the 1970s than the social effects of globalization, the nature of international political economy is nevertheless a core attribute of expanding networks of technology and markets.

Particularly affected by the industrialization of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Part I: Defining the Discourse
• Part II: Case Studies
• Part III: Expanding the Discourse
• Contributors
• Index