Critical review for environmental justice
Answers
On the first point above, EJ scholars have a tendency to focus on only one or two forms of social inequality in studies of environmental injustice. For example, some scholars continue to debate the relative importance of race versus class in terms of which category is most important with respect to the distribution of environmental hazards, while only a small group of scholars have explored the role of gender and sexuality in EJ Studies (Buckingham and Kulcur, 2010; Smith 2005). Moreover, the key social category species remains, at best, at the margins of the field of EJ Studies, despite the fact that, generally, when and where humans suffer from environmental inequalities, so does the more-than-human world (and vice versa) and often as a result of ideological frameworks that link marginalized humans to “nature.” My point here is that since multiple forms of inequality drive and characterize the experience of environmental injustice, the field would do well to expand in that direction. Thus CEJ Studies brings greater attention to how multiple social categories of difference are entangled in the production of environmental injustice, from race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class to species, which would attend to the ways that both the human and the more-than-human world are impacted by and respond to environmental injustice.
With respect to the second point above concerning scale, the EJ Studies literature tends to be characterized by research at one scale or another, rather than a multi-scalar approach. In other words, most researchers focus on the local, regional, national, or sometimes transnational or global scale, but few studies attempt to grasp how EJ struggles function at multiple scales, from the cellular and bodily level to the global level and back (Herod 2011; Sze 2016). Some scholars have addressed this important question by exploring cases in which pollutants produced in one part of the world travel across national borders and impact human and ecological health in another hemisphere (Sze 2006). Scale is of critical importance because it allows us to understand how environmental injustices are facilitated by decision-makers who behave as if sites where hazards are produced “out of sight and out of mind” are somehow irrelevant to the health of people and ecosystems at the original sites of decision-making power and consumption. Attention to scale also assists us in observing how social movement responses to environmental injustices draw on spatial frameworks, networks, and knowledge to make the connections between hazards in one place and harm in another. CEJ Studies thus advocates multi-scalar methodological and theoretical approaches to studying EJ issues in order to better comprehend the complex spatial and temporal causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of EJ struggles.
Regarding the third point above—the degree to which various forms of inequality and power are viewed as entrenched in society—this concern stems from my conclusion that the vision of change articulated by EJ Studies scholars and most EJ activists generally looks to the state and capital to accommodate demands via legislation, institutional reforms, and other policy concessions. The concern here is that such an approach leaves intact the very power structures that produced environmental injustice in the first place. Yes, it names those institutions and structures as sources of the problems and seeks to reform them, but by working in collaboration with those entities, such efforts ultimately risk reinforcing their legitimacy. CEJ Studies urges a deeper grasp of the entrenched and embedded character of social inequality—including speciesism and state power—in society and therefore a reckoning with the need for transformative (rather than primarily reformist) approaches to realize environmental justice. In other words, Critical EJ Studies seeks to push our analyses and actions beyond the human, the state, and capital via a broad anti-authoritarian perspective.