Environmental Justice

Theoretical Lens

Academic research employing an environmental justice lens tends to be interdisciplinary, participatory and concentrated in the social sciences. It is concerned with systemic issues of power and ownership in relation to nature, capital and labour that produce disparities in access to environmental benefits, such as parks, gardens, bike paths or farmer's markets, and in the distribution of environmental burdens, such as air and water pollution, contaminated soils and toxics in the workplace. Scholars working in this area tend to cast a broad net to allow consideration of how the exploitative relationships between industrial actors and marginalized communities, including workers, transcend into peoples' everyday lives. These scholar-activists are typically interested in breaking down the disciplinary boundaries that may exist between research on health, work and environmental issues. At its most basic, employing an environmental justice lens means that we take account of the sharing of costs and benefits associated with environmental policy and natural resource development decisions and the extent to which the decision-making has meaningfully included the participation of the affected communities.

Social Movement: ‘We Speak for Ourselves'

The environmental justice movement distinguishes itself from the mainstream environmental movement by making grass-roots political organizing its central priority. Where environmentalists over the past three decades have invested heavily in legal strategies as a means to achieve social change, the environmental justice movement, in contrast, explicitly calls this focus on law reform into question by noting how it continues to privilege elites at the expense of people working on the ground to improve their communities. Similarly, the environmental justice movement has focused on the health and well-being of people rather than on the need to protect ‘the environment’, conceptualized as wilderness spaces, endangered species or national parks, with the last sometimes dismissed as ‘playgrounds for the rich’. Thus, activists in the environmental justice movement are increasingly turning their attention to environmental harms derived not only from air, water or soil contamination but also from toxic workplaces, [Page 300]urban planning and transit decisions, conditions in public housing projects (e.g. lead paint or mould), water and sanitation services on native reserves, urban ‘food deserts' and so on. Their work highlights the relationships between profit incentives, the unsustainable production of waste, exploitative labour practices and differential exposure to pollutants. At the same time, environmental justice activism and scholarship emanating from within indigenous communities tends to emphasize the interconnectedness of people and their environments and the narrowness and short-sightedness of the approach that would separate the well-being of ecosystems from those who depend on them.

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