Structural Environmental Injustice as a Matter of Collective Responsibility
While the precise definition of environmental justice is contested (Schlosberg, 2007), Kristin Shrader-Frechette provides this helpful characterization:
Environmental Justice requires both a more equitable distribution of environmental goods and bads and greater public participation in evaluating and apportioning these goods and bads....
evidence indicates that minorities... who are disadvantaged in terms of education, income, and occupation not only bear a disproportionate share of environmental risk and death, but also have less power to protect themselves.(2002, p. 6)
Particularly in light of Shrader-Frechette’s definition we might think of environmental justice as no more than a distributional problem. Indeed, the effects of environmental injustice — from air pollution to water contamination to climate change — are indeed typically expressed through distributional concerns. However, the patterns taken by these distributional concerns indicate the underlying social, political, and institutional structures of society are key contributors to environmental injustice (Shrader-Frechette, 2002; Walker, 2012; Carmin and Agyeman, 2011). Eckersley’s appeal to collective responsibility is intended in part to remind us that environmental justice is a matter of public concern, a responsibility we all have to alleviate conditions that systematically disadvantage one group at the expense of another.
Unlike individual injustices, where undeserved harms can be traced to the willful or negligent acts of identifiable ‘culprits,’ structural injustices are undeserved harms that are collectively produced through recurrent social practices that are considered ‘normal’ and therefore non-blameworthy.
(Eckersley, 2016,pp. 346-347)
Similarly, the problems of environmental justice are not primarily individual or distributional, but, as we will see, structural.
Along these lines it is common to frame environmental injustice as a form of structural injustice, yet despite the common appeal to structural injustice a formal account is elusive. On Iris Marion Young’s influential account,
Structural injustice exists when social processes put large categories of persons under a systematic threat of domination or deprivation of the means to develop and exercise their capacities, at the same time as these processes enable others to dominate or have a wide range of opportunities for developing and exercising their capacities.
(Young, 2006, p. 114)
We can think of the structure that frames Young’s account in terms of the systems of practices, laws, and expectations, the institutional environment, that makes the circumstances in which an individual acts so remarkably different, and, on occasion, so unfair. When a person is unable to vote because voting is only allowed during hours when that person is required to work, when a person is unable to relocate as required by their employer because there is no reliable childcare at their new location, when a person is unable to find housing that will provide a healthy and safe environment for her children, in all of these cases the institutional environment generates structural injustice (See Young, 2013, pp. 43—74). In such cases, the institutional environment in which individuals make their decisions is structured in a way that certain individuals face challenges that others do not. Fairness is systemically compromised, and environmental injustice threatens.
While the dependence of environmental injustice on our institutional environment is well established in the environmental justice literature (Bullard, 2000; Agyeman, 2013; Schlosberg, 2007), we can see this most clearly through a brief examination of three instances of environmental injustice.
Love Canal. In the late 1970s residents of the Love Canal development, just to the east of Niagara Falls, New York, discovered that their homes had been built on or in extremely close proximity to a stew of toxic chemicals.
While the precise composition of the chemicals was not publicly known, the chemical stew was widely understood to be highly toxic, and “no fewer than four major reports on Love Canal confirmed the presence of chemicals in homes” (Newman, 2016, p. 105). The health and well-being of locals was severely compromised. In the face of these threats to health and well-being, residents wanted out. However, they did not have the financial resources to leave without selling their homes (Newman, 2016, p. 102), and for obvious reasons they were unable to do so. Local residents “felt trapped in their own home[s]” (Newman, 2016, p. 109). They looked to an institutional or governmental response to facilitate their exit. But through a failure to recognize their predicament and need for relocation, it took years for any substantial support to be provided. Indeed, lack of political recognition and the corresponding lack of voice constituted a problem perhaps more severe than the economic challenges posed by relocation. The lack of voice of those in Love Canal, and the vulnerability exacerbated by that lack of voice, was not the result of the decisions made by those in Love Canal. Nor was it the fault of any one individual or collective agent. The problem came from institutional failures and social processes involving disposal of waste and the lack of oversight of waste disposal, the lack of corporate accountability, the failure of institutional oversight, economic pressures, and political inaction. The people of Love Canal faced a threat to their well-being and to a flourishing life, and their predicament was, initially, barely recognized.Of course, environmental toxins were not limited to Love Canal, and their wider distribution points to a more general problem, anticipated in this chapter’s epigraph. In the very different responses to the largely white community at risk in the Love Canal case, and the largely black community at risk in the Carver Terrace case (Shrader Frechette, 2002, p.7), we can see that the structural features of environmental justice are complex, many layered, and pervasive.
They are interwoven with structural racism, classism, regionalism, and the wide range of group differentiated vulnerabilities that permeate society more generally. Many of the problems that generate the unequal burdens of environmental pollution are tied to the failure to recognize the power differentials that allow for those who find themselves in a certain social or geographical situation to be subject to grave environmental harms.TransnationaI E-Waste. While the residents of Love Canal suffered from their unchosen proximity to toxic pollution from decades past, problems of environmental injustice arise with equal clarity and severity in the international arena. Through its comparative economic and political power, the developed world is able to draw the benefits of development while offloading the burdens and costs of that development. As described in a wide range of environmental justice literature (Walker, 2012; Shrader-Frechette, 2002; Carmin and Agyeman, 2011; Lepawsky, 2018), the cross-border movement of discarded and recycled electronics — cell phones, televisions, computers, printers, and the wide range of electronics so central to our contemporary world — provides a distressingly clear example of environmental injustice. Despite the 1989 adoption of the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal (Basel Convention, 2018), many parties have used loopholes surrounding recycling (along with outright violation of the convention) to transfer unwanted waste from the developed world to the developing world (Walker, 2012; Pellow, 2006, 2007; Basel Action Network, 2002, 2005, 2018). Those who bear the costs of this “e-waste,” through efforts at salvaging metals and other valuable materials, are dependent on the illicit practices that provide them with this “resource.” Under awful conditions the electronic goods generated for the use of the powerful and wealthy are “recycled” by those who could never afford those items, who need the meager economic benefit that comes from the scrap material salvaged from those items, who suffer the health consequences of working in highly toxic environments with no protective equipment, and who are compelled by the pressures of politics and economics to compromise their economic opportunities, physical health, and environmental well-being (Guardian, 2009; Pacific Standard, 2018).
Apart from the costs of this injustice in terms of the physical health of those working to salvage economically valuable materials from the waste, the case of e-waste points to the ability of power differentials to enable the exploitation of economic vulnerabilities half the world away (Lepawsky, 2018, pp. 71—91). With few economic, social, or personally viable options, and little or no political voice to contest these conditions, background economic and political pressures compromise one group for the sake of another, something akin to what Bullard (1992) calls “environmental blackmail.” Those who bear the costs are seldom recognized by those who use the products that are later salvaged, even as those who use the products benefit from the ability to have their products recycled. As Lepawsky (2018) points out, the need for reuse and repair lends itself to further vulnerabilities and demonstrates that the problem is not merely the dumping of e-waste, but a failure to recognize the voice, interests, and needs of those who serve as part of the chain of recovery, reuse, and disposal. The problems associated with dumping e-waste go well beyond questions of distribution; they result from a failure of recognition as well (Walker, 2012; Bullard, 1990).Climate Change. A further dimension of environmental justice can be seen in the case of the differential effects of climate change. Whereas Love Canal and the problem of e-waste focus on environmental pollution in geographically discrete locations, the burdens of climate change are global in distribution. However, that global distribution is far from equal (Caney, 2014; Shue, 2014; Schlosberg, 2012; Hayward, 2007). We expect populations that are economically less powerful, politically stifled, and geographically less mobile to bear the brunt of climate change. And these same populations — from the poor in urban regions of coastal nations to citizens of island nations to farmers working in climate compromised agricultural zones — have minimal voice in generating policy to mitigate emissions causing climate change or to adapt to its consequences.
The lack of distributional fairness of the burdens associated with our response to and the consequences of climate change is not entirely the result of the decisions of some collective agent, even if some of the harms and injustices associated with climate change could have been avoided or mitigated by the actions of various state actors. The cause of the injustice, the lack of fairness and imbalance of burdens and benefits on vulnerable populations, is largely a matter of economics, politics, and broad social conditions, that is, our institutional environment. These conditions allow the globe’s wealthy to live lives that generate carbon footprints that will affect them less than the vulnerable, and to do so in a way that renders inaudible the voice of those who suffer. The problem is as much a matter of recognition as it is of distribution. As Robyn Eckersley (2016) has argued, the unjust distribution of the harms associated with climate change, and the responsibilities we have to address those harms, are largely matters of structural injustice.Unifying these examples, the underlying environmental injustice has a recognitional component binding distributional problems to the institutional environment in which those distributional problems occur (Young, 1990, 2013; Frasier, 1998, 2000; Bullard, 1990; Alternet, 2016). In the cases referenced above, environmental injustice arises out of failures of recognition: “they stand in a position of being vulnerable” (Young, 2013, p. 45) to a set of threatening conditions out of their control and unacknowledged by the powerful. The voice of those subject to environmental injustice is unheard. That is to say, “part of the problem of injustice, and part of the reason for unjust distribution, is a lack of the recognition of group difference” (Schlosberg, 2007, p. 15). On this view, the distributional injustice that is often the clear expression of environmental injustice “comes directly out of social structures, cultural beliefs, and institutional contexts” (Schlosberg, 2007, p. 15). The need to recognize the social and institutional underpinnings of injustice, particularly in light of the power differentials between affected populations, makes clear that the relevant problems ofjustice are structural. It remains to be seen how the suppression of voice and the structural concerns that animate environmental injustice, matters of the institutional environment which seem largely to be out of the control of individual agents, can be a matter of collective responsibility.
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