Chapter 7 Evaluating Environmental Justice Claims
May 1, 2006
Chapter in BriefAnnotated Resources
Bibliography (Download in PDF: 18KB)
Chapter in Brief
Robert Figueroa uses the cases in the book to illustrate the various modes of injustice that often characterize environmental controversies. In every case, he points out, a community is forced to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden of a harmful industrial practice or an environmental policy, or is unjustly deprived of a resource. Compounding these inequities is a keen awareness within the victim community that their voices are not heard and that their values, interests, and identities are not respected. Those communities that are repeatedly denied a fair hearing within the policy process are often left feeling despair or anger, which they sometimes convert into social action in the form of an environmental justice movement. Figueroa stresses the importance of public recognition of the damage to environmental identity—cultural identity as it relates to one’s environmental surroundings—by both environmental assaults and insensitive policies, which is typically overlooked in remedies to environmental injustice. Damage to environmental identity can be devastating and irreversible, and justice measures that do not account for it are only partial.
Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster. From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2001.
Written by two environmental justice experts—one a lawyer, the other a medical sociologist—this is a thorough and accessible volume on environmental racism in the United States. The cases are well-detailed and the accounts of racism and justice in process are sophisticated and insightful.
Robert Melchior Figueroa. Debating the Paradigms of Justice: The Bivalence of Environmental Justice. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1999.
Drawing upon Nancy Fraser's account of bivalent justice this book constitutes one of the first extensive arguments in the environmental justice literature for explicitly linking the paradigms of justice—distributive and recognition. It contains a philosophical analysis of environmental racism in the United States, as well as a survey of literature and arguments that reconfigure theories of justice to offer a practical application in environmental struggles.
Robert Gottlieb. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993.
This book is a groundbreaking environmental history of the United States, depicting two parallel environmental movements that started simultaneously in the 19th century. Gottleib, director of the Urban Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, describes the environmental justice movement, beginning with the reformist period in American history, and the ways in which the mainstream environmental movement appropriated and professionalized the grassroots knowledge of women, working classes, and racial/ethnic minorities. Gottlieb insightfully rewrites the history of the origins of the American environmental justice movement, dating its emergence nearly a hundred years prior to the most common accounts.
Rachel Stein, ed. New Perspectives in Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
A much anticipated account of the relationship between gender and sexuality in environmental justice contexts, this is a rich collection of case studies, environmental literature, and environmental history. Its contributors include major figures in feminism and gender theory, as well as leading environmental theorists who expand the horizons of environmental justice thinking.
This is a vital resource for environmental justice activists and educators. It considers both American and international contexts, and includes a number of useful case studies.
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