Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Lauren Kuby: Testing. Good morning, everyone. Thought we might have some latecomers, so now we’ll get started. My name is Lauren Kuby and I manage events here at the Global Institute of Sustainability. I want to welcome you all here today. Today’s our Sustainability Series talk featuring David Schlosberg. The Global Institute of Sustainability hosts this series—we call it sort of our “serendipitous series”—to welcome visitors to campus to speak on a range of issues related to social, environmental and economic topics.

Our next sustainability speaker will be 10:00 a.m. Tuesday in this same room: Mark Wilson and Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir—I’m a Svenska, so I probably really screwed that one up—but that talk will examine the flawed and inconsistent foundations of human-animal relationships through the methodologies of art practice, so unusual topic that we’re pleased to host.

Now to introduce our special guest, we’ll welcome Mark Cruse, who is the associate director of the Humanities Institute. Mark?

Mark Cruse: Good morning. Thank you all for coming this morning. My name is Mark Cruse. I’m the associate director of the Institute for Humanities Research. Before I get to the introduction of our speaker I would just like to share with you some upcoming events that we’ll be having at the IHR. We’ll be having a collaboration workshop on February 6th. That is for students and faculty. Anybody who’s interested in the issues of collaboration and how we collaborate here on campus and can work together more fruitfully is invited to that. Our IHR Distinguished Lecturer, Donna Haraway will be here on March 5th, so please come out for Donna Haraway’s visit.

Of great relevance to people who are working here at GIOS will be the presence of Dipesh Chakrabarty on March 28th. He’ll be speaking on “Climate Change and the Historical Imagination.” He’ll be on campus for a couple of days, and so we’re very excited about that presentation. Finally, we’ll be having our IHR Fellows Symposium on March 29th on the topic of humanities and the imagination, so lots going on at IHR and lots related to what is going on here at GIOS, one of our great partners here on campus.

Now it is my great pleasure to introduce our speaker this morning, David Schlosberg, who is Professor of Environmental Politics at the University of Sydney and director of the Sydney Network on Climate Change. Professor Schlosberg has numerous publications to his name. Most recently he has been a co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Climate Change in Society which came out last year. Forthcoming this year is his co-authored book also with Oxford on the climate challenged society. We are very pleased to be co-sponsoring this event with GIOS, so again, our thanks to the Global Institute of Sustainability. Today Professor Schlosberg will be speaking to us on “Theorizing Environmental Justice: the Expanding Sphere of Discourse.” Professor Schlosberg?

David Schlosberg: Thanks for that, and thanks for having me. I’m not Australian, as you can probably tell by now; I’m American. I actually spent 15 years up at NAU before escaping Arizona for the lovely environs of Sydney. It’s nice, if weird, to be back in the state, but thanks for having me. I think there’ll actually be some collaborative work going on between the Institute and the University of Sydney around environmental humanities. We’re both part of a large consortium grant project and so on. Oddly enough may do more work with ASU from Sydney than I ever did from NAU.

I’ve been working in the area of environmental justice for a while; my dissertation on the politics of environmental justice movement and a few years ago had a book about the conception of justice in the movement called Defining Environmental Justice. The Journal of Environmental Politics asked me to contribute something about environmental justice to their forthcoming anniversary edition. It gave me a chance to sort of look back over the last 20 years or so of thinking about environmental justice. This is less about the movement than it is about the discourse of environmental justice and what the conceptualization of environmental justice has meant, both for the movement but also in academia.

This whole idea of the expansion of environmental justice discourse really comes out of geography. A couple of colleagues in geography—Gordon Walker out of Lancaster University in the UK and Julie Sze who’s at UC Davis has been doing—both of them have been doing some work on this. Generally, the idea here is that environmental justice has been a central concern, a growing concern for a number of activists and academics in a range of disciplines. The idea of environmental justice itself has been expanding in scope far beyond its initial application to the inequitable distribution of environmental risk in poor communities and communities of color. The paper is all about the expansion of environmental justice discourse and the way that environmental justice has challenged some basic definitions and expanded the sphere of concern and expanded influence over the decades.

First I have a look at some early conceptions of environmental justice and how from the start environmental justice has been a discursive challenge. It challenged and expanded the very conception of the notion of environment; it challenged and expanded the very notion of the conception of justice, and I’ve spent a lot of time on the latter. It drew attention to a range of concerns on the construction or for the construction of injustice, and one of my earlier arguments is what the environmental justice movement really illustrated: a very pluralist conception of justice in terms of problem-solving rather than a singular ideal notion of liberal justice. I think environmental justice has always been a disruptive discourse and a challenging discourse, and I’ll come back to that.

The second point is that there have been a number of expansions of the term, horizontally in terms of the types of issues and locales, so just in terms of the types of issues that are being addressed by environmental justice and where environmental justice is being used as an organizing discourse. That spread horizontally. There’s also been a vertical expansion of environmental justice, where we see more and more of the conceptualization of environmental justice in global analyses: food justice, climate justice, toxics trades and a whole number of different issues.

I think there have been not just horizontal expansions and vertical expansions, but there’ve been some real conceptual expansions as well. Here I’ve done some work on the way that environmental justice understands community, that justice is a community conception; it’s not just an individualist conception, which is a real challenge mostly for liberal political theorists to understand, that it’s not just about the individual. The other thing that’s going on—and I’ve done some work here as well—is the beginning of a recognition of environmental justice as it applies beyond the human sphere and into the non-human. Again, I’ll come back to that.

The third sort of expansion of discourse that I wanna talk about, extension, is the way that new movements on climate justice, on the health of non-human beings and ecosystems and on local food and energy production movements—and I know there are folks doing some work on those here—these are moving away from environmental justice as a term. There’s a lot of stuff on just transition and on food justice and a number of different movements, and I think this probably has the single biggest development in environmental justice discourse in the last 30 years, this shift in a conceptualization of the relationship between environment and justice, whereas the very start of the environmental justice movement, the conception was that environment was a symptom of justice or injustice; that poor environments at environmental risk was a symptom of existing social injustice. The shift when we start to get into climate justice and start to talk about food and energy is a realization, a recognition that environment itself is the condition necessary. Healthy environment is the condition necessary for any kind of justice, so there’s been this conceptual shift in where environment is in the relationship between environment and justice.

That’s sort of an outline of the talk and of the paper. I don’t think I need—in Australia I need to do this. There’s not really an understanding of the history of environmental justice in Australia, and since I’m talking about the expansion of discourse it’s really bizarre because it hasn’t really had the kind of salience in Australia as it has in a lot of other places. I think that’s in part because of—well, one, the whiteness of a large part of Australia, but also because of the incredible racism in Australia, especially when it comes to indigenous peoples. There’s just very little activity and very little theorizing about the indigenous experience around environment.

Some of the earliest reflections of environmental justice focus on the existence of inequity in the distribution of environmental bads. This is really where the idea of environmental risk, environmental justice come up. The concept was used to illustrate that some communities obviously had more environmental risks and different environmental risks than others. Those environmental bads again were discussed as another symptom of existing social injustice, so this is where this conception of environmental racism came out: it was racism as the existing injustice and environmental risk as just another example of that—or not just—but another example of that existing injustice.

The studies that linked exposure to such risks and bads to class and race were the early focus of the movement, and that initial focus on inequity expanded rather quickly to include a range of issues, so it wasn’t just about toxics; it wasn’t just about air quality, but a whole range of environmental bads as well as environmental goods, so even from the beginning there was a suspicion, a questioning of the distribution of environmental protection, of environmental goods—the way the EPA treated white communities and communities of color differently, for example—and then Bob Bullard’s work expanding into public transit, into public space and lots of folks then moving into the distribution of food or maldistribution of food as well.

For all the focus on the reality of those inequities, one of the arguments that I’ve made for a long time is that environmental justice was never only about maldistribution. The study of environmental justice quickly expanded and theorizing developed in a couple of key areas. The first of course was in the definition of environment, and one of the early slogans in the environmental justice movement was that environment wasn’t just about wilderness; it wasn’t just about the big outside. It wasn’t that Arizona conception of the wilderness that we hear so much, about that I heard so much about in Flagstaff for years, but environment instead was where we live, work and play.

I think the importance of that shift can’t be understated. Obviously that’s what a Sustainability Institute here is built on: on urban environmentalism, on environment as the place in which we are immersed all the time, but this was 30 years ago, a major challenge to the conception of environment—of the major environmental organizations, the whole idea that environment was more than just wilderness and it was more than just the big outside. It’s one of those weird things: being an academic for so long and teaching this 20, 25 years ago to students who couldn’t conceptualize that shift and then teaching it now to students who couldn’t conceptualize it being the old way, that environment really is where we live. “Well, how could you think any differently?” That is in large part due to that shift initiated by the environmental justice movement.

There’s been a long history of concern with the environmentalism of everyday life, urban issues. Urban environmentalism is one of those things—the history of urban environmentalism in the US is one of those things that has been underemphasized for years and years, and environmental justice advocates insisted on bringing that attention back to that environment in which people are physically immersed.

I’m gonna come back to this in a bit, because a lot of the new materialist movements, the sustainable materialist movements are taking this another step. It’s not just about where we live, work and play, but it’s about the environment that physically flows through our bodies every day and it’s this move again to further conceptualize environment as something that flows through us. It’s not just something in which we sit. I’ll come back to that.

The broadening of environment—and this is important as well, because this was the early resistance from the mainstream environmental movement, that if we started talking about urban environments and all that, that we forget wilderness, that the big outside wouldn’t matter at all, that this sort of broad conception of nature would be ignored. This was a mistake from the beginning, because from the very beginning environmental justice—well, the environmental justice movement and environmental justice as a conception—included indigenous notions, so if you look at the very first principle of environmental justice that was developed at the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, it includes this conception of the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species.

That’s the first principle of environmental justice, and it came about because it was the very first time that urban African Americans and Native Americans had met to talk about environment. It had a huge influence on urban African Americans who were present at that meeting and there’s some really interesting stuff by Lee about that particular meeting.

Later than that, Julian Agyeman’s work, of course moved to bridge the difference between environment and justice into this conception of just sustainability, and Julian’s got a new book on just sustainability coming out from Zed Books fairly shortly. The idea has always been in environmental justice to broaden the conception of environment, to expand this discourse of environment, not to change it from one to the other, but to broaden it in a much more inclusive way.

The other main focus of environmental justice scholarship has been to think beyond the description and the documentation of existing inequities into a thorough analysis of the underlying reasons for injustice. Why is there environmental injustice? Initially, obviously the central focus was on poverty and on racism. Environmental justice wasn’t simply about establishing the fact that there were more environmental bads and risks being put on poor minority communities; it endeavored to explore the question of why those particular communities were being targeted, why communities were being devalued and dumped on, that there was an obvious reason why environmental justice activism at the start was all about and environmental racism, why Ben Chavis insisted on that conceptualization of environmental justice as environmental racism. It was an attempt to explain the injustice based in race.

I think it’s really important to remember that the environmental justice movement, though, insisted that it was more than just recognizing inequity. When the EPA started thinking about environmental justice and established an office, it was originally named the Office of Environmental Inequity, and the movement revolted. The movement did not want an Office of Environmental Inequity. They wanted an Office of Environmental Justice, and they got it and the name was changed. That’s because justice itself was conceptualized much more broadly than just inequity. It wasn’t simply about distribution.

My own argument has been that while equity has been a major issue with racism and other forms of disrespect came a broader concern with the politics of recognition. It was the lack of recognition, and the lack of recognition was linked to a lack of participation as well, so there’s a devaluing of community, a lack of recognition of community which justified the dumping—David Pellow’s done some work on this—that sort of association of communities of color and poor communities with pollution, with dirt that could be dumped on, that sort of association was key. Then more broadly, that lack of recognition also leading to a lack of participation. Justice wasn’t simply about inequity. Again, it was about the lack of recognition, the whys of the lack of recognition, the lack of participation and voice.

Again, from the beginning, one of the slogans of the environmental justice movement was “We speak for ourselves.” It was this insistence on that recognition, a seat at the table, also. Justice itself was much more broad than simply inequity, and the work that I’ve done lays out and sort of goes through these conceptions of justice as recognition and participation.

The other key thing here—again, coming at from it from a political theorist’s perspective and liberal political theory is it was never simply about individuals. The conceptualization of justice was a community-based conception. Environmental justice and environmental injustice was about the very functioning of communities. It was about the ability of communities to function, not just individuals. When you had movements around health—say asthma in New York City, for example—it wasn’t just articulated as all of these individual kids have asthma, and it’s due to the way that the transit system and the buses are idling in Queens. It’s not just about these individual kids or even these individual families. It was about the health of the community as a whole, and the movement articulated it in a community sense. It was about the functioning and the dysfunction of the community.

It’s the same around lead, the question of lead poisoning in communities. It wasn’t just that some kids were impacted by lead; it was about a number of communities and the impacts on the communities, the disruption of the functioning of communities that was key. It was a broadening of the conception of justice that came with the development of the movement.

The pluralism of the conceptualization of justice, I’ve argued, has been absolutely central to the environmental justice movement and the study of environmental justice. One of the arguments that I’ve made for a long time is that the movement has a hell of a lot to teach academics about the way that people actually use the concept of justice more so and I think in better ways and more constructive ways than a lot of academics do.

That’s the first area of what environmental justice discourse has offered in the past few decades, this sort of expansion and pluralization of conceptions of both environment and justice. What else has happened in the last 20 or 30 years? For me, one of the most amazing things has been watching the concept of environmental justice applied to more and more issues over the last 30 years. If there’s been a single major development, I think, in the development of environmental justice, it’s been that spatial expansion. There’s been a continued focused on the original idea of environmental justice issues in the distribution of toxins, obviously, on environmental bads more generally, but environmental just discourse has extended in both topical and in geographic scope.

The environmental justice frame’s applied not just to these initial issues of toxins and dumps, but also to analyses of transportation, of land use and smart growth policy, water quality and distribution, energy development and jobs, brownfields refurbishment, food justice, questions of the role of scientific expertise—that’s come up here. There’s also been a much more thorough examination of the experiences of indigenous peoples and immigrant labor, women and youth and a variety of other specific populations.

The expansion of discourse has occurred not only in issues, but in geographic location as well, so just my own theoretical framework has been applied to cases of postcolonial environmental justice in India, waste management in the UK, agrarian change in Sumatra, nuclear waste in Taiwan, salmon fishing and First Nations in Canada, gold mining in Ghana, oil politics in Ecuador, wind farm development in Wales, pesticide drift in California, indigenous water rights and management of lands in Australia. I mean that’s just folks that have cited my work in the development of their environmental justice analysis on these particular—so this is just—it’s gone global in that sense. Clearly the discourse of environmental justice has spread horizontally to be used in a number of different countries and a number of different issues.

We’ve seen collections on environmental justice issues and movements in Latin America, South Africa, Canada, the ex-Soviet Union. Gordon Walker lists no fewer than 37 countries in which the environmental justice frame has been used, so clearly there’s this expansion. Then there’s this vertical expansion, and by that I mean environmental justice has been used as an organizing theme in a number of global movements. In my last book I talked about indigenous activism, climate justice movements, food security and food justice movements, and the sort of anti-globalization, anti-new liberalization movement, all using a conception of environmental justice to do global analyses of global processes, so it’s more than just the sort of horizontal spread; there’s been this move vertically to consider global processes from an environmental justice framework.

Again, David Pellow’s work has been thoroughly enlightening on the global toxics trade, for example. Mohigh and his colleagues discuss transnational issue networks that have environmental justice as an organizing theme, from e-waste to climate justice. Carmin and Julian Agyeman again bring all of these together into a recent collection that focuses on both specific issues and movements and the larger global framework of analysis. If you can’t tell, I’m rather jetlagged. I don’t usually stick to my text as much as this. The point is that the discourse of environmental justice has expanded in scope and scale. It’s a salient analytical frame for a growing number of disciplines, a growing number of movements, a growing number of issues. That is a really important expanding space in environmental justice.

I wanna come back to another sort of expanding space, and again, for me, it’s this idea of community analysis. A lot of traditional environmental justice scholarship is about the individual. It’s individualist, and a lot of critics of environmental justice scholarship want to focus on this sort of individualist level of environmental justice. I think that environmental justice is one of the discourses out there that allows us to reflect on the impacts on communities and the limitations of an individualist focus of justice. One of the ways—I gave one example; asthma in New York—I think Hurricane Katrina actually offered another one of these as well.

In the case of Katrina, the impacts of the disaster were clearly and disproportionately on poor African Americans. That’s fairly obvious. Many lost their homes, their jobs, their belongings. Many were pushed out into this new diaspora, this sort of disaster diaspora. We’re gonna see more and more of those. That’s a good title for a paper, isn’t it? “Disaster Diaspora.” Many were left behind, still made invisible by racism, excluded from the plans to rebuild, but the understanding of the impacts of Katrina has to go and does go beyond just the impacts on individuals. The seminal set of reflections on this, Bullard and Wright’s book on environmental justice implications of Katrina, illustrates a range of basic needs and functions that were undermined by both the storm and the response, importantly, and that would have to be restored in a just recovery.

They talk about transportation, employment, health, housing, and political and economic participation. Of course those needs are not just about individuals; they’re identified at the community level. This is about neighborhoods; it’s about communities; it’s about the functioning of the city itself and not just the individuals that make it up. Ultimately the question of environmental justice in the wake of Katrina is about the functioning of New Orleans.

I think one of the things that environmental justice has done for me is to help break down this spatial barrier between individual and community in the study of justice, and maybe this is just my defensiveness coming out of a political theory background and having Rawlsian liberal theorists throw this individualist thing at me. For a lot of folks—geographers just look at this and say, “Well, hell, that makes sense, right? That’s always made sense,” but in the study of justice as an academic conception it hasn’t, and I still get people coming back at me with this individualist focus, but I do think environmental justice is probably the major movement that has made this conceptual shift to communitarian notions of justice much more salient.

That’s the expanding spaces of environmental justice. Now what’s going on now? Where is environmental justice as a conceptualization, as a discourse, going now? What are some of the new challenges? For me, there are three: there’s climate change; there’s nature and conceptualizing ecological justice and then there is what a number of people are starting to call “sustainable materialist movements.” Where is this conception of environmental justice moving?

I think these extensions are crucial, again, because the shift in emphasis is becoming much more clear, that it’s about environment as the condition under which—or the condition that supports any form of social justice. Environmental conditions is the basis of social justice, so this is another major conceptual shift in the idea of justice and the idea of environmental justice.

The notion of climate justice has been a key discourse in discussions surrounding climate change in the last couple of decades, and again, I’ve done some initial work on this, mostly dealing now with adaptation. Climate justice in the academic realm for years focused on a normative framework for the development of global policy. The global policy side has been just an utter failure. The attempt to use justice frameworks—historical responsibility, per capita equity—all of these have been just abject failures. They’ve been interesting theoretical attempts—and we can talk about conceptions in environmental justice—but they have been a failure in their major goal, which was to frame global policy. Ask Paul Baer if he’s ever back here about EcoEquity and EcoEquity’s attempt to bring a combination of per capita equity and historical responsibility into a very reasonable, rationalized model for climate justice. It goes absolutely nowhere.

My interest in climate justice has much more to do with what we do next, and it’s not about frameworks for prevention at the global level, but it’s about adaptation. How do we can apply conceptions of climate justice or environmental justice to climate change at the local level as we start to plan for adaptation?

Environmental justice activists and climate change activists regularly address the actual material experience of changing environmental conditions, impacts on everyday life, and the potential ways that functioning and development are now or are going to be increasingly threatened, so stories of the potential health impacts of heat, of food insecurity due to drought or floods, the instability of housing and infrastructure, the disappearance of tradition, of culture, of place—these sorts of discussions have become the norm in environmental justice, thinking about climate change. Adaptation discourse has focused on vulnerability-enhancing events, things like storms and fires—coming from Australia—drought, flood, fire and they’re all happening and they’re all happening now. Climate justice discourse has been thinking not just about those impacts, but the anticipatory response to those: how are we to start thinking about just responses to adaptation, to climate change now?

The focus, though, is much more explicitly about the relationship between the way that natural systems and human communities interact and function, and there’s much more of a recognition of the way that natural systems support the functioning of human communities. Again, let me use Katrina as an example here, cuz I think in the US it was a huge event and it was a conceptually shifting event. Before Katrina, the corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Cancer Alley, was a major focus of environmental justice discourse. Oil refineries, chemical plants, vinyl manufacturing—all these were linked to the disadvantaged and poor minority communities. Again, environmental justice was about social injustice being manifest in environmental conditions. After the storm, the conceptualization, I think, has changed or supplemented. It wasn’t just that the hurricane exposed once again that dire state of social injustice, though it did that. The storm brought attention to the link between the vulnerability of the community and to put it bluntly, the state of nature.

Environmental justice advocates began to question the very different impact of the refining of oil that they were exposed to, so it wasn’t just about—though it still continued to be about—but it wasn’t just about the fallout, the close fallout, the particulate fallout living next to an oil refinery. It was also about what these oil refineries were doing to the atmosphere, creating stronger storms that were coming in to impact the community in a different way and this linkage was made pretty quickly. The linkage was also made between that impact on the local community and the destruction of the delta and the wetlands. It was really interesting to hear—oh, now I’m just going to space. I saw the first public talk by the head of the EPA—why am I spacing on her name? Lisa Jackson—who talked about her mother who still lives in New Orleans, and her mother asking her, “Well, what are you gonna do about the wetlands?”

The storm showed us this. Lisa Jackson’s giving this talk about environmental justice and showing the shift in discourse in one person, her mother, but it was also a big part of that realization in New Orleans about a much broader conception of the relationship between human communities and the natural world and the relationship between the injustice being done at the local level and the way that was coming back through climate change. The link between ecological stability and ecological functioning and community functioning or climate instability and social disadvantage became much more clear.

In other words, environmental and climate justice have been—become just more embedded in an understanding of the way that environmental conditions provide for individual and community needs and functioning. I think examined this way, as environmental justice extends into climate justice, it pushes beyond those qualifiers “environment” or “climate” and into an understanding of justice itself that depends on a predictable set of environmental conditions and a particular type of functioning of local environments. Being in Australia I’ve seen the same thing: just a lot more focus on not just those direct impacts on local populations but on what it means for human beings to change the very processes of nature and how that’s going to come back to us. There’s this recognition of the relationship between environmental justice and impacts on the larger element.

For me this gets at the way that movements for environmental justice and the idea of environmental justice has really shifted in terms of its understanding of relationship with the non-human realm. There’s a reason why we talk about this as environmental justice, right? The issues are about how we are immersed in a local environment and how we are immersed in the manipulation of nature around us. This is the next border to cross: environmental justice discourse moving from where environmental conditions are an example or a manifestation of social injustice to one where justice is applied to the treatment not just of human communities but of the environment itself. This is a relationship between environmental justice and ecological justice, and this is where I’ve been getting into a lot of trouble lately talking about ecological justice being justice to the functioning of ecosystems. If we talk about environmental justice as—or environmental injustice as the interruption of the functioning of human communities we can talk about ecological justice as the interruption of the functioning of natural communities or natural processes or ecosystems. That’s a whole separate paper.

A number of analysts have begun to make these sorts of connections. I mentioned Julian Agyeman and “Just Sustainability.” He really insists on a conception of environmental justice that goes beyond socio-cultural impacts to the interactions between social and environmental communities. I mentioned the concern post-Katrina on the ecological damage done to surrounding ecosystems, and that’s led to more concern for the vulnerability not just of human communities, but of non-human communities as well. Julie Sze at Davis has done a lot of innovative work on environmental justice in the Sacramento Delta region by talking about this and engaging this socio-natural context, and for Julie, that’s quite a step. This is someone who was brought up and studied asthma in New York—she’s the author of Noxious New York—and to shift from this focus on the very urbanized African-American community impacted by health and asthma in New York to the Delta and the relationship between the impact of farming and agriculture, and industrialized agriculture on both the landscape and the people, it’s really been—for me it’s an illustration of the shift of this growth of this expansion of environmental justice discourse. Hafta ask Julie what she thinks about me using her as that kind of example.

I’ve been making the same sort of argument, and I use a capabilities approach to justice developed by Sen and Nussbaum to talk about functioning and communities. I’ve applied that to this concept of ecological justice, and I’ve actually applied it to climate justice as well. I’ve got a piece from last year which actually makes this sort of connection. I’m also using this to think about adaptation planning, that adaptation planning—and I’m working on a large project doing a comparison of adaptation planning by local governments in Australia and looking at the conceptualization of vulnerability there, and what various stakeholders think is vulnerable and looking at the difference between—or the relationship between those that focus on the role of vulnerability of the local environment—the barrier reef is going to collapse, droughts are going to undermine the ability of ecosystems to produce agriculture—looking at the link between that conception and that focus on the larger environment and environmental processes and on specific community-based understandings of vulnerability like health, for example, both in terms of heat and mental health I mentioned before.

It’s one of the most amazing things to me that there are two major focuses on environmental health in Australia. One is heat. That makes sense, you guys are gonna have that here, but the other is mental health of farmers and farmer suicides. As the heat has increased, as the droughts have increased, farmer suicides have increased. It’s the number two major issue of the National Health System when it comes to climate change adaptation, is the vulnerability of farmers, and it’s a really interesting link between the sort of individual vulnerability, community vulnerability and the shifts of the natural world.

Look, there’s a lot of this sort of discussion about ecosystem health and about functioning ecosystems, some done with justice in mind, some not so much. One of the initial statements of the UNFCCC on climate change was that the problem was the interruption of climate systems. This is what climate change is about; it’s the interruption of climate systems. For me, that’s the injustice. We see a lot of development of the focus on constitutional law that includes both animals and ecosystems as subjects with rights. Ecuador and Bolivia and New Zealand has just given status to a river. The river itself has a right, so it’s not just an individual being or an animal; it’s a river. Ecuador—rivers, there’s a big focus on rivers. Ecuador, the first case brought forward on the new constitutional protection for ecosystems was on behalf of a river, and that was a case that won. There’s more of a focus on ecosystems for themselves and not just as they provide for human beings in terms of ecological justice, and justice is being applied to those, so it’s not just me thinking about this; there’s clearly a broader application of environmental justice to non-human nature.

Now there’s a lot of issues with that. There are a lot of conflicts to talk about between human communities and natural communities and I’ve thought about that a bit and we can talk about that in questions if folks want to, but I think there’s a lot of bridge building in this. One of the benefits that I see to using environmental justice on both human and non-human communities is it provides—it’s already happening discursively, and I think it provides a discursive link between environmental justice movements and more traditional environmental movements. We can talk about the functioning of communities, ecosystems and human communities—in a way that appeals to or that can be easily understood on the natural science side as well as on the social side as well as on the movements.

Finally—oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Did that. Finally, new stuff that’s happening, and this is the kind of stuff that is taking me away from work I’m being paid to do to work that I want to do, and I’m writing a grant on this at the moment while I’m trying to do this climate justice stuff. I think one of the ways that what I have been discussing has been playing out is in very reconstructive new movements, a whole set of new movements about reconstructive environmental justice. A lot of environmental justice battles, the most well-known environmental justice battles have been about reactions to inequity, threats to health, all of that, but there’s been a growth of groups using environmental justice and sustainability to design and implement more just and sustainable practices of everyday life. It feels really weird giving this kind of talk here where you guys are doing a lot of this work, but you’re the odd one out here. In Australia this is in its infancy, and it’s really wild to talk about it there as well.

The idea is that movements are making demands for environmental justice practice, for actual practice that sees communities and everyday practices as part of the flow of a working and sustainable relationship with the non-human world. I think this is most obvious in movements around food justice and just energy development. They both take on unsustainable environmental processes; they both take on processes that have environmental justice implications for communities on the ground. They’re not just satisfied with purely individualistic or consumer responses to environmental concerns, right? It’s not just about installing your own solar panels or going to the whole foods or buying the right kind of veggies. The focus is on building new practices and institutions for sustainability, practices and institutions that embody both environmental justice conceptions and other conceptions of sustainability. I’m trying to think of a term for this. It’s a “reconstructive environmental justice”; it’s “sustainable materialism”.

The focus is on resisting, on rethinking, on redesigning basic institutions that embody—I mean literally embody—problematic practices connected to basic material needs, so obviously the response is to food deserts is the growth—sorry for the pun—the growth of gardening, community gardens, farmer’s markets, all of that sort of thing within cities, within communities: community supported agriculture, collective gardening and all of that. The idea of the food justice movement isn’t just about equity or the better distribution of good food, but the whole idea is to transform the human relationship with food as well, with production, with transportation, with consumption. It’s not just about supplying a basic need; it’s an awareness that such basic needs that supply the functioning of the community should themselves be sourced without creating injustices either to the community or to the natural world.

In terms of energy, obviously a lot of environmental justice communities are organizing around the development of community-wide wind, local generation, networking of solar and wind. There’s a lot of talk about transition tabs, energy transition to displace, replace destructive practices. Damage done in Australia. It’s a huge thing, the damage done by mining companies, both in terms of the mining itself and then of course the burning of the coal, the abuse of local autonomy by mining companies. This isn’t just coal mining; this is also natural gas mining and fracking and all of that and the response to that.

One of the points here is that this conception of environmental justice then shifts from resistance to reconstruction. It aims to transform and undermine dominating and unsustainable practices of production and consumption while working to sustainably rebuild material relationships we have with the resources that we use every day. For me, I look at three different ways of analyzing these movements.

On the one hand, I see these movements and this shift as a sort of Foucauldian shift, so there’s an awareness of the way that the power of the food industry, the power of the energy industry literally flows through the human body, that we in our everyday practices of going to a supermarket or just switching on electricity that comes from coal, we are participating in and re-creating a practice of injustice both to communities and to a larger natural world. We are the physical representation and reproduction of that form of power. There’s a recognition of that and there’s an insistence of the removal, but the shift here is that people thought this way in the ‘60s as well and they went off the grid; they went back to the land. That was a very individualist idea; that was a removal. There was that same idea of not to participate in that sort of machine, but the difference here is the reconstructive aspect.

Communities are focused on the rebuilding of institutions that produce flows of food and energy that are just to their core, that it’s about eating food that one can feel good about. It’s about using power that one knows is created locally and is doing no damage and creating institutions—again, farmer’s markets, community-based power generation. I think that reconstructive institutional part is a real shift in environmental justice and a real shift in the understanding of power and the reaction to power. It’s not just resistance; it’s reconstruction, so there’s that Foucauldian analysis of movements wanting to step out and re-create new flows of power.

Second—and for me of course I’m going to say this—these movements represent a very pluralistic conception of justice. It’s about equity; it’s about recognition; it’s about participation; it’s about the delivery of basic needs and capabilities and the functioning of communities in very inclusive and just ways. I think most importantly for me these movements represent the embodiment, the institutionalization of a new form of materialism, of a new form of material relationship with the natural world that is focused on the natural world, that takes the natural world into consideration. It’s not just a removal from power and a removal from practices of power; it’s done with a conceptualization of the flows of materials out of the natural world through the human body back out into the natural world, that there is finally a recognition of the place of human beings in the flows of the natural world.

These movements and efforts illustrate environmental justice moving to a form of just sustainability that embodies not just a variety of themes of justice, but a much more thorough engagement in everyday material life: again, the things that pass through our bodies, the practices that we use to transform the natural world, the institutions that we create collectively. Environmental justice in this way has expanded beyond just a reactive condition or a reactive position to environmental conditions; it now means a refusal to participate in practices that create or circulate injustice and instead, the creation of and participation in the proposal of the development of new counter institutions and practices and flows that embrace a much more sustainable relationship with the non-human environment.

Again, in discourse and in practice this is again that shift from environment as a symptom of social injustice to a recognition of the necessity of working environments as a condition of justice itself.

I guess that’s really sort of enough. I can talk about—and in the paper I include a little bit—about the relationship between theory and practice. Environmental justice as a discourse has been a very interesting engagement between the activist community and the academic community, and there are all sorts of constructive and not so constructive relationships there, but for me it is one of those practices, one of those conceptions, one of those movements that problematizes the academic approach to an issue. On the one hand, it’s also a movement and a discourse that can be incredibly valuable for academics if they spend some time looking at the movement. I guess I’ll stop there. Thanks for listening.