Introduction
I have wanted a book like this for some time: a book that not only provides an entry point to the field of environmental justice for those who are unfamiliar with the topic but also provides the opportunity to assemble a group of scholars who are helping to cultivate a new and vibrant wave of environmental justice scholarship, methods, and activism. Toward this effort, I invited a diverse set of scholars to contribute to this edited book. Some readers will recognize established scholars in the field. Other names are new. I wanted readers to read the words and ideas of scholars who have often been marginalized in their own fields. Justice comes in many forms, and academic writing needs to increase matters of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our research, teaching, and learning. This book project is an effort to do that.
For example, black women account for two percent of full-time professors of college and university faculty, and Latinas make up one percent or less of the total number of full-time professors. This blatant omission of women-of-color scholars, I argue, is one that the discipline of environmental sociology and efforts toward environmental justice can ignore only at their own peril. At the time of writing this book, the University of California, Berkeley, my employer, had three Native American faculty. Similarly, African Americans (men and women) occupy a paltry 4.6 percent of leadership positions in environmental organizations; Hispanics/Latinxs, 2.3 percent (Taylor, 2014). As a result, much of what we know about environmental justice and environmental racism has been written by academics who have never experienced institutional racism or sexism. I saw this book project as a means to challenge the white supremacy that lies at the heart of much of our academic writing.
My motivation for this book project was also inspired by recent developments in environmental justice theory and methods. For example, in addition to conceptualizing the environment as a place where we work, live, and play, scholars in this book have considered the conditions of how and where we eat, where people are incarcerated, and the emotional costs of being subjected to environmental injustice and environmental racism. The heinous crimes of Dylann Roof and Gregory Bush, who together murdered 11 African Americans, reveals not only the rise of white rage and antiblack genocide in the United States, discussed by João Costa Vargas, but also the need for us to expand our thinking about environmental racism in this county and around the globe.
Similarly, scholars in this book have given much thought to how to engage in research with vulnerable communities. Many of the scholars in this book have advanced a collaborative style of community engagement that works with and not on environmental justice communities. This participatory style of research can be difficult, lengthy, and complicated; and it stands in stark contradiction to the publish-or-perish mantra of the academy. Yet, the contributions of scholars in this book illustrate that social science research can be both academic and directed toward local empowerment and meaningful social and environmental change. In a post–Flint water crisis era, having community-based health monitoring research and programs that are built on the idea that ordinary residents are knowledgeable about their environment and the status of their health is now, literally, a matter of life or death.
The Flint water crisis, antiblack genocide, unremitting settler colonialism, and the possessive investment in whiteness, more generally, underscore a continuing theme in American history—the betrayal of environmental justice for non-white communities. This enduring racial formation also raises some important questions about the role of the state in normalizing environmental justice. And although scholars are generally critical of the abuse of state and corporate power with respect to the perpetration of environmental injustices, they generally do not question the existence of those institutions. This reformist approach, David Pellow argues, is an existential threat to social and environmental justice and ecological sustainability for all beings. How do we reconcile, Cristina Faiver-Serna asks, a society that simultaneously permits the poisoning of particular (racialized and marginalized) communities yet also sets aside funds to pay for the medical treatment of members of that same community? Thinking through environmental justice as structure, I suggest, can help explain this seeming contradiction.
It has also been my intention to make the theory and praxis of environmental justice relevant to students and others who are struggling to make sense of a rapidly changing world, growing levels of inequality, and deepening degrees of social and environmental injustice. By foregrounding the work of environmental justice scholars, many of them also people of color, I hope to instill a sense of hope and the chance for change for you and the communities you call home.
The book is divided into five parts. Part I begins with an introduction and history of the environmental justice movement. It is fitting that Robert Bullard writes this chapter. He has written dozens of books on the subject, helping to shape theory and influence environmental justice policy. Many people have referred to Bullard as the father of environmental justice. Yet he will admit that his wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, was the original motivating force behind his efforts, as he provided the sociological data that attorney McKeever Bullard required in a discriminatory facility siting in Houston, Texas. His study, conducted in 1978, was the first comprehensive account of environmental racism in the United States. In Chapter 2, Stella Čapek explains why the environmental justice frame continues to be a powerful tool for understanding social and environmental inequalities at a systemic and personal level. Environmental justice has always been about more than just “disproportionate dumping” of toxins on vulnerable groups, Čapek argues. The environmental justice frame powerfully linked the civil rights movement to the environmental movement, and over time it has been expanded to include global processes, transnational networks, Indigenous understandings of place, urban as well as rural sites, and issues like immigration, food production, and climate justice. In Chapter 3, Indigenous scholar Kyle Powys Whyte asks us to consider how processes of imperialism, colonialism, industrialization, and settlement undermine Indigenous ways of life by altering ecosystems to suit dominant societies. A key observation to cultivating environmental justice is recognizing that wherever we are in North America (Turtle Island), we are always standing on colonized land. Not recognizing this fact is a major barrier to environmental justice efforts.
Part II explores environmental justice methodology, both in terms of epistemology (how do you know) and ethics (who should you involve). In Chapter 4, Paul Mohai reflects on meeting his colleague Bunyan Bryant, “the first African American environmental studies professor I ever met.” Before their collaboration, Mohai had not stopped to consider that environmental problems may be disproportionately burdening certain groups in society over others. Mohai’s chapter raises many important questions about methodology, including appropriate scale and availability of longitudinal data, in the assessment of environmental justice. In Chapter 5, Alissa Cordner and Phil Brown explain why the most impactful approaches to environmental justice research and advocacy are community engaged and reflexive. They highlight four such approaches: community-based participatory research, transdisciplinary social science–environmental work, the New Political Sociology of Science (NPSS), and reflexive research ethics. In Chapter 6, Carolina Balazs and Rachel Morello-Frosch advance the debates around environmental justice measurement, suggesting that rigor, relevance, and reach of science to support environmental justice claims must include affected communities at all levels of the research process, from conceptualizing the problem to communicating the findings to the affected communities. In Chapter 7, J. M. Bacon and Kari Marie Norgaard turn the microscope inward to address emotions. Specifically, they examine how unequal mental and emotional harms shape the way communities and individuals experience environmental injustice.
In