Alphabetical by
Author
Carruthers,
David V.
San
Diego State University
In recent years, scholars and activists alike have begun to employ the language of environmental justice to promote and to study environmental challenges and conflicts outside of the North American context in which the movement and discourse were born. This paper is part of an emerging effort to explore the promise and limits of environmental justice in Latin America, both as a discourse of popular mobilization, and as a framework for analysis and interpretation. On the one hand, environmental justice holds great promise in Latin America. As a movement it builds from the base, spotlighting equity, justice, and participation. Analytically, it reveals local, global, and national economies that strive to contain the human and ecological costs of production in the communities of the most politically and economically marginalized. Thus environmental justice meshes naturally with myriad counter-hegemonic movements throughout Latin America, among farmers, shantytown dwellers, factory workers, indigenous people and others. However, environmental justice faces a number of sobering conceptual, organizational, and methodological constraints in the Latin American context. This paper explores the promise and limits of environmental justice in Northern Baja California, drawing lessons from two case studies: community struggles against industrial hazardous waste in Tijuana, and community responses to a the construction of power plants and natural gas facilities in the region.
Crate, Susan A.
George Mason University
Today it is broadly understood that much of Russia is in ecological crisis due to Soviet and post-Soviet environmental offenses. A lesser known aspect of this environmental plight is its effects on native populations who continue to inhabit and reap subsistence from the land. In addition to declining socioeconomic conditions, including rampant unemployment, inadequate living conditions, poor health and limited educational opportunities, the land, water, air and resources on which indigenous life depends are contaminated. There exist organizations dedicated to protecting Russia’s indigenous peoples’ rights to a healthy existence, who are versed in issues of environmental justice, due to contact and collaboration with adjacent northern countries. Despite their efforts, Russia’s indigenous peoples’ plight worsens as president Putin focuses his country’s economic policies on natural resource exploitation. The sacrificed health of native rural populations is regarded as one price to pay for economic advance.
This paper analyzes the case of Viliui Sakha, an indigenous people of northeastern Siberia, Russia, whose natural environment continues to be impoverished by capital intensive diamond mining. The case is contextualized within relevant research on Russia’s indigenous peoples and a comparative aspect is included by analyzing diamond mining operations for indigenous peoples of the NWT, Canada.
Figueroa, Robert Melchior
Colgate University
My longstanding position on environmental justice is that three dimensions of justice are interdependent and must be addressed for a proper analysis: distributive justice, recognition justice, and justice respecting environmental identity and environmental heritage. The first two dimensions of justice have generally become accepted as interpenetrating and interdependent in environmental justice; however, the accounts of environmental identity and heritage have either been marginal or ultimately subsumed under the former two dimensions. I present an argument that the environmental identity and heritage of the community cannot be subsumed within the big two dimensions, and that this misunderstanding has emerged because the only remedies that have been mustered for environmental injustices to a community’s environmental identity seem to be satisfied by forms of recognition justice, such as participatory justice. This fails to account for the fact that the injustices and the remedies are asymmetrical as they pertain to environmental identity.
I provide a cross-cultural analysis between Northern (industrial capitalist) cases and Southern (less industrial/less capitalist/socialist) cases. The non-United States cases include environmental justice struggles in Kerala, India; Delhi, India; Benxi, China; Sanjaing Reserve, China; Minamata, Japan; and, Lake Biwa; Japan. Some of these cases involve industrial capitalist cases; however, they are more representative of communities transitioning from “traditional” resource practices to development-industrial practices. These will be contrasted with one another, as well as with cases within the United States, particularly Grand Bois, Louisiana and several Latino/a cases, such as Kettleman City, California, the United Farm Workers Movement, and San Luis, Colorado.
Hughes, David M.
Human Ecology, Rutgers University
In Zimbabwe, conservation has embraced a form of structural, environmental racism. To a surprising degree, policies have protected the cultural heritage of Euro-Africans rather than any wilderness of Africa. Nowhere is this statement more true than at Lake Kariba and the Matusadonha National Park. In 1958, engineers created the lake by damming the Zambezi River. Over the next five years, the reservoir flooded 5580 square km, displacing 57,000 Tonga farmers and destroying more habitat than any single action every had. In response to this devastation, whites – particularly conservation-minded writers and photographers - expressed shock and alarm. Gradually, however, they grew to accept the artificial lake. Indeed, the lake answered a deep European longing for water in inland, semi-arid Africa. The Kariba dam did the work of glaciers, carving intricate “fjords” and “lochs” in a country which previously lacked any shoreline at all. With Kariba, whites imported their hydrological heritage. How could they not forgive the engineers? By the 1980s, the same coterie of conservation-minded writers moved from accepting the lake to appropriating it. They described white boaters anglers as “discovering” secluded, “wild” areas of the shoreline. They then advocated for the repression of blacks’ extractive activities. Kariba became whitest Africa.
King, Brian
The University of Texas at Austin
Colonial and apartheid spatial planning continue to have lasting impacts upon livelihood opportunities, environmental resource access, and development discourses in post-apartheid South Africa. Various agencies and rural communities are attempting to reconcile the contrasting needs of nature preservation and rural development within the former apartheid homelands. This involves a legacy that is tied to historical political, economic, and social relations that remain unequal in the contemporary era. This paper uses a case study from the former KaNgwane homeland to address the impacts of conservation planning and shifting institutional frameworks of environmental resource access upon rural households. Utilizing a livelihood mapping approach combining both quantitative and qualitative methods in a Geographic Information System (GIS), this paper attempts to create a framework to address the conflicts between nature preservation and rural development. It is argued that local residents view conservation and development projects in varied ways based upon their engagement with informal and formal economic activities. Poorer residents and those dependent upon environmental resources are more negatively affected by conservation and development planning and therefore engage in alternative strategies that better serve their interests. Additionally, opportunities to redress the inequities of the apartheid system are shaped by the changing sets of rights to environmental resources. Newly created democratic systems are coming into conflict with traditional structures specifically in the arena of environmental resource access. A political ecology framework that addresses institutional transformation is well suited to evaluate changing livelihood systems and the opportunities for environmental justice in rural South Africa.
Leichenko, Robin M.
Rutgers University
Solecki, William D.
Hunter College,
CUNY
Cities in less developed countries (LDCs) have entered into a period of dynamic transformation as a result of globalization. One hallmark of this transformation is the emergence of suburban housing developments with large numbers of single-family homes in locations that are spatially segregated from central city and squatter settlement areas. While similar patterns of suburbanization have long been recognized in more developed countries (MDCs), especially the United States, the arrival of these suburban “consumption landscapes” in LDCs portends an intensification of social and spatial inequality and heightened levels of resource consumption and environmental degradation. This paper examines how the globalization of consumption preferences is shaping landscapes of housing development in LDC cities, and it explores the implications of these new consumption landscapes for issues of environmental justice. Using evidence from Shanghai, the paper suggests that these new suburban landscapes reflect the global spread of an ideology of consumption based on homeownership of a single-family house in a suburban area. The paper further suggests that this new form of LDC suburbanization raises critical questions about the consequences of globalization for environmental justice, as middle-income LDC residents increasingly emulate the resource-consumptive, energy intensive, and exclusionary lifestyles practiced by MDC suburbanites.
Moore, Sarah
University of Kentucky
Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) and politics are common issues in environmental justice research. However, insights garnered from the experience of the global north cannot be applied directly to the global south since local processes and regional dynamics shape unique landscapes of waste. To this end, my fieldwork in Oaxaca de Juarez, a rapidly urbanizing city in southern Mexico, concentrates on the history of MSWM in the area. Here, the livelihood struggles of local neighborhoods are imbricated with the management of the existing official municipal dump. I argue that the same cultural, social, political, economic and environmental processes that “marginalize” such communities are also the processes that give them leverage to achieve their development goals. It is their location, both physical and social, that makes it possible for them to block the flow of municipal trash and so reveal it to visitors, residents, and politicians. The ability to make visible this unseen product of development – garbage – gives them unique power. This case presents a reworking of traditional concepts of environmental justice by examining the contradictory processes of marginalization and political activism particular to the global south.
Perreault, Thomas
Syracuse University
In October 2003 Bolivia came to a standstill as protestors from an array of social sectors sought the reversal of the president’s plan to export natural gas. The Guerra del Gas, as it became known, bore more than a casual resemblance to the Guerra del Agua, three years earlier. In that struggle, citizens in the city of Cochabamba took to the streets to oppose the privatization of the city’s water services, eventually forcing their return to public control. Why has natural resource management become so contentious in Bolivia? In what ways do these conflicts incorporate other social struggles? What are the implications for environmental governance and its relationship to scales of social justice? In this paper I argue that protests over the governance of water and natural gas in Bolivia crystallized a broader set of struggles over democratic participation, social justice, and economic development. In both cases protestors called for greater social control over key natural resources and a more equitable distribution of their benefits. These protests raise important questions regarding the ability of social movements to construct a trans-scalar politics of social justice, and demonstrate that environmental governance cannot be divorced, conceptually or materially, from questions of democratic participation.
Rocheleau, Dianne
Clark University
The encounter of the city and the countryside in the municipality of Santiago, Dominican Republic, is most dramatically visible in the rapidly urbanizing rural fringe to the north of the city. Case studies from Jacagua al Medio and Gurabo illustrate how the rural/urban relationship plays out at the intersection of rivers, forests, highways and human settlements, influenced by land, labor, commodity markets and experienced differently by class and ethnicity (Haitian and Dominican). Highway construction, Free Trade Zone (Zona Franca) factories (with their concommitant emissions of toxic effluents), the decline of the tobacco industry, urban sprawl and the rise of new suburbs have all played a role in rapid transformation of landscapes and livelihoods, and selective displacement and enrichment of rural people at the city’s edge. The two communities are in the midst of close encounters with state-mandated streambank evictions and road construction, coupled with simultaneous state support for factory expansion and “river cleaning”, along with promotion of green zones (and displacement) by environmental NGO’s. Environmental discourse and appeals to rural visions of “clean, green rivers” has apparently provided some actors --- developers, investors in factory worker rental tenements and upscale suburban developments--- with a lever to remove recently arrived and poor people from ribbons of riverside settlements). The accounts of people residing in the area, our own observations, and measurements of diverse forest/garden ecologies in settlements of smallholders and poor settlers all provide a strong counterpoint to the prevailing “common sense” assumptions about poor residents as the parties responsible for deforestation, erosion, and river pollution. Moreover, in Gurabo those blamed for pollution and threatened with eviction are the same people most vulnerable to toxic effluents released into the air and water from the Free Trade Zone factories at the river’s edge. We describe the uneven ecologies of persistence, cohabitation and invention, as well as those of eviction and displacement, and relate both to the themes and perspectives of environmental justice.
Schroeder, Richard A.
Department of Geography, Rutgers University
A consensus has formed in Africa around the idea that communities most directly affected by wildlife conservation should receive a share in the revenues generated in connection with wildlife utilization. The primary objective in the use of economic incentives has been to encourage rural communities to abandon land uses that compete directly with wildlife management, but proponents also invoke principles of equity and fairness central to the theory of distributive justice. The fact that the revenue sharing approach has captured the imagination of wildlife managers in Tanzania raises a number of salient questions addressed in this paper: 1) why have distributive remedies become the preferred approach in Tanzania at a time when other justice concerns, including demands for equitable access to resources, cultural and economic self-determination, secure legal and human rights, and compensation for property loss and personal injury, seem so pressing? 2) what political-economic purposes has revenue sharing served? and 3) how have social relations with rural communities been affected by the new approach? Documentary evidence, field interviews and participant observation conducted in northern Tanzania in 1997 and 2000 provide the basis for a comparison of three strikingly different examples of revenue sharing launched over the past decade. The differences in approach serve to illustrate a theoretical discussion of the contradictions encountered in the pursuit of distributive environmental justice goals in the context of market reforms.
Sneddon, Christopher S.
Dept of Geography/Environmental Studies Program, Dartmouth College
Christopher.Sneddon@Dartmouth.Edu
The publication of the World Commissions on Dams (WCD) final report in November 2000 prompted a series of contradictory responses. The global anti-dam movement applauded the report’s call for more careful screening of large dam projects and increased levels of transparency and participation in dam decisions. The dam industry and various pro-dam governments (notably China and India) argued the document was fatally biased against a technology they argued as crucial to developing the cheap, clean energy demanded by industrializing economies throughout the so-called third world. Somewhat lost in the shuffle of positive and negative rejoinders, several anti-dam campaigns (consisting of coalitions of national and local NGOs and community organizations) in specific localities almost immediately employed the WCD recommendations as a means of arguing against contentious projects. This paper examines two of these struggles, one in Northeast Thailand and one in the lower Zambezi Valley of Mozambique, to shed light on the impacts of the WCD process and the variegated ways it is being used as a political tool. The transnational networks that mobilize both against and in support of large dams, and the transnational character of the WCD process itself, demolish any simple notions of dams as ‘local’ or ‘national’ projects with specific scales. Conceptions of environmental justice and an ethics of livelihood, stressing that the socioecological costs of industrialization should not be borne exclusively by rural and politically marginalized communities, are central to struggles over dams.
Sundberg, Juanita
Department of Geography,
University of British Columbia
Increasing concerns about global inequalities have led scholars to extend environmental justice frameworks developed in the United States to other regions. Current debates in and critiques of environmental justice scholarship are particularly important when formulating frameworks appropriate for areas such as Latin America, where I specialize. Of particular concern to me are recent criticisms suggesting that environmental justice studies tend to focus on unequal outcomes without a systematic analysis of the underlying social order that plays a role in shaping patterns of inequality between groups. In my view, at the heart of this critique lie debates about the place of race in organizing social and environmental relations.
In this paper, I engage with these debates and outline why race should be included as a key variable in environmental justice approaches in Latin America. Race has been central to social organization since the colonial era, thus racial identification is rarely incidental to environmental inequality. Moreover, ideas about racial differences have come into being in articulation with environmental formations (or the historically specific articulations between environmental imaginaries, natural resource allocations, and patterns of environmental transformation). Tracing how racial processes work through environmental formations will help to understand not only how exclusionary discourses and practices work, but also how they come to appear justifiable and indeed necessary.
Wolford, Wendy
Department of Geography, UNC Chapel Hill
Over the past ten years, resistance to global capitalism has become increasingly well-organized and transnational. Local actors with global connections have coordinated aggressive direct action strategies to counter the material and symbolic intrusions of a capitalism they view as exploitative and unjust. In this paper, I argue that one of the most important strands of the counter-globalization movements is what can be loosely called “agrarian populism,” where demands for access to land, a healthy environment, and control over local resources are strung together with demands for citizenship, social justice and equality in what Ernesto Laclau refers to as a chain of equivalences. Using the Movement of Rural Landless Workers (the MST) in Brazil as an example, I situate the rise of agrarian populism within the history of colonial and postcolonial development and argue that transnational links among movements espousing agrarian populism are instituting a new form of “transnational governmentality.” For the first time in Brazilian history, foreign actors concerned about issues such as landlessness, environmental degradation and poverty are effectively promoting a progressive agenda in domestic politics. At the same time, the effectiveness of agrarian populism at the local level is complicated by differing understandings of how the land and the environment ought to be re-appropriated and managed.