COLUMN
BY ELLIOTT SCHWEBACH
Imagine, for a moment, that you are tasked with describing a healthy, just, and responsible environmental politics. What comes to mind?
If we were in a large room, many of us would probably not be surprised to hear our colleagues mention sustainability, the protection of natural land and resources, or practices like recycling, taking public transit, or buying local produce.
Let’s make it more challenging. Do some nonhuman life forms have the right to not die by human hands? If we answer yes, upon what characteristics do we base that determination? Is it sentience? (And if so, how do we define sentience?) Is it ecological carrying capacity, the population density that can be sustained for living creatures without degrading resources or ecosystem health? (And if so, should ecologists determine who gets to take or consume nonhuman forms of life, and when, how, and why they can do so? Should this be enforceable by government authority?)
Let’s make it even more complicated. Who should be, or who is, responsible for the climate crises on humanity’s horizon? Is it, as suggested by the prefix of our “Anthropocene” era, humankind itself? Or are climate crises a result of particular systems of production, governance, and consumption, such as those tied to industrialization and the global expansion of capital markets?
How does our understanding of the proper response to pressing environmental issues depend on how we answer these questions?
In significant ways, ideas about justice have expanded in recent years. As this column has explored, the approaches of distributive justice, restorative justice, reparative justice, and transitional justice have encouraged us to conceive of justice less individualistically. Justice in these approaches goes beyond personal virtue with respect to written law and more deeply involves social institutions, including the state.
However, even for those who adopt the more radical or progressive approaches, the universe of justice in distributive, restorative, reparative, and transitional justice often remains limited to humans. In response, as an attempt to correct what some consider a problematic and limiting disposition (especially in the face of contemporary ecological crises), environmental justice has emerged.
The term itself, environmental justice, often abbreviated EJ, did not become widely employed until the 1980s, and in its common usage today it most often refers to policy initiatives that involve a wide range of community stakeholders in decisions about environmental health. This definition owes a great deal to the impact of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice, established in 1992, which advocates on behalf of communities disproportionately affected by environmental harms—such as pollution, contaminated water, and hazardous waste—and engages these impacted groups in developing policy solutions.
This institutional approach also developed, in part, from grassroots movements of the prior decade, such as the activism of the primarily Black residents of rural Warren County, North Carolina, who led marches and nonviolent protests in response to North Carolina’s decision to dump tens of thousands of tons of contaminated, toxic soil in their community.11 “This is environmental racism,” The Washington Post, April 6 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/environmental-justice-race/.
And yet, to speak of environmental justice as a single or ready-made framework may be somewhat off base. Given that EJ views the natural environment (including human relationships with and within nature) as an integral part of justice itself, a multitude of challenging questions follow, and EJ can mean different things to different people.
To understand how “justice” might be affected by its “environmental” modifier, let’s examine what we mean when we refer to the natural environment. For early conservationists, including President Theodore Roosevelt, the potential for depletion of nonhuman resources that are vital for ecosystem stability and even human life—trees and forests, game, water—compels an approach to natural spaces that protects them from overconsumption, especially at the hands of commercial interests.
Environmentalism for conservationists therefore emphasizes the maintenance of natural resources for sustained use, including both present and future human use. This has led to expanded federal creation and regulation of national parks and forest systems, the rise of the EPA (proposed and signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970), and even contemporary social trends such as ecotourism.
Around the same time as conservationism emerged, however, there were critics who argued that it does not go far enough, leading to an environmentalist position known today as preservationism. Preservationists, like John Muir, place their emphasis on “wilderness,” a natural space purportedly free of human interference.
They believe that these spaces have intrinsic value in themselves (making preservationism a more “eco-centric,” or earth-centered, position than conservationism), and that justice is served by protecting natural spaces from resource extraction, artifice, and even vehicles and roads.
Other environmentalist positions emerged throughout the mid-to-late 20th century that take wildly different approaches. Deep ecology, for example, as advanced by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, finds preservationism to be too moderate(!). Deep ecologists challenge the significance of a distinction between urban life and wilderness, and advocate for a wholescale, society-wide noninterference with nature, at least outside of the minimum necessary for survival.
By contrast, “ecomodernists,” who might be found near tech-centric areas like Seattle or Silicon Valley, promote technological development as the best means of addressing environmental crises and other ecological harms.
For ecomodernists, protecting natural land and wildlife does not just mean protecting endangered plant and animal species or even reintroducing extirpated species into modern ecosystems, but supporting contemporary attempts, such as those made by the company Colossal Biosciences (by many accounts, a billion-dollar company), to genetically resurrect extinct specials like the woolly mammoth and Tasmanian tiger.
While preservationism and deep ecology trend progressively more eco-centric, ecomodernism is far more “anthropo-centric,” and sometimes proudly so, which is to say that attending to nature and staving off ecological crisis is largely meant to serve the well-being of humanity, including in its “mastery” over natural knowledge and laws.
From this perspective, injustice would be done if human ingenuity and economic growth were thwarted, but also if ecological harm negatively impacted the social human collective. Justice (perhaps paradoxically, depending on your perspective) thus requires both unhindered, free human enterprise, especially scientific enterprise, and a direction of these efforts toward sustainable ends. The opening of the “Ecomodernist Manifesto”22 John Asafu-Adjaye, et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” (The Breakthrough Institute, April 2015). reads:
To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands. Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.
Finally, as environmental activism and environmental justice frameworks have advanced, there are many who have slowed down the conversation to ask: What do we mean by nature itself? For example, how stable are the boundary lines separating “nature” or “wilderness” from “culture” and “artifice”?
How “protected” are national parks if their ecosystems are affected by atmospheric green gasses emitted in industrial centers elsewhere? More challengingly, how “natural” is this land if it was formerly occupied by Native populations who have not only been violently displaced from and/or alienated of sovereignty over it, but who have maintained a long history of land-management practices, including prescribing controlled burns and migrating plants and animals, that shaped the environment over time?
Both conceptually and practically speaking, it is also a difficult truth that modern environmental movements owe a great deal of their heritage to eugenicist political philosophies. Consider Madison Grant, for example, an American pioneer of conservationism and wildlife management (and creator of the Bronx Zoo and numerous national parks) who worked assiduously to protect what he understood to be the “purity” of both nature and the “Nordic [white] race.”33 See e.g., Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (University of Vermont Press 2008). Adolf Hitler, in fact, wrote to Grant to thank him for serving as a formative influence.
In what should be essential reading for any critically thinking student of environmental justice, scholar and EJ advocate Dina Gilio-Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows does a fantastic job relating contemporary issues in environmental justice to the contradictory ideologies that first allowed colonists to associate Indigenous people with “nature” itself, encouraging conquest, and then to render their historical and continued presence invisible.44 Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows (Beacon Press 2019).
Gilio-Whitaker counsels practitioners and advocates of environmental justice to question the extent to which contemporary, policy-driven environmental solutions perpetuate U.S. interests, such as those of resource extraction, economic development, or national security, at the expense of Indigenous sovereignty. And invoking and stretching existing models of justice, she explains:
From an Indigenous standpoint, justice must transcend the distributive, capitalist model. Indigenous models of justice typically reflect a restorative orientation. A decolonized American justice system would also necessarily encompass both the colonized and the colonizer. In essence, justice for Indigenous peoples is about restoring balance in relationships that are out of balance.55 Id. at 26.
Whether for narrowly “anthropocentric” reasons or not, many of us would likely agree that it is important to account for the natural world in our human endeavors, including, of course, our practice of justice. Indeed, because this is so important, it is also vital to keep in mind the political and community implications of how and why we do so, and to continue to question the assumptions that we bring to the table in our framings of nature and the environment.
About the author
Elliott Schwebach is a WSBA Equity and Justice Lead.
He can be reached at:
NOTES
1. “This is environmental racism,” The Washington Post, April 6 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/environmental-justice-race/.
2. John Asafu-Adjaye, et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” (The Breakthrough Institute, April 2015).
3. See e.g., Jonathan Peter Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (University of Vermont Press 2008).
4. Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows (Beacon Press 2019).
5. Id. at 26.