Abstract
This chapter clarifies the substantial impact of environmental justice on scholarship and policy-making by addressing the core questions of this volume. It reviews the assumptions and contributions of the concept of environmental justice, which are argued to be numerous and influential. The scholarly idea and the social movement of the same name are not going to disappear: environmental justice is being used more than ever in the scholarly and policy literatures. The economic, socio-political and racial discrimination explanations for why environmental injustices exist drive different explanations for existing patterns, and divergent policy approaches for addressing the issue. As it heads to the end of its fourth decade, environmental justice research has a vast open agenda with great promise, both within national and local realms, and at the international level as well.
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Notes
- 1.
Contrary to popular belief in many societies, there is no biological basis underlying the phenomenon of “race.” Instead race is a social category or social construction that reflects social conflicts and interests through referencing human bodies and populations believed to be different. Racial categories and meanings are constantly being transformed by political struggles, primarily through what Omi and Winant (1994) call “racial formation,” which is “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 55). Racial formation is also the process through which various populations come into being as a “race” through state policy making and legislation. Therefore, racial formation is not only the way that various groups are assigned a racial category; it is the mechanism and process through which various social forces shape the meaning of those categories. For example, in the United States, it is not just that a person is white, Latino, Asian American, or African American, but it is what those categories have come to mean to society, and how it promotes privilege, disadvantage, and variable life chances. In that sense, it is less sociologically useful to define what race is than to define what race does. What race and racism do, then, is to enable processes in which a dominant group (for example, whites) makes demeaning assumptions and characterizations about an out-group based on beliefs about alleged cultural, physical, intellectual differences. These assumptions and characterizations are then used to justify denying rights and privileges to the out-groups by the dominant group. This is why race has taken on importance in the U.S., not because it is a biological construct but because it is a social construct used by dominant groups to maintain their privilege over out-groups. The attitudes and actions of the dominant group have had real consequences on the life chances of racial minority groups in the U.S. These actions and consequences go beyond what can be explained by income and other socioeconomic differences alone. That is why race is an important concept in the U.S. and is neither trivial nor should it be dismissed.
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Timmons Roberts, J., Pellow, D., Mohai, P. (2018). Environmental Justice. In: Boström, M., Davidson, D. (eds) Environment and Society. Palgrave Studies in Environmental Sociology and Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76415-3_11
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