Trends in EJ Flashcards
What is environmental racism?
“unequal distribution of environmental benefits and pollution based on race”
What is environmental inequity?
Encompasses additional factors associated with disproportionate impacts such as class, gender, immigration status, etc.
(some prefer b/c it’s more inclusive while others say it decentralizes race = problematic)
What is EJ?
The movement that arose in response to these problems.
Who are the stakeholders in the Environmental inequality formation?
government (federal, state, local), private capital, residents, social movements (environmental/social), and workers
What 2 important reports started the movement in the US?
Government Accountability Office (GAO) report: *Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communites (1983) and United Church of Christ: Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (1987).
What type of methodology did those reports use?
quantitative & spatial analysis/using direct action approaches
Findings from Toxic Waste and Race (1987)
- race was the most important factor
- 3/5 of African Americans live near abandoned toxic waste sites
- 60% of AA live in communities with 1 or more
- 3/5 of the largest commercial hazardous waste landfills are located in AA or Hispanic communities
What are the new populations that are being affected and their problems?
- Native Americans: battling with oil and gas pipelines & hazardous projects
- Asian & Latino immigrant workers: occupational exposures in the garment industry
- Farmworkers: health, safety & just compensation
New problems in EJ?
- Food justice
- Urban issues and transportation planning and access
- “Smart growth”, suburban sprawl, and “regional equity”
- Critiques of the prison-industrial complex
What are the new goals?
Desirable communities, equal rights to desirable space (not just elimination of toxic sites), and environmental benefits
What are the new methods?
- more advanced technical spatial analysis (more analysis of various factors on a fine scale)
- interdisciplinary approach
- community-based and grassroots (going back to roots since it started here but went towards more lobbying, fundraising, lobbying, etc.)
- First Env. movement led by POC
How are corporations damaging global environments?
Avoiding stricter environmental regulations at home so outsourcing labor and waste in other countries
What type of countries are facing this new wave of problems?
Nations that were previously colonized.
Issues from transnational inequality?
- Occupations with higher health hazards are exported
- Extraction of their natural resources for our processed goods
- Disposal of global waste
What are the 3 emerging trends?
- focus on the material and practices of everyday life (food and energy movement)
- still looking to work on community and the importance of attachment (urban planning, food/climate concerns, )
- interest in relationship between human practices and communities/ nonhuman nature
Materials Of Everyday Life?
- Focus isn’t on an external “nature”, but on the everyday environment
- Food security movement
- Food justice, food sovereignty, etc.
- Production, transportation, distribution, and consumption of good
Community, identity, and attachment?
- focus on space
- livable streets
- transit-oriented development
- democratization of streets
- focus on urban development & urban environment
- gentrification, displacement, homelessness
Human and nonhuman?
- A greater level of social and economic equity is essential to the goal of sustainability
- Hurricane Katrina solidified the links between climate change and EJ
- “A poor environment is not only a symptom of existing injustice; rather, a functioning environment provides the necessary conditions to achieve social justice” (Agyeman et al. 2016, pg. 335)
- Urban climate justice
- Global issues: UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) like an “institutional agenda for just sustainabilities”
