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Political Theory
Poor people live in poor environments. This is a near-universal truth that is fundamental to much environmental policy and theory in the developing world, where the sustainable development movement is organized around dealing with environmental problems through improving the life chances of the billions of resource-poor people who are forced to degrade their environments in the name of daily survival. The formula is equally applicable to the ‘developed’ world too, and in the USA it has given rise to a powerful movement for what has come to be called ‘environmental justice’. As Stephen Sandweiss says in David Camacho’s collection, ‘For most environmental justice activists, the problem is one of distributional inequity’ (p. 35), which is to say that environmental ‘bads’ are disproportionately found in the backyards of poor people and people of colour. The evidence of this inequity is now beyond dispute, and a number of the essays in Camacho’s Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles amount to further nails in the coffin of those who would believe that the risks associated with environmental degradation are somehow ‘democratic’. Camacho’s contributors make it clear that from Southern Arizona to New Mexico and from Mexico to Ohio, landfill sites and toxic wastes are disproportionately dumped on poor communities.
It is something of a mystery why Britain has no equivalent environmental justice movement, given that the structures of the distribution of environmental bads are, according to a recent Friends of the Earth survey, identical to those in the USA. Part of the answer might be given by Sandweiss who points out, in a perceptive essay on the social construction of environmental justice, that the movement’s success ‘can be attributed, to a considerable degree, to the ability of the movement to tap into the collective action frame of the civil rights movement’ (p. 32). Articulating environmental justice as a civil rights problem – particularly of racial discrimination – buys into a dignified tradition of campaigning in American political culture which affords it a recognition and legitimacy not so readily available in Britain.
Creditably, both books under review move beyond an identification of the problem of environmental injustice to what to do about it. The rather tenuous thread that holds Camacho’s collection of essays together is a question to which Camacho offers an affirmative answer: ‘Might ...the causes and consequences of environmental justice be located in the hierarchies of political power in the United States?’ (p. 3). Neither Camacho nor his contributors, though, offer a sustained programme for undoing these hierarchies, and this stands in marked contrast to David Schlosberg’s Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism which articulates a transformative ‘radical pluralist’ theory and practice. The key to Schlosberg’s radical pluralism is the belief that ‘procedural equity is a way to address both distribution and recognition’ (p. 13). For Schlosberg, the signal failure of the supposedly environment-friendly Clinton administration to make inroads into environmental problems is due to the unrepresentative nature of decision-makers – including those from the ‘Big Ten’ mainstream environmental organisations, such as the Sierra Club, drafted in by Clinton. Schlosberg argues for a politics of recognition in the belief that a democratization of process could assist the environmental justice movement’s aim of equalizing the distribution of environmental risks. It is not, he says, that ‘process is ...elevated above content, or inequitable environmental risks, but it is just as central’ (p. 184). Unsurprisingly, and in common with many other commentators on the green scene searching for solutions, all this leads Schlosberg to endorse ‘deliberative democracy’ which, in common with critical pluralism, ‘emphasizes ...processes over content, allowing for an institution of discursive practices among a plurality of positions, knowledges and understandings’ (p. 90). Schlosberg’s is a serious, well-grounded and original piece of work which makes a valuable contribution to both the normative and policy-related aspects of contemporary environmentalism.
A subtext of most books on environmental justice is the contrast between the environmental justice and the ‘mainstream’ movements, and these two texts are no exception. Invariably the mainstream movement comes off badly in this comparison because of its ‘focus on natural resources, wilderness, endangered species and the like, rather than toxics, public health, and the unjust distribution of environmental risks’ (Schlosberg, p. 9). This is odd, since it is rather like criticising a (British) liberal for his lack of interest in substantive equality, or a democratic socialist for her failure to enthusiastically endorse negative liberty. Such criticisms are fine, but they must be made on the understanding that conversion would involve a change of creed, not just a change of emphasis. Mainstream environmentalism and the environmental justice movement have different objectives, both of which are valid, but neither of which are synonymous. As Schlosberg points out, ‘The justice demanded by the environmental justice movement ...begins with two central issues: inequity in the distribution of environmental risk, and recognition of the diversity of the participants and experiences in the environmental-justice movement’ (p. 12). The absence of any mention of environmental sustainability, and what it might mean, is significant. The environmental justice movement sees it as a virtue to ‘expand the notion of environment by defining it not just as external nature or the “big outside”, but as the places where people live, work, and play’ (Schlosberg, p. 115), but it does so to the point where the cutting-edge meaning and importance of ‘environment’ that has made environmentalism such an important player in contemporary politics, disappears. Bath, Tanksi and Villareal ask whether ‘the failure to provide even minimum public services, such as water and sewage, represent a case of environmental racism?’ (in Camacho, p. 125). Racism, yes, but environmental racism? I think not.
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