Julie Sze - Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power

SUSTAINABILITY

Sustainability

Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power

Edited by

Julie Sze

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2018 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

ISBN : 978-1-4798-9456-7 (hardback)

ISBN : 978-1-4798-7034-9 (paperback)

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CONTENTS

Julie Sze, with Anne Rademacher, Tom Beamish, Liza Grandia, Jonathan London, Louis Warren, Beth Rose Middleton, and Mike Ziser

M. L. Cadenasso and S. T. A. Pickett

Joni Adamson

Giovanna Di Chiro and Laura Rigell

Tracy Perkins and Aaron Soto-Karlin

Lawrence Baker

Kyle Whyte, Chris Caldwell, and Marie Schaefer

Miriam Greenberg

Traci Brynne Voyles

Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Isa Ua Ceallaigh Bowman

Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze

David N. Pellow

Introduction

JULIE SZE, WITH ANNE RADEMACHER, TOM BEAMISH, LIZA GRANDIA, JONATHAN LONDON, LOUIS WARREN, BETH ROSE MIDDLETON, AND MIKE ZISER

In 2008, the residents of Kivalina in northwest Alaska filed a ground-breaking lawsuit. This Iupiaq village of four hundred people is in danger of being destroyed as sea ice melts and rates of coastal erosion increase. In Kivalina v. ExxonMobil Corporation, et al. , the residents of Kivalina, represented by the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment and the Native American Rights Fund, among other major law firms, charged twenty-four of the largest oil and electric companies in the United States with contributing to global warming and claimed that the companies are liable for the damage suffered by the village. The lawsuit also alleged that the defendants have engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public about the causes and effects of climate change. The suit, based on the common-law theory of nuisance, claimed up to $400 million in monetary damages to pay for the relocation of the village. The U.S. District Court dismissed the case on the grounds that regulating greenhouse gas emissions was a political, rather than a legal, issue. Although the residents were not successful legally, their case raised important issues of responsibility and sustainability. Kivalina garnered global attention for climate change, their situation, and the relocation process they had initiated. How could a small Native village which had very little to do with the causes of environmental damagein this case, climate changesurvive?

The pressing issues of sustainability and social justice that the lawsuit raised remain largely unaddressed, and in many ways, the challenges of achieving both sustainability and social justice have only magnified. Yet, paradoxically, there is potential today for a broader base of concern, activism, and solidarity than ever before. Important social movements for environmental and climate justice are mobilizing large numbers of people, with broad impact outside of their local political contexts. Kivalina is just one example. Others include oil pipeline protests on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation; global coverage of mass lead poisonings in Flint, Michigan; the urgent entreaties of small Pacific islands and Arctic Indigenous villages in response to rising sea levels caused by climate change; and the struggles of the working classes, immigrants, and people of color on waterfronts in San Francisco and New York against high-end ecologically themed sustainable developments in gentrifying cities. All of these instances have combined elements of environmentalism, sustainability, and concerns about social injustice/inequality.

Spurred by climate change and taken together with questions of increasing water scarcity and the negative impacts of dirty energy systems, promoting sustainability may be one of the key global issues of our era. In its absence, the very demise of humanity seems plausible. As ecological change exacts urgent, and often unprecedented, tolls on human and nonhuman life, this sense of urgency sometimes obscures the extent to which sustainability and its underlying pillars are carefully analyzed and understood as products of social and ecological dynamics. These dynamics form mosaics of moral logic, aspiration, and struggles over power. Yet studies examining how sustainability issues and issues of social justice are linked remain underdeveloped. This book contends that environmental crises and social inequality are in fact twins, born of coexisting cultural, political, and economic processes. Thus social justice and sustainability are intimately connected.

Sustainability and social justice remain elusive, even as it has become increasingly clear that each is unattainable without the other. Unsustainable practices diminish social justice: The effects of animal extinctions, toxic waste, and air pollution alike have fallen disproportionately on the poor. Meanwhile, efforts at achieving sustainability in the industrialized West and Global South have often aggravated social inequitiesfor example, when Indigenous people have been displaced to create wildlife or natural reserves or when governments have mandated expensive new environmental management technologies that exacerbate the burden of the poor. One result is that sustainability is sometimes perceived as an elite, technologically driven project in an increasingly diverse world, and opposition to environmental reform finds a solid footing among the expanding ranks of the worlds working and impoverished peoples.

Moreover, sustainability seems so vague a concept that it invites skepticism. The environmental scientist Lucas Seghezzo argues that it is the ambiguity of the term sustainability that has contributed to its large-scale acceptance as a framework for environmental and social action. In this volume, we argue that to aspire to something called sustainability is to reject this ambiguity. Our task is to contextualize and situate sustainability. This volume does so through engaging with three central questions:

1. What does sustainability mean? How does sustainability function in multiple dimensions, including material, pragmatic, ideological, and discursive dimensions?
2. What are the key contexts for how sustainability is conceptualized, enacted, and contested?
3. What is sustainable, for whom, why, and how? Where and how do social justice and sustainability connect? How is that connection achieved?

The short answer we propose to the first question in this book is this: Sustainability depends on context. Our case studies range widely. Sustainability, as one chapter shows, can mean a range of more or less water quality in a particular urban watershed in Baltimore, Maryland. Another chapter shows that, in the Menominee Nation, sustainability is squarely focused on Indigenous planning principles and projects centered on land sovereignty. And another chapter describes Dinner 2040, a planning exercise website and actual event that imagined what a sustainable dinner would be like in Maricopa County, Arizona, in the future. For all the chapters in this book, social justice and/or interdisciplinarity are central factors. The questions of whether and how social justice is achieved in a sustainability project, and what it looks like, must also take many different disciplinary perspectives into account. This diversity of approaches and perspectives is a necessary precondition to achieving sustainability.