Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger

By Julie Sze

“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein

We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles?
 
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9780520971981

Julie Sze

Julie Sze is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis and founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for the John Muir Institute for the Environment at UC Davis. Her first book, Noxious New York (MIT Press), won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Award for the best book published in American Studies.

Book preview

Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Endowment Fund in Environmental Studies.

AMERICAN STUDIES NOW: CRITICAL HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT

Edited by Lisa Duggan and Curtis Marez

Much of the most exciting contemporary work in American Studies refuses the distinction between politics and culture, focusing on historical cultures of power and protest on the one hand, or the political meanings and consequences of cultural practices, on the other. American Studies Now offers concise, accessible, authoritative, books on significant political debates, personalities, and popular cultural phenomena quickly, while such teachable moments are at the forefront of public consciousness.

1. We Demand: The University and Student Protests, by Roderick A. Ferguson

2. The Fifty-Year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit, by Scott Kurashige

3. Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, by Jack Halberstam

4. Boycott! The Academy and Justice for Palestine, by Sunaina Maira

5. Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism, by Shelley Streeby

6. Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century, by Barbara Ransby

7. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Americas, by Macarena Gómez-Barris

8. Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed, by Lisa Duggan

9. Being Brown: Sonia Sotomayor and the Latino Question, by Lázaro Lima

10. A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, by L. H. Stallings

11. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger, by Julie Sze

Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger

Julie Sze

UC Logo

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2020 by Julie Sze

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sze, Julie, author.

Title: Environmental justice in a moment of danger / Julie Sze.

Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019021691 (print) | LCCN 2019981055 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520300736 (cloth) | ISBN 9780520300743 (paperback) | ISBN 9780520971981 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Environmental justice. | Environmental justice—United States.

Classification: LCC GE220 .S94 2020 (print) | LCC GE220 (ebook) | DDC 363.7—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019021691

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019981055

Manufactured in the United States of America

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To friends, compatriots, and colleagues who struggle for justice. To all families coming together and to a better world. But mostly to Sasha, Sofia, and Leo.

CONTENTS

Overview

Introduction. Environmental Justice at the Crossroads of Danger and Freedom

1. This Movement of Movements

2. Environmental Justice Encounters

3. Restoring Environmental Justice

Conclusion. American Optimism, Skepticism, and Environmental Justice

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Selected Bibliography

OVERVIEW

INTRODUCTION. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AT THE CROSSROADS OF DANGER AND FREEDOM

This chapter introduces environmental justice as a social movement and discusses how it has changed over time. Environmental justice advocates conceptualize problems in a particular way that centers their lived experiences and histories.

Social Movements • Anti-immigration • Nationalist Authoritarianism • Climate Change Denial • Structure of Feeling • Freedom Struggles • Ideology and Hegemony

1. THIS MOVEMENT OF MOVEMENTS

This chapter reappraises the histories and theories of environmental racism and the role of Native struggles as fundamental to environmental justice, particularly in Indigenous conceptions of nature and worldviews of human and more-than-human life based on interconnection. It describes the Standing Rock Sioux struggle against the Dakota Access Pipeline, foregrounding activists, scholars, and allies who work on Indigenous land rights and sovereignty claims.

Indigenous Movements • Direct Action • Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) •#NoDAPL • Dispossession • Production • Extraction • Militarized and Police Violence • Just Transition • Climate Justice • Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) • Gender

2. ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE ENCOUNTERS

This chapter examines water injustice, slow and fast violence, and environmental racism in Flint, Michigan, and the Central Valley of California. Both are sites of environmental racism, a result of government policy based on neglect and of the concentration of corporate and business power at the expense of democracy and justice.

Radical Democracy • Flint • Central Valley • Deregulation/Privatization • Austerity • Crisis • Invisibility • Water Justice • Human Right to Water • Slow Violence • Storytelling

3. RESTORING ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

This chapter examines environmental and social disasters to illustrate where and how radical hope is generated in dark times, particularly through cultural production. After Hurricanes Katrina and Maria and in Kivalina, Alaska, there are glimmers of how peoples and communities hit hardest by natural and social disaster respond when brutalized by oil extraction, environmental racism, and colonialism.

Disasters • Restorative Environmental Justice • Reparation Ecologies • Anti-capitalism • Solidarity • Climate Justice • Zombie Environmentalism • Climate Debt • Just Recovery

CONCLUSION. AMERICAN OPTIMISM, SKEPTICISM, AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

Environmental justice movements challenge the authorities of whiteness, extraction, and violence through diverse voices, media, and perspectives that can be leveraged in powerful ways. They make links, within the United States and across borders, in order to create cultures of solidarity.

Whiteness • Death Cult • Empathy • Radical Hope • Ethics • Love • Solidarity • Optimism • Skepticism

Introduction

Environmental Justice at the Crossroads of Danger and Freedom

Stevie Wonder’s 1975 Saturn, from the epic Songs from the Key of Life, offers a lyrical utopia. Wonder penned the song as an ode to his birthplace (Saginaw), which his collaborator misheard as Saturn. The song is a loving testament to where Wonder came from and where he wants to go, a vision of a future world much better than the one we inhabit. Unclean air, violence, war, and consumerism are wrapped into an extraterrestrial longing. Four decades later, Wonder’s lyrical call is both more urgent and ever distant. In a nation where rapacious corporate capitalism is plundering natural resources, and oil and gas interests fund climate change denial and direct what passes for environmental policy, a world with clean air and without war, rampant consumerism, and extractive capitalism seems nearly impossible to imagine. It is precisely now that imagination and action become essential.

We are living at a precarious moment, with the warmest years ever measured, active assaults on both the disenfranchised and institutions that serve the public interest, and global inequality at its zenith. This moment demands an analysis through the crossroads, an important structuring metaphor in American Studies, taken from the story that bluesman Robert Johnson cut his deal with the devil down at the crossroads, trading his soul for genius.¹ We are now at a new, yet familiar crossroads and a moment of danger.² Neoliberalism idealizes markets, capital, consumer subjectivities, and values over communitarian notions of belonging or justice. We have lived (and died) under neoliberalism for decades, but under changing conditions. The valorization of privatization, finance, and the market and the retrenchment of the state and public sectors are both dominant and under stress. As one scholar writes, The present economic crisis is a moment of potential rupture, because prevailing regimes of power, profit and privilege are under serious pressure.³

Anti-immigrant sentiments, nationalist populist authoritarianism, militarized security discourses, racist policies, regressive gender politics, and climate change denial (or hostility) are linked, whether in the United States, Italy, India, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, Israel, or Poland. Awareness of environmental and other injustices, in the form of vibrant global social movements, is also on the rise because of social media. Although the global economic system is ever more integrated under neoliberalism, hostility to immigrants and refugees is high. Economic inequality has reached levels never seen before in any period of human history. The three richest people in the United States (Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates) own as much wealth as the bottom half of the population (160 million people).⁴ In 2013, the world’s eighty-five richest people had a net worth equal to that of 50 percent of the planet’s population (3.5 billion people).⁵ In 2017, the wealthiest global 1 percent gained 82 percent of the world’s wealth.⁶ It was also the third warmest year on record.⁷ Interwoven are crises of modernity (including declining faith in technical authority and scientific knowledge), attacks on media institutions, and the winding down of the American century (albeit with bellicose American exceptionalism denying its demise though red hats and Make America Great Again—MAGA—slogans).

This book begins with an observation: those on the environmental justice front lines have been living, dying, and fighting for a long time. The resurgence of explicit racism is unsurprising for justice activists, who see their lives impacted by legacies of structural domination and racist public policies. Social movements for environmental and climate justice are mobilizing large numbers of people (including virtually) and having a broad national and global impact outside of local contexts. Oil pipeline protests on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; responses to mass lead poisonings in Flint, Michigan; mobilizations against police killings of African Americans and other people of color; impassioned actions of Indigenous and small island populations in opposition to climate change—all comprise a snapshot of the hundreds of protests in the United States that have foregrounded the convergence between environmentalism and movements to combat social injustice and inequality. Environmental justice activists make common cause across the globe and mourn the victims of environmental violence and assassination, land defenders like Berta Cáceres in Honduras, Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, and Chico Mendes in Brazil, who all lost their lives in the struggle against dams and oil and forestry interests. Internationally, extrajudicial killings of those who oppose economic development and deforestation have accelerated, with the death rate rising in the last four years to an average of two activists a week.⁸

The central questions I explore here are based on intensifying social, political, economic, and environmental injustices and responses to these conflicts framed around these questions: What crossroads and moment are we in now? What can we learn from struggles for environmental justice in our moment of danger? My starting point is simple: environmental justice movements—what they are, who is involved, and what they are fighting against and for—help us understand historical and cultural forces and resistance to violence, death, and destruction of lives and bodies through movements, cultures, and stories.

It is precisely in this moment that understanding environmental justice movements is essential. In Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin writes that to articulate the past does not mean to recognize it the way it really was, but to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.⁹ This book is about the seizing hold of the significance of environmental justice movements. The moment of crisis is the moment of rupture: dominant belief systems and ideologies that dispute them come into view, or sharper relief.

My focus here is on environmental justice movements and the cultures and analytics they advance and embody. These social movements offer important guideposts for troubled times, because they and the people who make them have long-standing political commitments and have done important ideological work grounded in everyday and long-lasting struggles for justice. Starting from the premise that environmental damages are interwoven with political and social conflicts, this book examines how organizers, communities, and movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of environmental and social violence that challenges the very conditions of life itself.

This book offers a synthesis of environmental justice from a distinctly American Studies perspective, looking at Standing Rock; Flint; Hurricanes Katrina and Maria; Kivalina, Alaska; and the Central Valley of California. It spotlights how diverse peoples and communities invoke