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Environmental Justice (environmental + justice)
Terms modified by Environmental Justice Selected AbstractsToxic Torts, Politics, and Environmental Justice: The Case for Crimtorts,LAW & POLICY, Issue 2 2004THOMAS H. KOENIG The borderline between criminal and tort law has been increasingly blurred over the past quarter century by the emergence of new "crimtort" remedies which have evolved to deter and punish corporate polluters. Punitive damages, multiple damages, and other "crimtort" remedies are under unrelenting assault by neo-conservatives principally because, under this paradigm, the punishment for wrongdoing can be calibrated to the wealth of the polluter. If wealth-based punishment is eliminated by the "tort reformers," plaintiffs' victories in crimtort actions such as those portrayed in the movies Silkwood, A Class Action, and Erin Brockovich will become an endangered species. [source] Introduction Spaces of Environmental Justice: Frameworks for Critical EngagementANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Ryan Holifield First page of article [source] Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental JusticeANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Gordon Walker Abstract:, Over the last decade the scope of the socio-environmental concerns included within an environmental justice framing has broadened and theoretical understandings of what defines and constitutes environmental injustice have diversified. This paper argues that this substantive and theoretical pluralism has implications for geographical inquiry and analysis, meaning that multiple forms of spatiality are entering our understanding of what it is that substantiates claims of environmental injustice in different contexts. In this light the simple geographies and spatial forms evident in much "first-generation" environmental justice research are proving insufficient. Instead a richer, multidimensional understanding of the different ways in which environmental justice and space are co-constituted is needed. This argument is developed by analysing a diversity of examples of socio-environmental concerns within a framework of three different notions of justice,as distribution, recognition and procedure. Implications for the strategies of environmental justice activism for the globalisation of the environmental justice frame and for future geographical research are considered. [source] Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political EcologyANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Ryan Holifield Abstract:, Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT),in particular, the agency of nonhumans,while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT,specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour,provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the,social,and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities. [source] Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east EnglandANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Karen Bickerstaff Abstract:, In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises,and has impacted upon,national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human,nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute,and scale,EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice. [source] Defining and Contesting Environmental Justice: Socio-natures and the Politics of Scale in the DeltaANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Julie Sze Abstract:, This article examines a contemporary process intended to "identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento,San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California" (Delta Vision 2008, http://deltavision.ca.gov/AboutDeltaVision.shtml). Environmental injustices in the Delta are exacerbated by connected conflicts between knowledge and power, over the scale at which "environmental justice" and the "Delta" are understood through public policy. The rejection of environmental justice and the socio-natural in the Delta Vision process represents how contemporary policy processes are recreating and reenacting the power/knowledge dynamics that have defined the Delta, placed it on a path to ecological collapse and injected high levels of social and racial injustice in its landscape over the past 150 years. Our article combines an ethnographic and a historical geographical approach that contributes to the literature on environmental justice and scale and links with the literature on water governance and power to advance the task of defining environmental justice from the academic and policy perspectives. [source] Antiracism and Environmental Justice in an Age of Neoliberalism: An Interview with Van JonesANTIPODE, Issue 3 2009Anoop Mirpuri First page of article [source] Environmental Justice and Normative ThinkingANTIPODE, Issue 1 2009Gordon Walker No abstract is available for this article. [source] Environmental justice and Roma communities in Central and Eastern EuropeENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND GOVERNANCE, Issue 4 2009Krista Harper Abstract Environmental injustice and the social exclusion of Roma communities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has roots in historical patterns of ethnic exclusion and widening socioeconomic inequalities following the collapse of state socialism and the transition to multi-party parliamentary governments in 1989. In this article, we discuss some of the methodological considerations in environmental justice research, engage theoretical perspectives on environmental inequalities and social exclusion, discuss the dynamics of discrimination and environmental protection regarding the Roma in CEE, and summarize two case studies on environmental justice in Slovakia and Hungary. We argue that, when some landscapes and social groups are perceived as ,beyond the pale' of environmental regulation, public participation and civil rights, it creates local sites for externalizing environmental harms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. [source] RACIALIZED TOPOGRAPHIES: ALTITUDE AND RACE IN SOUTHERN CITIES,GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 1 2006JEFF UELAND ABSTRACT. This study examines altitudinal residential segregation by race in 146 cities in the U.S. South. It begins by embedding the topic in recent theorizations of the social construction of nature, the geography of race, and environmental justice. Second, it focuses on how housing markets, particularly in the South, tend to segregate minorities in low-lying, flood-prone, and amenity-poor segments of urban areas. It tests empirically the hypothesis that blacks are disproportionately concentrated in lower-altitude areas using gis to correlate race and elevation by digital elevation-model block group within each city in 1990 and 2000. The statistical results confirm the suspected trend. A map of coefficients indicates strong positive associations in cities in the interior South-where the hypothesis is confirmed-and an inverse relationship near the coast, where whites dominate higher-valued coastal properties. Selected city case studies demonstrate these relationships connecting the broad dynamics of racial segregation to the particularities of individual places. [source] A Random Utility Model of Environmental EquityGROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2000Diane Hite Past attempts to uncover evidence that economically disadvantaged groups are unjustly exposed to environmental disamenities have failed to take into account self-selection behavior of individuals or groups of individuals. For instance, when choosing a place to live, households may be trading environmental quality for other housing, neighborhood, and location characteristics they care about. Previous literature on environmental justice has investigated location choice of polluting industries, but fails to account for consumer self-selection in housing markets. This paper thus focuses on location choice of individuals based on observed housing transactions. From the results of a random utility model, a test is proposed that incorporates the no-envy concept of economic equity. The results support a finding for environmental discrimination with respect to African American households, but do not support the hypothesis that poor households in general are unfairly exposed to environmental disamenities. [source] The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental ProductionINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2009ERIK SWYNGEDOUW Abstract In recent years, urban research has become increasingly concerned with the social, political and economic implications of the techno-political and socio-scientific consensus that the present unsustainable and unjust environmental conditions require a transformation of the way urban life is organized. In the article, I shall argue that the present consensual vision of the urban environment presenting a clear and present danger annuls the properly political moment and contributes to what a number of authors have defined as the emergence and consolidation of a postpolitical and postdemocratic condition. This will be the key theme developed in this contribution. First, I shall attempt to theorize and re-centre the political as a pivotal moment in urban political-ecological processes. Second, I shall argue that the particular staging of the environmental problem and its modes of management signals and helps to consolidate a postpolitical condition, one that evacuates the properly political from the plane of immanence that underpins any political intervention. The consolidation of an urban postpolitical condition runs, so I argue, parallel to the formation of a postdemocratic arrangement that has replaced debate, disagreement and dissensus with a series of technologies of governing that fuse around consensus, agreement, accountancy metrics and technocratic environmental management. In the third part, I maintain that this postpolitical consensual police order revolves decidedly around embracing a populist gesture. However, the disappearance of the political in a postpolitical arrangement leaves all manner of traces that allow for the resurfacing of the properly political. This will be the theme of the final section. I shall conclude that re-centring the political is a necessary condition for tackling questions of urban environmental justice and for creating egalibertarian socio-ecological urban assemblages. Résumé Récemment, la recherche urbaine a montré un intérêt croissant pour les implications sociales, politiques et économiques du consensus techno-politique et socio-scientifique selon lequel les conditions environnementales actuelles, non viables et injustes, exigent que soit transformé le mode d'organisation de la vie urbaine. Or, cette perspective consensuelle de l'environnement urbain soumis à un danger manifeste et réel annihile le moment véritablement politique et contribue à ce que de nombreux auteurs ont défini comme l'apparition et la consolidation d'une situation post-politique et post-démocratique. Traitant ce thème essentiel, l'article tente d'abord de conceptualiser et de recentrer le politique en tant que moment critique dans les processus politico-écologiques urbains. Ensuite, il montrera que la mise en scène particulière du problème environnemental et de ses modes de gestion indique, et aide à consolider, un état post-politique, dans lequel le véritablement politique est évacué du plan de l'immanence sous-jacent à toute intervention politique. La consolidation d'une situation post-politique urbaine se fait en parallèle à la formation d'un dispositif post-démocratique qui a remplacé débat, désaccord et dissension par une panoplie de technologies gouvernementales gravitant autour de mesures de consensus, d'accord et de responsabilité, associées à une gestion technocratique de l'environnement. Une troisième partie soutient que cet ordre policé consensuel post-politique se rapproche nettement du geste populiste. Toutefois, la disparition du politique d'un dispositif post-politique laisse toutes sortes de traces permettant la réémergence du véritablement politique. Cet aspect est au c,ur de la dernière partie. Pour conclure, le recentrage du politique est un préalable au traitement des questions de justice en matière d'environnement urbain et à la création d'assemblages urbains socio-écologiques d'égaliberté. [source] Environmental Justice Imperatives for an Era of Climate ChangeJOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 1 2009Mark Stallworthy This paper is about intra- and inter-generational equity, connecting environmental justice discourse with necessary responses to climate change. It offers a review of the role of globalization in this pervasive context, contrasting the disaggregated nature of localized impacts, and seeks to address the potential for adjusting law-policy frameworks as a key part of the search for solutions. It argues that environmental justice approaches can incorporate values into law-policy processes based upon vital aspects of the integrity and functioning of communities, distributional fairness, and capacities for wider engagement and participation in the search for necessary behavioural change. The conclusion is that the ultimate success of the urgent process of addressing climate-related threats, through a meaningful degree of mitigation and adaptation, and multiple levels of decision-making and response, must be informed by the precepts of environmental justice. [source] CULTIVATING JUST PLANNING AND LEGAL INSTITUTIONS: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE SOUTH CENTRAL FARM STRUGGLE IN LOS ANGELESJOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 1 2009CLARA IRAZÁBAL ABSTRACT:,The South Central Farm (SCF) in Los Angeles was a 14-acre urban farm in one of the highest concentrations of impoverished residents in the county. It was destroyed in July 2006. This article analyzes its epic as a landscape of resistance to discriminatory legal and planning practices. It then presents its creation and maintenance as an issue of environmental justice, and argues that there was a substantive rationale on the basis of environmental justice and planning ethics that should have provided sufficient grounds for the city to prevent its dismantling. Based on qualitative case study methodology, the study contributes to the formulation of creation and preservation rationales for community gardens and other "commons" threatened by eventual dismantlement in capitalist societies. [source] Environmental Obligations and the Limits of Transnational CitizenshipPOLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2009Andrew Mason Notions of cosmopolitan and environmental citizenship have emerged in response to concerns about environmental sustainability and global inequality. But even if there are obligations of egalitarian justice that extend across state boundaries, or obligations of environmental justice to use resources in a sustainable way that are owed to those beyond our borders, it is far from clear that these are best conceptualised as obligations of global or environmental citizenship. Through identifying a core concept of citizenship, I suggest that citizenship obligations are, by their nature, owed (at least in part) in virtue of other aspects of one's common citizenship, and that obligations of justice, even when they arise as a result of interconnectedness or past interactions, are not best conceived as obligations of citizenship in the absence of some other bond that unites the parties. Without ruling out the possibility of beneficial conceptual change, I argue that Andrew Dobson's model of ecological citizenship is flawed because there is no good reason to regard the obligations of environmental justice which it identifies as obligations of ecological citizenship, and that other models of cosmopolitan or global citizenship face a similar objection. [source] How can Political Liberals be Environmentalists?POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 4 2002Derek Bell It is often assumed that neutralist liberalism and environmentalism are incompatible because promoting environmentally friendly policies involves endorsing a particular conception of the good life. This paper questions that assumption by showing that one important version of neutralist liberalism, John Rawls's ,justice as fairness', can allow two kinds of justification for environmental policies. First, public reason arguments can be used to justify conceptions of sustainability and environmental justice. Second, comprehensive ideals (including non-anthropocentric ideals) can be used to justify more ambitious environmental policies when two conditions are met, namely, the issue under discussion does not concern constitutional essentials or matters of basic justice; and the policy is endorsed by a majority of citizens. Rawls's willingness to allow this second kind of justification for environmental (and other) policies is defended against two objections, which claim that Rawls's ,democratic liberalism' is incoherent. The first objection , the ,justice' objection , is that to spend public money promoting comprehensive (environmental) ideals is inconsistent with the ,difference principle'. The ,justice' objection depends on a common misunderstanding of the difference principle. The second objection , the ,neutrality' objection , claims that ,democratic liberalism' is inconsistent with Rawls's commitment to neutrality. The ,neutrality' objection is unconvincing because ,democratic liberalism' is ,fundamentally neutral' whereas the leading alternative is not. [source] Legislating Against Climate Change: A UK Perspective on a Sisyphean ChallengeTHE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 3 2009Article first published online: 1 MAY 200, Mark Stallworthy The UK's Climate Change Act offers a framework for civil society to achieve ,low carbon' realignment through to 2050. The Act is reviewed for its coherence as a mechanism for directing future policy. The legislation establishes a carbon budgetary process, mandates greenhouse gas reduction targets and strategies, and imposes a novel range of duties supported by processes for ensuring transparency concerning progress. Following an overview of climate change risks and likely economic consequences, the analysis identifies selected regulatory strategies. It explores the main statutory features, with an emphasis upon the implications of imposing mandatory duties on decision makers. An evaluation of the key policy choice of emissions trading is informed by perspectives of environmental justice, in particular as to questions of equitable burden-sharing in relation to impacts of climate change and related policies. A concluding section summarises reasonable expectations and ongoing challenges. [source] Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of Environmental JusticeANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Gordon Walker Abstract:, Over the last decade the scope of the socio-environmental concerns included within an environmental justice framing has broadened and theoretical understandings of what defines and constitutes environmental injustice have diversified. This paper argues that this substantive and theoretical pluralism has implications for geographical inquiry and analysis, meaning that multiple forms of spatiality are entering our understanding of what it is that substantiates claims of environmental injustice in different contexts. In this light the simple geographies and spatial forms evident in much "first-generation" environmental justice research are proving insufficient. Instead a richer, multidimensional understanding of the different ways in which environmental justice and space are co-constituted is needed. This argument is developed by analysing a diversity of examples of socio-environmental concerns within a framework of three different notions of justice,as distribution, recognition and procedure. Implications for the strategies of environmental justice activism for the globalisation of the environmental justice frame and for future geographical research are considered. [source] Actor-Network Theory as a Critical Approach to Environmental Justice: A Case against Synthesis with Urban Political EcologyANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Ryan Holifield Abstract:, Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT),in particular, the agency of nonhumans,while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT,specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour,provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the,social,and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities. [source] Gendered Geographies of Environmental InjusticeANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Susan Buckingham Abstract:, As environmental justice concerns become more widely embedded in environmental organizations and policymaking, and increasingly the focus of academic study, the gender dimension dissolves into an exclusive focus on race/ethnicity and class/income. While grassroots campaigning activities were often dominated by women, in the more institutionalized activities of organizations dominated by salaried professionals, gender inequality is neglected as a vector of environmental injustice, and addressing this inequality is not considered a strategy for redress. This paper explores some of the reasons why this may be so, which include a lack of visibility of gendered environmental injustice; professional campaigning organizations which are themselves gender blind; institutions at a range of scales which are still structured by gender (as well as class and race) inequalities; and an intellectual academy which continues to marginalize the study of gender,and women's,inequality. The authors draw on experience of environmental activism, participant observation, and other qualitative research into the gendering of environmental activity, to first explore the constructions of scale to see how this might limit a gender-fair approach to environmental justice. Following this, the practice of "gender mainstreaming" in environmental organizations and institutions will be examined, demonstrating how this is limited in scope and fails to impact on the gendering of environmental injustice. [source] Acknowledging the Racial State: An Agenda for Environmental Justice ResearchANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Hilda E. Kurtz Abstract:, This paper argues that environmental justice scholars have tended to overlook the significance of the state's role in shaping understandings of race and racism, and argues for the use of critical race theory to deepen insight into the role of the state in both fostering and responding to conditions of racialized environmental injustice. Critical race theory offers insights into both why and how the state manages racial categories in such a way as to produce environmental injustice, and how the state responds to the claims of the environmental justice movement. Closer attention to the interplay between the racial state and the environmental justice movement as a racial social movement will yield important insights into the conditions, processes, institutions and state apparatuses that foster environmental injustice and that delimit the possibilities for achieving environmental justice in some form or another. [source] Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east EnglandANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Karen Bickerstaff Abstract:, In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises,and has impacted upon,national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human,nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute,and scale,EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice. [source] Defining and Contesting Environmental Justice: Socio-natures and the Politics of Scale in the DeltaANTIPODE, Issue 4 2009Julie Sze Abstract:, This article examines a contemporary process intended to "identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento,San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California" (Delta Vision 2008, http://deltavision.ca.gov/AboutDeltaVision.shtml). Environmental injustices in the Delta are exacerbated by connected conflicts between knowledge and power, over the scale at which "environmental justice" and the "Delta" are understood through public policy. The rejection of environmental justice and the socio-natural in the Delta Vision process represents how contemporary policy processes are recreating and reenacting the power/knowledge dynamics that have defined the Delta, placed it on a path to ecological collapse and injected high levels of social and racial injustice in its landscape over the past 150 years. Our article combines an ethnographic and a historical geographical approach that contributes to the literature on environmental justice and scale and links with the literature on water governance and power to advance the task of defining environmental justice from the academic and policy perspectives. [source] | |||||||||||||