scholarly journals Marrying Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism: The Rising Voices of Dissent in American Environmentalism

2019 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohamed E. Bakari
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Environmental Hazards ◽  
Contemporary History ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
National Consensus

In light of multiple significant incidents in its contemporary history, the American environmental movement (EM) seems to be at a crossroads as the national consensus on this movement—forged during the 1970s—starts to crack under the strain of rising challenges. Communities most adversely affected by environmental hazards—usually referred to as communities of color and labor—now seem to be estranged from and ignored by a mostly ecocentric movement they can hardly identify with. Against such a backdrop,I examine the emergence of new dissenting ‘anthropocentric’ voices within the American EM—most notably the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM)—and discuss the multiple facets of the anthropocentric-ecocentric divide and its bearing on the evolution of the movement. I will further analyze whether the emerging sustainability discourse will be able to contain this ideological divide and offer a reconciliation framework for a harmonization of these movements’ objectives, policies, and modes of activism.

Vulnerable Bodies

2019 ◽  
pp. 281-292
Author(s):  
Julie Avril Minich
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Ethics ◽  
Environmental Hazards ◽  
Pesticide Poisoning ◽  
Social Justice Movements ◽  
Mission District ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Justice Movements

This essay examines how the Chicana feminist muralist Juana Alicia fosters environmental justice activism that values vulnerable lives in her two most famous murals, both painted at Twenty-Fourth and York Streets in San Francisco’s Mission District: Las Lechugueras (1983) and La Llorona’s Sacred Waters (2004). It explores how Juana Alicia gives visual form to an environmental ethics that prompts a politics of inclusion, equitable resource distribution, and bodily diversity. Juana Alicia’s murals remind us what antiracist, feminist, disability, environmental, and other social justice movements share: an investment in radical interdependence between different kinds of bodies and beings. They depict disabilities created by environmental hazards (including pollution, pesticide poisoning, and the privatization of water) without reducing disability to tragedy, prompting viewers to envision a world in which working-class communities of color are not forced to bear the brunt of environmental risk.

Environmental Justice: Making Policy, One Skirmish at a Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Baehler
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Environmental Hazards ◽  
Vulnerable Population ◽  
Environmental Discourse ◽  
The Core ◽  
Established Fact ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
Vulnerable Population Groups

Environmental justice refers to both a concept and a social movement that originally spun off from the American civil rights establishment in the 1980s. The core idea focuses on the now well-established fact that members of vulnerable population groups tend to experience disproportionately higher levels of exposure to environmental hazards, less access to green amenities, and fewer opportunities to have their environmental concerns heard and remedied compared to their wealthier and whiter counterparts. Environmental justice terminology is deeply embedded in contemporary environmental discourse and governance in multiple countries, but its ability to alleviate real instances of environmental mal-distribution has been strongest at the local level thanks to the concept’s power to mobilize diverse networks of activists around local causes.

Foundation Funding of the Environmental Movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (13) ◽  
pp. 1640-1657 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Craig Jenkins ◽  
Jason T. Carmichael ◽  
Robert J. Brulle ◽  
Heather Boughton
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
Systematic Data ◽  
Environmental Discourses ◽  
Constant Dollar ◽  
Foundation Funding ◽  
Movement Organizations ◽  
Alternative Discourses

We address the long-standing debate between elite theorists and pluralists about the priorities and scale of foundation funding for social movements by examining systematic data on foundation grants to environmental movement organizations (EMOs) between 1961 and 2000. By combining these data with a comprehensive inventory of EMOs that operated in this period, we show that foundation giving favored conservative mainstream environmental discourses, EMOs that avoided protest, older EMOs, and those located in the northeastern seaboard. Despite major growth in the constant dollar value of foundation giving to EMOs, this remains a highly concentrated system of philanthropy with over half of all foundation grants going to the top 20 grant recipients, a third of which have been leading recipients for over five decades. Nonetheless, there is evidence of change in that alternative discourses, especially environmental justice, received over 5% of these grants in 2000.

Environmental Justice in Warehousing Location

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 287-298 ◽  
Author(s):  
Quan Yuan
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Impacts ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Location Choice ◽  
Spatial Relationship ◽  
Environmental Hazards ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Firm Location ◽  
Spatial Expansion ◽  
Disadvantaged Population

With the rapid spatial expansion of the warehousing industry in major metropolitan areas, environmental impacts associated with warehousing activities have been growing in the recent decades. This study focuses on the disproportionate distribution of warehousing facilities in disadvantaged neighborhoods and discusses how the disparities result from the interactions between various socioeconomic processes. From the perspective of environmental justice, warehousing-related environmental hazards affect the spatial relationship between warehouses and local communities. The changing factors in the firm location choice of warehousing facilities and the housing location choice of disadvantaged population jointly lead to the environmental justice problem in warehousing location.

scholarly journals The Intersection of Race, Immigration Status, and Environmental Justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (14) ◽  
pp. 3942 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Pellow ◽  
Jasmine Vazin
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Environmental Injustice ◽  
Institutional Practices ◽  
Environmental Racism ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Immigrant Detention

Environmental injustice occurs when marginalized groups face disproportionate environmental impacts from a range of threats. Environmental racism is a particular form of environmental injustice and frequently includes the implementation of policies, regulations, or institutional practices that target communities of color for undesirable waste sites, zoning, and industry. One example of how the United States federal and state governments are currently practicing environmental racism is in the form of building and maintaining toxic prisons and immigrant detention prisons, where people of color and undocumented persons are the majority of inmates and detainees who suffer disproportionate health risk and harms. This article discusses the historical and contemporary conditions that have shaped the present political landscape of racial and immigration conflicts and considers those dynamics in the context of the literature on environmental justice. Case studies are then presented to highlight specific locations and instances that exemplify environmental injustice and racism in the carceral sector. The article concludes with an analysis of the current political drivers and motivations contributing to these risks and injustices, and ends with a discussion of the scale and depth of analysis required to alleviate these impacts in the future, which might contribute to greater sustainability among the communities affected.

Conditions and Consequences of ELULU Improvement: Environmental Justice Lessons from San Francisco, CA

2020 ◽  
pp. 0739456X2092940
Author(s):  
Miriam Solis
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Low Income ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Community Based ◽  
Communities Of Color ◽  
Neighborhood Relationship ◽  
Locally Unwanted Land Uses

Existing locally unwanted land uses (ELULUs) are disproportionately located in low-income communities of color. As ELULUs fall into disrepair, can planners redevelop them in ways that advance environmental justice and, if so, how? Through a case study of a San Francisco ELULU redevelopment planning process, this article highlights the central role of community-based organizing in generating policy changes that promoted certain environmental justice outcomes. A reconceptualization of the agency-neighborhood relationship was key. Findings also identify the obduracy of infrastructure and directed redress as central planning considerations and tensions.

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