Environmental and Social Justice in Sustainable Materialist Movements

2019 ◽  
pp. 49-77
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg ◽  
Luke Craven
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Social Attachments

Many of the movements we examine define themselves, in part and in name, as movements for social and environmental justice. We explore what activists and organizations actually mean by justice. Unlike other movements for environmental justice, equity is rarely an explicit concern. We find three key areas of justice articulated by movement activists: the crucial nature of political and material participation, the importance of responding to power, and, in particular, the necessity to address basic capabilities and everyday needs. All of these are articulated at both individual and community levels, with the functioning of communities, and social attachments to that community, central to conceptions of justice.

The Comparative Politics of Environmental Justice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kemi Fuentes-George
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Agricultural Development ◽  
Close Association ◽  
The United States ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Environmental Injustice ◽  
Environmental Advocacy

Although the terms “environmental justice” and “environmental racism” emerged due to race-based mobilization in the United States, justice is a constant feature of environmental struggles around the world. Pursuing social justice in environmental advocacy can be difficult, but case studies of activism in places including New Zealand, Mexico, Jamaica, Brazil, and the United States show that it is possible. Environmental injustice emerges when populations that are already politically and socioeconomically marginalized disproportionately bear the costs of environmental consumption, and they are often systematically excluded from the benefits of this consumption. Although different political systems vary in how they structure marginalization, this close association of social injustice with environmental injustice characterizes cases like fossil fuel extraction in industrialized countries and agricultural development in the Global South alike. While skeptics have argued that promoting environmentalism is counterproductive to social justice, because environmental regulations often constrain economic growth, combining the two can lead to more sustainable environmental practices.

Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of History

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin V. Melosi
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Agenda Setting ◽  
Health Hazards ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Environmental Organizations ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Earth

The emergence of the environmental justice movement in the 1980s has stimulated much debate on the extent to which race and class have been or should become central concerns of modern environmentalism. Leaders in the environmental justice movement have charged that mainstream environmental organizations and, in turn, environmental policy have demonstrated a greater concern for preserving wilderness and animal habitats than addressing health hazards of humans, especially those living in cities; have embraced a “Save the Earth” perspective at the expense of saving people's lives and protecting their homes and backyards. Some advocates of environmental justice have gone so far as to dissociate their movement from American environmentalism altogether, rather identifying with a broader social justice heritage as imbedded in civil rights activities of the 1950s and 1960s.

Environmentalism Unbound: Exploring New Pathways for Change By Robert Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. 408p. $29.95.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 613-613 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schlosberg
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Pollution Prevention ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
Movement Strategies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Common Vision

The key argument of Robert Gottlieb's Environmentalism Unbound is that an integrated focus on pollution prevention and environmental justice can lay the groundwork for fundamental environmental and social change (p. xiii). The aim is to develop a common vision and a more “embracing language” for environmentalism that is more broadly appealing than a mainstream focus on nature and species and more broadly applicable to a range of environmental and social issues. Such an expanded environmental discourse—integrating the workplace, the social, and the ecological—would make for an unbounded and more successful environmentalism. This is another wonderful offering by Gottlieb, right up there with his Forcing the Spring (1993). The recognition of diverse discourses of environmentalism and social justice is a challenge to movement strategies, and Gottlieb takes on the issue with a focus on both a broad vision and everyday practice.

Masturbatory Ecologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-59
Author(s):  
Jeremy Chow
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
The Erotic

This essay considers how environmentalism can be interwoven with discourses of sexuality and the ways in which sexuality can participate in environmental justice movements. By thinking with provocative, erotic media that highlight environmental degradation, it marries investigations of ecological crisis at the hands of deforestation and porn studies with two aims. First, it highlights the fraught relationship a pornographic video aggregator like Pornhub might share with feminist and queer epistemologies. Second, it emphasizes the ecosexual nature of environmental justice by way of Pornhub’s Give America Wood initiative (2014) and the documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014). While Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Pornhub are incommensurate in many ways, together they demonstrate how masturbatory ecologies enable a relationship with the environment that can be both active, as in the film’s offering, and passive, as with Pornhub’s, and thus constitute a “perverted” environmental justice through the experience and demonstration of sexuality. A perverted environmental justice envisions a broader framework that recognizes the potential to actively and passively participate in environmental social justice while also enfolding the environment into sexual arrangements. “Masturbatory ecologies” thus signifies a self-gratifying mode of environmentalism that harnesses the self, the body, and the erotic to foster positive environmental world building in apocalyptic times.

scholarly journals The Commodification of Food, Farming and Farmers: A Critical Review of Farm Laws, 2020

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 18-26
Author(s):  
Vinay Sankar
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Critical Review ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Present Review ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
Peasant Resistance

The recently enacted Farm Laws in India has led to widespread and vigorous protests across the country. It has been hailed as a watershed moment by the neoliberal market analysts and is compared to the 1991 economic reforms, based on the notions of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation. A critical review of these laws and amendments needs to be situated in the larger narrative of commodification, wherein certain essential goods and services are appropriated and standardised and traded at market-determined prices. The present review intends to place these new laws in the broader policies and ‘projects’ of neoliberalisation of nature. A critical look at these laws shows that they have profound implications for social justice and environmental sustainability. It seeks to cross-question the food question and the peasant question by revisiting the ontological questions of what constitutes food and farming. It considers the new debate and the old vision of ‘food as commons’, and find that the new laws are, in fact, a continuation of attempts by neoliberal markets and states to commodify food and farming activities. Nevertheless, such attempts, for various reasons, face active resistance in the form of countermovements by the peasantry and enter the arena of political economy. The review argues that the present peasant resistance should be considered as part of the larger environmental justice movements.

scholarly journals Equality in the Air We Breathe

2018 ◽  
pp. 246-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey Dillon ◽  
Julie Sze
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Toxic Exposure ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Politics Of Difference

This chapter brings an interdisciplinary and social justice perspective to the concept and practices of "sustainability" by foregrounding the work of anti-racist struggles in U.S. cities, like Black Lives Matter. It asserts that anti-racist struggles have always been struggles about life-sustaining environments, at least as "the environment" is defined by the environmental justice movement as the place where people "live, work, and play. It suggests an alternative notion of sustainability, as it has long been theorized by and lived through black and brown lives, focusing on breath and breathing as an intimate geography of race and toxic exposure. In so doing it contributes to the challenge to sustainability practitioners to rethink their ideologies and practices through a politics of difference.

Occupational and Environmental Health Equity and Social Justice

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Roelofs ◽  
Sherry L. Baron ◽  
Sacoby Wilson ◽  
Aaron Aber
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Health ◽  
Health Equity ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Labor Unions ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Community Planning ◽  
Ethnic Discrimination ◽  
Racial And Ethnic Discrimination

This chapter describes occupational and environmental health equity and social justice in its various dimensions. Case studies are utilized to demonstrate specific issues and how to address them. Topics covered include workplace injustice, racial and ethnic discrimination, inadequate government protection, environmental exposures and health equity, environmental injustice and health disparities, and residential segregation, environmental hazards, and health. In addition, the chapter covers environmental justice, community planning and development, and the roles of labor unions as well as nongovernmental organizations. One section deals with environmental justice and the built environment. A final section addresses approaches to decreasing occupational and environmental health inequities.

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