Sunday, July 12, 2020

TOWARD A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES: Black Lives Matter as an Environmental Justice Challenge

In this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term “Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ) Studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. I do so by (1) adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and (2) focusing on the case of Black Lives Matter and the problem of state violence.

INTRODUCTION

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a social movement centered on the problem of state-sanctioned racist violence. The movement began as a response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, a man who killed Trayvon Martin, a seventeen-year old African American boy in Sanford, Florida, in 2012. From that moment on, social media, mainstream media, and the Black Lives Matter movement would routinely intensify the national focus on racialized state-sanctioned violence when yet another video or testimony surfaced featuring an African American being shot, beaten, choked, and/or killed by police or White vigilantes. The role of social media technology was pivotal. As one writer put it, “Social media could serve as a source of live, raw information. It could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. And it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives . . .” (Bijan 2015).
BLM co-founder Alicia Garza explained what the movement stands for: “Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. It is an affirmation of Black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (Garza 2014).
In this paper, I draw links between what I view as the most important insights and questions that emerge from the Black Lives Matter movement and the struggle against environmental racism. This is a connection that many scholars might not make at first glance because police brutality and environmental politics would appear to be only tangentially related, but I argue they are in fact closely intertwined and that we must explore their myriad connections in order to excavate the roots of racist violence no matter the form it takes. The questions I explore here include: How can Black Lives Matter’s emphasis on police violence against African American communities inform our understanding of the scourge of ecological burdens facing those same communities? Conversely, what can the violation of Black bodies and spaces by ecologically destructive agents produced by states and corporations tell us about the violation of those same bodies by police and law enforcement agents? I find that a “first-” and “second-generation” Environmental Justice Studies framework can assist in this effort, but can only take us so far. Therefore, I propose that a Critical Environmental Justice Studies framework can more fully address these pressing concerns.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES

The Environmental Justice (EJ) movement is composed of people from communities of color, indigenous communities, and working-class communities who are focused on combating environmental injustice—the disproportionate burden of environmental harm facing these populations. For the EJ movement, social justice is inseparable from environmental protection.
In the early 1970s, researchers in the United States found strong correlations between social class status and air quality in the United States. As a result of social movement activism, however, the focus began to broaden from social class to race and from air pollution to a range of environmental hazards (Pulido 1996; Walker 2010). For example, in 1982, hundreds of civil rights leaders and community activists protested a toxic waste dump in the majority African American community of Warren County, North Carolina. That action sparked the discourse of environmental racism and the growth of Environmental Justice Studies, and since that time, scholars and other researchers have documented the reach of environmental racism/inequality in the United States and around the globe, as well as the social movement that has emerged to highlight and challenge this phenomenon (Bullard 2000; Cole and Foster, 2000; Pellow and Brulle, 2005).
Thus, hundreds of studies have documented that people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status, indigenous and immigrant populations, and other marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by ecologically harmful infrastructures, such as landfills, mines, incinerators, polluting factories, and destructive transportation systems, as well as by the negative consequences of ecologically harmful practices, such as climate change/disruption and pesticide exposure (Ringquist 2005). Much of this work has documented the troubling depths and breadth of environmental injustice’s impact on the lives of people—including public health and mental health effects—and on how these communities make meaning out of these assaults while organizing for environmental justice. And while EJ Studies may have earlier focused on the United States, scholars are also documenting environmental inequalities and EJ movements’ responses to them around the globe (Agyeman et al., 2010; Pellow 2007; Roberts and Parks, 2006). A small but growing group of researchers—including and especially environmental humanities scholars—have focused on the ways that gender, sexuality, citizenship, indigeneity, and nation shape the terrain of ecological inequalities, but those areas of scholarship remain in need of further development (Adamson 2011; Bell 2013; Buckingham and Kulcur, 2010; Gaard 2004; Smith 2005).

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