David Naguib Pellow: What is Critical Environmental Justice?

Rapidly, scholars and practitioners are recognizing the need for the radical incorporation of justice into conservation interventions. Critical environmental justice is an attractive avenue for integrating justice and wildlife crime prevention within the illegal wildlife trade. As coined by David Pellow, critical environmental justice delineates dynamics of inequality related to intersecting social categories, multi-scalarity, racial expendability, and state power. Within IWT, these pillars of critical environmental justice offer opportunities to contend with futures otherwise and to pursue IWT intervention with a grounded understanding of communities, wildlife, and each other. This article demystifies the critical EJ literature and analyzes IWT through a critical EJ lens. Grounding IWT prevention and study in a critical EJ approach can facilitate a more seamless, radical, and transformative integration of justice principles into IWT intervention.

Critical environmental justice (EJ) scholars, focused on the role of race, gender, capital, colonization, and power as key to environmental injustice, argue that EJ thinking and practice should move past the traditional focus on liberal and state-based remedies. There are many scholarly accounts of critical EJ, but no systematic examinations of such views in practice. This paper reports on a survey of the meanings of EJ circulating among activists and scholars globally. Using Q method, we found strong agreement with this more critical framing of EJ – representing an important development of EJ as a global discourse. At the same time, we found important differences in terms of knowledge and standpoints, participation, the liberal state, EJ praxis, and the politics of disruption. We argue that this heterogeneity of perspectives, within a generally critical approach, reflects the context-specificity, evolution and expanding reach of EJ and reflects the field’s overarching ethos of plurality.

The critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework contends that inequalities are sustained through intersecting social categories, multi-scalarity, the perceived expendability of marginalized populations, and state-vested power. While this approach offers new pathways for environmental justice research, it overlooks the role of firms, suggesting a departure from long-standing political-economic theories, such as the treadmill of production (ToP), which elevate the importance of producers. In focusing on firms, we ask: how do firms operationalize diverse social forces to produce environmental injustice? What organizational logics sustain these inequalities? To understand the firm-level dynamics shaping treadmill acceleration and environmental injustice, we utilize two concepts—social embeddedness and managerial authority—from economic sociology research on firms. The former refers to the social and non-economic factors that guide economic decision-making, whereas the latter refers to the power that reinforces worksite hierarchies. This theoretical paper argues that social embeddedness and managerial authority interact within firms to produce an organizational logic that sustains environmental injustice and ecological disorganization. We draw from historical and contemporary evidence on sugarcane plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean, with cases ranging from the colonial period to the present day. By bringing economic sociological concepts to bear on the CEJ and ToP frameworks, we advance debates on how firm-level dynamics shape environmental inequalities.

The limitations of existing institutional and social structures and their discrete approaches to water management call for a holistic, trans‐disciplinary, and multi‐stakeholder approach to addressing water security concerns with a focus on water equity and justice. The need for forging partnerships and strengthening positive and meaningful cooperation among water, sanitation, and broader development communities operating across different levels and scales has been gaining greater currency in global water debates. In this scenario, emerging critical environmental justice (CEJ) scholarship has a focus on recognizing and analyzing the contextual/historical dimensions that are often mutually reinforcing, inseparable, and multiple oppressive structures that intersect to perpetuate marginalization at the cost of privileging powerful actors. Integration of the environmental justice concerns into the development plans, and plans would pave the way for improved interactions and synergies among water‐based institutions and communities affected by them. It is urgent to deepen the discourses and deliberations on CEJ directed towards addressing systemic inequalities and injustices prevalent in water security by putting “people before profit.”

Lacking access to stable shelter, infrastructure, and services, houseless people are exposed to a range of environmental hazards. Yet, environmental justice scholars have only begun to consider how environmental justice issues impact unsheltered people. In dialogue with Critical Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies and geographies of homelessness research, and drawing on seven years of participant observation and a national phone survey of 47 houseless community representatives, this paper begins to chart a baseline Critical EJ analysis of homelessness. I argue that understanding the environmental justice experiences of houseless people requires attention not only to direct exposure to hazards, but also to criminalization. Police sweeps in downtown and residential areas push people into toxic spaces; when houseless communities express concerns, they risk further eviction. In this way, cities overwhelmingly respond to hazard exposure with displacement, creating a cycle of criminalization, dangerous living conditions, and serial forced removals. Moreover, examining such intersecting hazards and their impacts through a Black feminist lens of intersectionality reveals how systemic violence vis-à-vis environmental hazards is multiplied and magnified for houseless people along lines of race, gender, age, disability status, and so on. By bringing Critical EJ and geographies of homelessness into conversation, with particular attention to intersectional impacts, scholars and organizers can better attend to the complex suite of issues that differentially shape the lives of houseless people and inspire resistance.

What is Critical Environmental Justice? by David N. Pellow (review)

Recent oceans sustainability, coastal community development, and ocean governance policy discourse among academics and practitioners increasingly invokes “equity” and “ocean equity.” But, to what end? While this new focus may be a positive development for these fields, this article argues that the conceptualization of equitable approaches to oceanic production and consumption remains rooted in market-liberal environmentalist as well as unproblematized global developmentalist logics, revealing tensions about whom equity notions may serve in practice. Via theoretical and conceptual development drawn from the emerging literature on this topic, the article draws attention to how critical environmental justice scholarship provides a necessary intervention for ocean equity. If the goal is to achieve equitable ocean outcomes, it is necessary to reckon with and undermine logics that continue to structure social inequality, dominate labor, and create the present ocean governance situation as ruled by global development and bourgeois environmentalist organizations. Furthermore, scholars, activists, practitioners, and anyone else working toward equity in, on, and around oceans should fight against any banalization of the term ocean equity, so that it can maintain its underlying socially progressive, and hopefully emancipatory, potential.

Fat studies has produced tremendous theoretical contributions that upend hegemonic discourses posing fatness as a social problem. In spite of some key contributions, food and environmental justice literatures both have been slow to fully integrate fat studies perspectives into the study of food and environments. This paper seeks a more systematic integration of fat insights within both literatures, offering several points of departure based on existing thematic convergences. This discussion serves to establish a research agenda for scholars of critical food studies and environmental justice for transforming the existing sluggishness into a systematic treatment of the role of anti-fat discourses and structures in food and environmental systems.

Delivering Fresh Water: Critical Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Flint, Michigan Affiliation Michael R. Greenberg PhDMichael R. Greenberg is Distinguished Professor and Dean of Faculty at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. He is also an associate editor for AJPH, Washington, DC.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Michael R. Greenberg, Edward J. Bloustein School, 33 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1958 (e-mail: [email protected]rutgers.edu). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the "Reprints" link. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303235 Accepted: April 12, 2016 Published Online: July 11, 2016

Data-driven environmental governance within the standard regulatory regime routinely relies on unmeasurable, missing, or abjected data. Technocrats typically use data surrogates to alleviate this pervasive problem. By combining feminist technoscience and critical environmental justice approaches, this article argues that data surrogates are far more than fungible substitutes and rely on more than scientific rationality and transcendent objectivity. Through a case of intersecting environmental governance and justice work in the Portside Community in San Diego, this article exposits a broader conceptualization of data surrogates by developing a partial typology of operations they perform: calibrating, weighting, and validating. The politics and labors of these operations are crucial to analyze how data acquire material and discursive power in environmental governance. I propose an analytical shift from examining the work of data surrogates in terms of substituting to one of hosting. This shift reveals and better explains how data surrogates negotiate relationships between body, place, and property across state, market, and civil society actors. Moreover, it demonstrates how data surrogates interrupt the dominant regulatory regime by resisting fungibility through acts of social reproduction. Far from being subordinate to technocratic tools, the work of social reproduction makes governing with scientific and technical instruments both possible and contestable.

As meatpacking facilities became COVID-19 hotspots, the pandemic renewed the importance of longstanding claims from environmental justice and agrifood scholars. The former asserts the perceived dispensability of marginalized populations sustains environmental injustices, whereas the latter stresses that decades of industrial consolidation created structural instability in the food supply chain. This article asks how industry and government leverage existing socio-ecological inequalities to ensure the continuity of the meatpacking supply chain during COVID-19, and the implications these actions hold for workers. To answer these questions, the authors perform case studies of meatpacking facilities in three Midwestern states. This article uses the critical environmental justice framework to expand research on sacrifice zones to include hazardous worksites such as meatpacking. We find that toxic employment flourishes through firms’ labor practices that pass socio-ecological risks onto workers in the name of efficiency, and through a complicit state that prioritizes accumulation and consumption over workers’ health.

This section maps out a Critical Energy Research agenda that analyzes energy relations in light of their role within broader systems of (re)production, (geo)politics, economics, and ecological regeneration. This requires moving beyond the popular ‘energy justice’ framework, both analytically and politically, and also continuing to engage with emergent branches of EJ such as Critical Environmental Justice studies and Multispecies Justice. Reorienting our work in these ways carries theoretical, methodological, and political implications. Accordingly, critical energy research also reconsiders the roles and responsibilities of those who write about injustice. Five key approaches constitute this agenda for critical energy research: (1) foregrounding the roles of EJ communities, Indigenous groups, and diverse social movements; (2) maintaining a critical focus on systems of production and extractivism (and on how ongoing processes of settler colonialism and multiple forms of exploitation interact and underpin energy-intensive systems of capitalist production); (3) reframing transitions as collaborative projects of justice; (4) drawing on restorative environmental justice to see justice as the restoration of mutually supportive relationships between beings of all kinds; (5) renewing practices of reflexivity by subjecting our own analyses, commitments, research relations, and notions of solidarity to ongoing political scrutiny.KeywordsCritical environmental justiceMultispecies justiceReflexivitySolidarityRefusalCritical energy research

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book briefly reviews the available empirical evidence on inequality and ecological crises and details the transmission channels of the inequality crisis to environmental degradation. It analyzes disparities in global material extraction, which they consider both the consequences of as well as the prerequisite for globally unsustainable patterns of economic growth. The book shows how political economy is able to renew our understanding of past paradigms, ideas, and theories related to natural resources and the environment. It presents the critical environmental justice framework, which he co-developed, addressing some shortcomings in existing environmental justice studies, including the importance of understanding multiple dimensions of inequality. The book analyzes inequalities in exposure and vulnerability to climate change and then study inequality in the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions between countries and individuals.

PART I: HAZARDOUS WASTES, DISASTERS AND HEALTH RISKS Sociology of Hazardous Wastes, Disasters, and Risk Hazardous and Toxic Wastes as Social Problems Taxonomy of Hazardous Wastes PART II: ELECTRONIC WASTES, PERSISTENT ORGANIC POLLUTANTS, AND HEALTH EFFECTS Electronic Waste: The Dark Side of High-Tech Revolution Environmental Health Risks of Persistent Organic Compounds PART III: CONTAMINATED COMMUNITIES AND REGULATORY RESPONSES Communities Contaminated by Toxic Wastes and Industrial Disasters: Selected Cases The Regulatory Frameworks PART IV: CONCLUSION Critical Environmental Justice Movement

This study traces how Black lesbians in the San Francisco Bay Area made a place for themselves in the world at the end of the twentieth century, after the decline of the Black Power Movement and before the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Geocoding and analyzing the content of a Black lesbian journal in the San Francisco Bay Area that had global distribution, the author examines how the placemaking of Black lesbians remade them as cultural‐political subjects, expanded their networks, and inspired them to reimagine their relations with the earth. As they crafted cultural spaces across the African diaspora, they faced threats—most notably, street violence, harsh policing and ecological degradation—yet they also experienced joyful interactions with each other, with allies and with nature. The belief grew in their cultural spaces that their liberation required world transformation and that they could change the world. This research, providing a frame for studying the interaction between the making of cultural spaces and the formation of political solidarities, contributes to urban movements research, critical environmental justice studies, and Black feminist/LGBTQ+ research.