Environmental Racism Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Book Review of Harriet Washington's A Terrible Thing to Waste.

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- Race and Racism, Environmental Sustainability, Environmental Racism

Current situation and key questions: What is puzzling, problematic, unsustainable, engaging, meaningful? Who is impacted most by environmental degradation and pollution? In what ways do the social, political, and economic arrangements in society relate to inclusion for some, exclusion for others, health for some and suffering for others? How are these arrangements linked to academic achievement? How might community development contribute to changing community dynamics for historically marginalized populations? This case study explores some aspects of these questions and more.

- by Edward Brantmeier and +1
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- Race and Racism, Sustainable Development, Racism, White Privilege
- by Dr. Ingrid Waldron
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- Spatial Ecology, Race and Racism, Critical Race Theory, Environmental Racism

Environmental racism typically describes how people of color are excessively affected by environmental damage and racially driven environmental policies and practices. Those wielding power can, intentionally or unintentionally, promote public and private environmental initiatives that negatively impact some people and communities over others. Effects include health-related disparities resulting from increased exposure to contaminants and pollution, spatializing practices, and political alienation. As a broad and diverse activist movement that inserts social justice into traditional environmentalism, environmental justice exposes and eliminates harmful and discriminatory environmental practices, shifts the burden of proof, and holds offenders accountable.

- by Clorinde Peters
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- Photography, Neoliberalism, Documentary Photography, Environmental Racism
- by Matthias De Groof
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- History, Climate Change, Postcolonial Studies, Climate Change Adaptation

My story on how one experienced Racism, Discrimination in Université Libre de Brussels. Hate continues because we stay quiet, shy away from denoucing it, speaking it or being compromised. Racism and hate or discrimination should never be condoned or tolerated, this paper narrate the ordeal i went through and an updated version will be posted. what one never think of, is now happening and the whole world should know this.

- by Hilda Lloréns
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- Social Movements, Latin American Studies, Anthropology, Race and Racism

This collection of essays presents to the reader leading voices within food justice, environmental justice, and school-to-prison pipeline movements. While many schools, community organizers, professors, politicians, unions, teachers, parents, youth, social workers, and youth advocates are focusing on curriculum, discipline policies, policing practices, incarceration demographics, and diversity of staff, the authors of this book argue that even if all those issues are addressed, healthy food and living environment are fundamental to the emancipation of youth. This book is for anyone who wants to truly understand the school-to-prison pipeline as well as those interested in peace, social justice, environmentalism, racial justice, youth advocacy, transformative justice, food, veganism, and economic justice.

- by John Lupinacci and +1
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- Environmental Education, Critical Pedagogy, Environmental Studies, Social Justice

Anabaptist environmental theologies and ethics could and should do more to engage issues of environmental racism and environmental justice. Since most Anabaptist environmentalisms center on efforts to witness to God’s peace within creation, a failure to address ecologies of racialized violence undermines the tradition’s core theological values. This essay identifies three main varieties of contemporary Anabaptist environmentalism: agrarian virtue, bioregionalist discipleship, and eschatological eco-pacifism. It explores how each variety frames the natural environment within an account of Anabaptist faith and life, considers why and how problems of environmental racism elude that frame, and offers initial suggestions for how advocates and practitioners might sharpen each version in participatory dialogue with movements for environmental justice.

- by Luke B Kreider
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- Religion and Ecology, Anabaptist Theology, Christian Ethics, Ecological Theology

This article examines the shifting ways in which the dispossessive and toxic effects of agricultural chemicals have been encoded as agrarian best practices. I develop the concept of agrarian racial regimes, based on the work of Cedric Robinson, to examine how constructed hierarchies of human worth are made central to the sale and usage of chemicals. A focus on the politics of pesticides in the Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the U.S. South, elucidates the ways in which agrarian racial capitalism has been reproduced through shifting antiblack conceptions of racial difference and technological progress. Two key conjunctures serve to draw these dynamics into relief: the development of the application of pesticides by aircraft in the 1920s and 1930s and the shift toward nearly complete mechanization and chemicalization of cotton production in the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing film and advertisements in this period in the context of the material relations of agriculture and race, I argue that dispossession and toxicity are encoded as best practices through antiblack representations of agrarian whiteness. In the first period, chemicals were positioned as the height of progress through racist depictions of Black workers in the fields. In the second period, in response to Black challenges to white supremacy, the notion of “clean cotton” was deployed to represent Black absence as the height of technological progress and possessive agrarian masculinity. In both instances, racial representation has served to justify unstable and toxic relations of unequal power and profit.

With the development of global logistical systems to coordinate the movement of goods, cities around the world are being reconceived as nodes in circuits of commodity capital. These efforts are reshaping urban environments and provoking novel forms of political resistance. They are also bringing distant places and subjects into new relations of interaction and interdependence. This article traces the web of urban change and contestation that has taken shape around the expansion of the Panama Canal, an infrastructure megaproject with reverberations that have been felt in port cities throughout the Americas. Drawing on research conducted in the Panama City, Los Angeles, and New York City areas, I examine efforts to remake urban space in the name of smooth, efficient circulation—what I call supply-chain urbanism—and the struggles that have ensued over land, labor, and environments. The concept of supply-chain urbanism calls attention to the life-damaging impacts of goods movement on communities and workers, impacts that are unevenly distributed across space, race, and class. Crucially, it also underscores the connections between seemingly disparate episodes of urban change and resistance. Beyond shedding light on emerging forms of logistics-based urbanization, the article illustrates the value of relational methodologies for the study of networked urban dynamics. In disclosing the wider forces, processes, and flows that connect far-flung experiences of urban transformation and struggle, such approaches can apprehend the interlinked character of contemporary urbanization processes in ways that purely local perspectives cannot.

- by Martin Danyluk
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- Logistics, Urbanization, Environmental Racism, Relational comparison

This study uses communication, critical race theory (CRT), and storytelling to examine environmental racism and environmental justice efforts. In New Mexico’s Petroglyph National Monument, a conflict emerged when officials moved protected rock carvings to build a road through the park. When creating the monument, stakeholders evoked cultural and environmental protectionism. Yet, proroad campaigners then used colorblind racist development arguments, while environmental justice activists argued that the road violated Indigenous peoples’ wishes and environmental integrity. After analyzing the case, in the
tradition of CRT scholarship, I present my own fictional narrative as an environmental justice tool. I advance an environmental justice narrative framework to address environmental
racism by exploring through storytelling how racial and environmental inequalities materialize and to what effect.

- by Dr. Elizabeth Dickinson
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- Critical Geopolitics, Narrative, Political Ecology, Critical Race Theory

On any given weekday, you can find families, intrepid athletes, elderly strollers, and young friends grazing Riverbank Park along the West Harlem landscape. The twenty-eight acre park is home to an Olympic-sized pool, an athletic complex with a gym, tennis and handball courts, a cultural theater holding eight hundred people, and a covered skating rink where people can ice-skate in the winter and roller-skate in the summer. This place did not come about from the plans of elected politicians. Nor is it the product of any philanthropic interest looking to extend their name into new territory. Riverbank State Park was built precisely as a result of what lies underneath this haven of green, a water treatment facility servicing some one million residents of Upper Manhattan—North River Water Treatment Plant—and the surrounding residents’ response to this being built in their backyard.

Johnny Lupinacci and his co-authors make the case for addressing environmental justice and equity in the elementary classroom, providing a short case study example of how one Detroit teacher and her students confront urban blight with... more

- by John Lupinacci and +3
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- Environmental Education, Teacher Education, Science Education, Critical Pedagogy

Indigenous peoples are among the most active environmentalists in the world, working through advocacy, educational programs, and research. The emerging field of Indigenous Environmental Studies and Sciences (IESS) is distinctive, investigating social resilience to environmental change through the research lens of how moral relationships are organized in societies. Examples of IESS research across three moral relationships are discussed here: responsibility, spirituality, and justice. IESS develops insights on resilience that can support Indigenous peoples' struggles with environmental justice and political reconciliation; makes significant contributions to global discussions about the relationship between human behavior and the environment; and speaks directly to Indigenous liberation as well as justice issues impacting everyone.

This essay introduces a special stream of Media+Environment focused on "disaster media." In the process, the authors conceptualize this term in relation to "natural" and other disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic, and explore how understandings of "disaster media" are embedded within several areas of humanities-based film and media scholarship. Writing from the social ecological premise that consequences of disasters stem in large part from systemic actions, the introduction develops three general arguments about disaster media as an analytic. First, disasters cause people to rethink what "media" are and to contend with the fact that, especially during disasters, media are constantly changing and being updated; they also escape the screen and sculpt the environment (media are not only representational but also affective and infrastructural). Second, because they come to the fore in relation to crisis situations, disaster media help expose structural inequalities; practices of relief and reform need to happen and can be facilitated (or inhibited) by mediatic means. Finally, disaster media need to be considered in relation to the multiple temporalities of climate disruption (from the longue durée of glacial flow to uncertain and sudden extreme weather). Discussing these issues, the authors also introduce pieces in the stream that are focused on humanitarian drone interventions and glacier-melt artworks.

- by Lisa Parks
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- Climate Change, Environmental Humanities, Film and Media Studies, Environmental Racism

"We review the literature published in academic, non-law journals on environmental justice and environmental racism, focusing on the literature relevant to the environmental justice movement in the United States. In the overview we define major concepts: environment, justice, race and racism. We discuss major trends in the literature and in the movement and current issues and debates, including risk assessment, GIS mapping, and community-based research and campaigns. Annotations are provided for over 100 publications. We also include a table of GIS based studies and findings, a list of publications and dissertations not summarized, and a list of special issues and classic texts on environmental justice."

- by Diana Pei Wu
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- Environmental Sociology, Social Movements, Environmental Geography, Race and Racism

Neoliberalism represents a key moment in time for race relations in Canada, one that systematically protects white privilege, not through overt forms of state sanctioned institutional racism, as in the past, but through the colorblind and seductive rhetoric of free enterprise, free markets, and common sense. This paper situates and contrasts Canada's historical and institutional racial formation with neoliberal racism: the later, being a more hegemonic form of racism. Both, of course, are a form of white privilege and are a part of Canada's racial formation—historical and contemporary. However, because most Canadians associate racism with Canada's distant past, they are not able to understand and accept how a more contemporary form of racism—neoliberal racism—affects First Nations today. This limited understanding of racism, helps to explain the recent apathy, cynicism, and violence directed towards contemporary First Nations conditions, concerns, and protests in Canada. In effect, neoliberalism has rendered an enormous and growing racial inequality culturally palatable by effectively relegating racism to historical legacies, and translating contemporary social problems into individual choices and personality traits.

- by Michael Mascarenhas
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- Neoliberalism, Environmental Justice, Environmental Racism

This article contributes to recent work that has turned to Frantz
Fanon for a socio-ecological approach to racism and colonization. Its intervention is to take up Fanon to critically reflect on
the concept and use of “environmental racism,” one of the few
approaches we have to hand to interrogate the place of race
in discussions of the Anthropocene. It shows that a Fanonian
approach to environmental racism integrates a socio-ecological
perspective with decolonial political phenomenology. It uses
this position as a foundation to rethink environmental racism, reframing the problem in terms of racist environments.
Environmental racism can then be understood as a symptom of
a more fundamental problem with modes of experiencing and
organizing the world.

- by Romy Opperman
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- Political Ecology, Frantz Fanon, Environmental Racism, Decolonial Philosophy

As wondrous lands are represented as “wastelands” to make way for urban and industrial development in Hawaiʻi, kūpuna or elders and cultural practitioners are currently building a movement across the islands to mobilize moʻolelo (stories and histories) in huakaʻi aloha ʻāina, (physical and spiritual travels to view and remember celebrated and sacred places) in order to protect them. On these huakaʻi, moʻolelo have critical decolonial effects as they articulate an ʻŌiwi moʻoʻāina economy of abundance that restores “wastelands” to ʻāina kamahaʻo (wondrous land) and ʻāina momona (abundant land). In this essay, I focus on a 2010 community struggle to protect the birthplace of the kupua (supernatural hero) Māui in Lualualei valley from a developer’s proposal for a light industrial park. The Concerned Elders of Waiʻanae organized the Huakaʻi Kākoʻo no Waiʻanae environmental justice bus tours to share the Māui moʻolelo and build a broad base of support for their struggles, enabling wonder to grow into direct action. I discuss the ways that Indigenous and critical settler cartographies map the wonder of the Māui moʻolelo on the ground, and I look to narrative conventions of moʻolelo that compare and connect distant places, helping to grow affinity activism.

- by Candace Fujikane
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- Mythology And Folklore, History, Cultural History, Landscape Ecology
- by James Manigault-Bryant
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- Autobiography, Environmental Racism, Audre Lorde

Climate change is often discussed in terms of linear units of time. This essay covers the meaning of linear time and its implications for how climate change is narrated. There are concerns about how narrating climate change in this way can eclipse issues of justice in the energy transition. There are of course different ways of telling time. This essay provides a narration of climate change inspired by particular Indigenous scholars and writers. These conceptions of time narrate time through kinship, not linearity. One implication is that issues of justice are inseparable from the experience of climate change.

- by Kyle Whyte
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- Native American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Climate Change, Climate Change Adaptation
- by Brian Williams
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- Human Geography, Wilderness (Environment), Conservation, Political Ecology

Contemporary approaches to integrating "self" and the "other"—such as multiculturalism, cultural diversity, race relations, inclusiveness strategies, or identity politics—are flawed from the perspective of traditional thought. At their core, modernist ideologies are inimical to and destructive of all human diversity. The new face of antipathy to pluralism is becoming more deceptive as it grows less focused on respecting diversity and more on promoting ideological uniformity and the erection of a global monoculture. This essay argues that it is from a metaphysical perspective that human diversity can be fully understood and can seek to reconcile the dichotomy of "self" and the "other".

- by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
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- Religion, Buddhism, Native American Religions, Comparative Religion
- by shela sheikh
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- Testimony, Postcolonial Studies, Environmental Humanities, Subaltern Studies

Environmental degradation is identified as a key factor that threatens the future of life on Earth, but such generalised reading entails that conceal the uneven effects of environmental degradation. When environmental degradation takes place on the lands of the marginalised groups, it is often overlooked or further justified by hegemonic powers that view these areas as natural resources or hideouts for insurgent groups that need to be drained. The embedded prejudice and discrimination against the internal others are often inflamed through the media and followed by the dominant society. This commentary addresses this issue of differential significance attributed to environmental degradation in Kurdistan and discusses how the concept of ecological racism may help uncovering this variance. In doing so, this piece covers the existing literature about conflict and environment nexus in Kurdistan, and suggests ways forward to advance knowledge and work towards political and ecological justice.

- by Pinar Dinc
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- Middle East Studies, Conflict, Kurdish Studies, Resistance (Social)

O presente trabalho é centrado na discussão acerca da produção de danos ambientais e sua especial imposição a comunidades habitadas principalmente por populações negras. Parte-se da premissa de que a poluição ambiental não afeta de igual forma a população mundial, sobretudo, vislumbrada não só do ponto de vista técnico-científico, mas sociopolítico. Considerando que as sociedades americanas se constituíram a partir da colonização de base escravista e de processos dela decorrentes, atenta-se para a influência e consequências desses processos. Os movimentos sociais destinados a questionar a sujeição desigual aos ônus ambientais nos EUA, com relevo ao racismo ambiental, ganharam força nos anos 80, enquanto no Brasil, isso só ocorreu no início do século XXI. Com atenção as particularidades brasileiras, busca-se, no estudo do desenvolvimento e combate das questões nos EUA, parâmetros e indicadores utilizados para aferir a alocação racial de passivos ambientais.

- by Daniela dos Santos Almeida and +1
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- Critical Legal Theory, Direito Ambiental, Direito Constitucional, Critical Legal Studies

Health, healing, and environmental conservation are often thought of as discrete responsibilities. In order to connect these frequently compartmentalized aspects of Christian mission, this article will provide
an overview of climate change and its effects, summarize Catholic Social Teaching on environmental responsibility, and offer two ways Catholic health care can continue to take ethical responsibility for the environment. The conclusion highlights the unique opportunity for Catholic health care to practice creation care and medical care in a way consistent with Catholic Social Teaching on the environment.

- by Cristina Richie
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- Applied Ethics, Bioethics, Climate Change, Catholic Studies

This article situates pesticides as technologies marked by both continuities and discontinuities from previous modes of agrarian racism in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, a plantation region of the United States South. Attention to the historical-geographical specificity of pesticide intensification, I argue, provides the means to understand pesticide intensification as a mode of what I term agro-environmental racism. Anti-Black racism shaped the politics of pesticides, underpinning policies and material practices that were destructive of both the environment and human welfare in the Delta and beyond. The structures and ideologies of plantation racism helped position the Delta as one of the most pesticide-intensive sectors of U.S. agriculture during the mid-20th century—a particularly consequential period for both the intensification of pesticides and the formation of contemporary environmentalism. Pesticides were defended by agro-industrial interests as technologies supporting agricultural production—and particularly that of cotton, the most pesticide-intensive commodity crop. Simultaneously, they were figured as technologies crucial to a normative way of life. Although pesticides were articulated without explicit mention of race by the 1960s, I argue that the freedom struggle activism of the Mississippi Freedom Labor Union and Fannie Lou Hamer provide context necessary to explain the pesticide politics of the Delta's plantation bloc. These mobilizations to enact more just, sustainable, and livable geographies were an indictment of a plantation politics which put the health of cotton and profitability of plantations above all else.

This article analyzes the interrelationship between resource consumption, socio-spatial justice, and what is popularly known as global warming by interrogating the ecological footprint of professional geographers, especially in terms of their conference-going involving air travel. In this spirit, the article introduces and employs the concepts of ecological privilege (as well as its inextricably related antithesis, ecological disadvantage) and dys-ecologism as a way to understand the roots and implications of professional geographers’ fossil fuel use, and those of globally advantaged classes more broadly. To illustrate this, the article measures the flight-related ecological footprint of the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Seattle. In doing so, the article examines how professional geographers, in the form of the AAG, have responded to their travel-related ecological footprint. It thus highlights the importance of scrutinizing the complex and dynamic interrelationships between consumption; associated socio-ecological benefits and detriments and their systemic manifestations; as well as hierarchy-related and power-infused categories of race, class, and nation—and their spatialities.

La conception de la nature au cœur du mouvement de justice environnementale et des courants théoriques se réclamant de celle-ci a été très peu étudiée et mise en lumière dans la littérature académique sur la justice environnementale. Pourtant, les théoricien.nes critiques de la pensée décoloniale, de l’écoféminisme et du poststructuralisme ont largement démontré que la représentation ou la façon de définir la nature n’est pas anodine et innocente, mais participe le plus souvent à renforcer des rapports de pouvoir déjà à l’œuvre. Dans cet article, je propose d’abord de resituer le mouvement pour la justice environnementale dans son histoire militante. Ensuite, je propose d’examiner deux formulations de justice environnementale, l’une provenant de l’économie écologique (Hornborg, 2001; Martinez-Alier, 2014) et l’autre de la socioécologie (Larrère, 2017; Scholsberg, 2004, 2013) afin de ressortir la définition qu’elles proposent de la nature. La confrontation du corpus de littérature étudié au cadre théorique expose que les théoriciens (Hornborg et Martinez-Alier) de l’approche de l’économie écologique, qui nécessite une uniformisation du langage des luttes, mobilisent une conception occidentalocentrée et moderne de la nature et ce faisant, échoue à se soustraire de la logique coloniale qu’ils critiquent.

Edited by Shela Sheikh and Uriel Orlow Contributions by Sita Balani, Melanie Boehi, Clelia Coussonet, Karen Flint, Jason T. W. Irving, Nomusa Makhubu, Bettina Malcomess, Karin van Marle, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll This... more

- by shela sheikh
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- Contemporary Art, Traditional Medicine, Post-Colonialism, South Africa

Hurricanes are thought of as “natural” disasters, but the social and environmental devastation wrought upon Puerto Rico by Hurricane María last September is really an unnatural disaster resulting from a long history of colonial subjugation, economic hardship, environmental injustice, infrastructural neglect, and, at the local level, a broken rule of law. Hurricane María affected all of Puerto Rico to some degree, but in doing so the disaster also exposed the vulnerabilities created by ubiquitous socioeconomic inequality and the differential neglect of the island’s rural regions.

- by Hilda Lloréns and +1
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- Latin American Studies, Disaster Studies, Environmental Studies, Environmental Anthropology

This performative autoethnography uses oral history, memory, and reflection to unpack the delicate intricacies of marginalized ecocultural voices. I show how oral histories can help access ecocultural identity by highlighting ways that race, class, gender, ability, and orientations to the more-than-human world are multiple, layered, and performed in interlocking webs of privileges and disadvantages. This chapter also exhibits ways auto/ethnographic methodology can help make sense of ways certain orientations to the more-than-human world are disseminated through narratives and experiences that take place within families. I propose that studies in ecoculture could benefit from increased attention to stories that interrogate previous generations' environmental conceptualizations, and present unique, historically marginalized voices. Additionally, I posit that the reflective act of working through one's own family stories helps make sense of ways ecocultural identity is formed, performed, and accepted or rejected within imbrications of other cultural identities. Biography: Mariko Oyama Thomas is a PhD candidate at University of New Mexico. She completed an M.S. in communication and research at Portland State University in Oregon, where she studied family storytelling and mixed-race identity. Since then, her research has focused on environmental communication, storytelling, more-than-human communication, critical race issues, and plant studies. Other interests include herbalism, camping, and attempting to learn the banjo.

- by Mariko O Thomas
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- Intersectionality, Environmental Racism, Ecocultural Communication

With debates about how or whether climate change is “pure myth” in an age of alt-facts, this symposium brings together scholars who think broadly and deeply about various forms of “toxicity” – social, sexual, economic, political, historically-situated, medical, as well as environmental – and the tales told about who and what is “toxic”, abnormal, diseased or harmful. Who represents “the folk” in Americana lore and in global narratives about progress? Where is the line between “traditionality” and “modernity,” who draws it, and what are its implications? How does “folk science” contribute to the making of current medical and agricultural innovations on a quickly heating planet? Drawing from Critical Race, Muslim, Indigenous, Queer and Environmental studies, this symposium’s storytellers will present on myriad “toxic tales” that span the intersections of folkloristics, queer theory, environmental and social justice, settler colonialism and structural racism in the United States and around the world.

- by Ruth Goldstein and +7
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- Native American Studies, Gender Studies, Anthropology, Social Sciences

Esse trabalho tem como objetivo abordar a desigualdade racial nas questões do acesso ao serviço público de abastecimento de água da população negra do bairro Rua Nova, em Feira de Santana-Bahia e analisa-lo a partir do racismo ambiental. Trata-se de pesquisa de abordagem qualitativa com técnicas de pesquisa definidas de forma a atender sua problemática, bem como atingir seus objetivos. Para tanto, foram realizados levantamento bibliográfico, entrevistas semiestruturadas, Observação Participante e análise dos dados coletados. Os argumentos apresentados pelos moradores do bairro sobre
a prestação do serviço público de abastecimento de água corroboram para a diferenciação das condições de tratamento da empresa pública com a população pobre e de maioria negra. Foi evidenciado o racismo ambiental na Rua Nova em relação ao acesso do serviço público de abastecimento de água, ao revelar a percepção dos moradores quanto às
atitudes tomadas pela estatal que deve oferecer um serviço de qualidade e sem discriminação.