'Just sustainability': the emerging discourse of environmental justice in Britain?

Environmental justice is both a vocabulary for political opportunity, mobilization and action, and a policy principle to guide public decision making. It emerged initially in the US, and more recently in the UK, as a new vocabulary underpinning action by community organizations campaigning against environmental injustices. However, as the environmental justice discourse has matured, it has become increasingly evident that it should play a role in the wider agendas for sustainable development and social inclusion. The links between sustainability and environmental justice are becoming clearer and more widely understood in the UK by NGOs and government alike, and it is the potential synergy between these two discourses which is the focus of this paper. This paper argues that the concept of 'just sustainability' provides a discourse for policymakers and activists, which brings together the key dimensions of both environmental justice and sustainable development.     

Un Proceso Muy Vagabundo: The Use of Visual Research Methods to Explore Intergenerational Political Behavior

This article explores the use of visual research methodologies for understanding the everyday political desires and behavior of individuals. Its goal is to extend conversations in geography about the use of visual methods for interpreting the relationships between society and space, specifically the ways in which photovoice techniques can help geographers better understand the ways in which intergenerational emplaced memories motivate and shape contemporary political action. Using an urban community in Costa Rica built through hybrid housing–antiviolence movements in the 1980s and 1990s as a case study, this article illustrates the material and metaphorical pathways that participants trace between historical social movements and contemporary social issues through their photo essays. Participant images are made in tandem with practices and movement in the present but recall and represent family histories and narratives of historical struggle in the past. Significantly, as savvy users embedded in visual worlds, participants use these moments of intersection between past and present to mobilize political arguments about value and justice in their community. In this way, visual methods reveal the political mundane: how individuals shape their political opinions through conversation between contemporary embodiment and experiences with social issues and family histories of social movement participation. Key Words: photovoice, urban social movements, visual research methods.     

Swedish Forests in the Bioeconomy: Stories from the National Forest Program

Abstract

The concept of a bioeconomy has been placed central in formation of a Swedish National Forest Program (NFP). Drawing on Hajer’s conceptual framework of storylines, we present a discourse analysis of the working group reports underlying the establishment of the NFP strategy. We ask what stories about Swedish forests come to dominate the NFP process, how well they reflect the commitment of balancing economic, social and environmental interests, and what role the concept of a bioeconomy, has on the formation of these stories. Storylines of Swedish forests in the bioeconomy unite wider European discourses on the bioeconomy and climate change with historical Swedish forest policy discourses, revitalizing a discourse coalition comprising the state and the industry. Particular to the Swedish discourse is the strong emphasis on creating consensus around a single story of the forest-based bioeconomy.     

Do firms adopt lower standards in poorer areas? Corporate social responsibility and environmental justice in the EU and the US

Within the context of broader debates on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and environmental justice (EJ), this paper examines three key questions: first, how the standards that corporations adopt at the global scale trickle down into local site-level practices; second, whether levels of corporate environmental performance vary from place to place; and third whether any variations in corporate environmental performance relate to the principles of EJ. To do this, the analysis draws upon recently disclosed data to evaluate variations in the environmental performance of oil refineries across the US and the EU. It finds significant variations in emissions of some key pollutants. These exist both across the range of refineries, with dirtier refineries emitting at least five times as much as cleaner refineries, and between the EU and the US, with refineries in the EU emitting more than twice as much as refineries in the US. At the local level, it finds that there are correlations between higher levels of emissions from refineries and lower levels of income, employment and population density. Although these findings provide support for some of the contentions of the EJ movement, they do not say anything about causality, and as a result we cannot say definitively that companies adopt lower standards in poorer areas.     

国外环境公正研究综述

环境公正已成为国外学术研究的热点问题,且地理学家研究贡献颇多。文章通过梳理国外环境公正的相关研究,特别是地理学家的相关文献,探讨了环境公正的概念建构,并应用Citespace软件分析20世纪90年代以来对环境公正研究的主题词变化态势,从研究内容、方法和尺度等方面总结了环境公正的研究特点,以期为中国环境公正的研究和相关政策的制定提供参考和借鉴。国外学者对环境公正概念主要从“分布公正”“认知公正”与“程序公正”3个方面建构。国外对环境公正的研究主题从关注社区的污染物质和污染设施向气候变化、绿色能源空间等全球性问题发展;研究内容涉及环境公正的分布、原因、影响以及实现方式的多元探讨;研究立场鲜明且在政策与规划方面具有极强的实践性;研究方法涵盖定性和定量两大领域的多种方法,并不断发展;研究尺度上从社区至全球都有覆盖。     

Confronting Power and Environmental Injustice: Legacy Pollution and the Timber Industry in Southern Mississippi

Research has documented how grass-roots activists deploy the environmental justice frame to convey their grievances and demand their right to health and safety. While scholars have highlighted the widespread success of this frame, little attention has been paid to instances where the environmental justice frame fails to resonate. Drawing from social movements and environmental justice literatures, we examine how local discursive and cultural contexts can pose barriers to environmental justice claims. Our case is based on legacy pollution from a decommissioned creosote facility in Southern Mississippi. When black residents discovered the pollution in their neighborhood, they made repeated appeals to authorities for remediation and compensation. After being denied inclusion in a lawsuit filed by white residents, they formed an environmental justice organization to mobilize support for their campaign. Findings reveal the importance of both historical contextualization and the social situation of frame deployers in analyses of the environmental justice frame.     

Heidegger's philosophy of space and place

The purpose of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time ( BT ) is to recover the experience of Being that lies concealed behind the dominant modes of Western thought. BT represents a well-founded phenomenological attempt to interpret the everyday understanding of Being that Dasein always already has. Much of the contemporary discourse in human and social geography, such as on class, race and gender, centres on issues that can generally be described as grounded within a socio-political context. However, while recognising their value, these approaches are often unsatisfactory in that they fail to consider Dasein's Being-in-the-World as a unique and peculiar phenomenological problem. Dasein's spatiality is used expressly to establish that Dasein is spatial and Dasein can be spatial only as care. Dasein's spatiality, or place, expresses the bounded and lived spatiality that characterizes Being-in-the-World. Heidegger's body of philosophy should be of great interest to geographers in their attempts to understand themselves as part of the studies of the interaction between man and world. This is what hermeneutic phenomenology is all about, and is what geographers such as Edward Relph, Yi-Fu Tuan and John Pickles try to tell us in their many works on humanism, phenomenology and geography.     

Energy solution or future pollution? Applying an energy justice perspective to coal seam gas in New South Wales

ABSTRACT

The emergence of an unconventional extractive industry of coal seam gas (CSG) in New South Wales, Australia has caused a range of social tensions. Although the industry has generally received strong support from state-level governments across Australia, an eclectic social movement has arisen in opposition. Critical questions of justice have emerged in these debates about CSG, particularly about the ‘winners' and ‘losers' that would emerge should large-scale CSG extraction be introduced into New South Wales. However, the question of justice in relation to CSG extraction is not altogether so simple. Actors on all sides of CSG development have mobilised the language of justice in their claims about this energy source in sophisticated ways and at different scales. In this paper, we draw upon ‘energy justice’ scholarship to tease out different energy justice dimensions of the CSG debate in New South Wales. We show how there are significant issues that will likely intensify regarding the recognition of different forms of knowledge, the access citizens have to forms of decision-making, and the risks that span geographic and temporal scales. We argue that it is vital to appreciate the significant and interrelated injustices faced by those challenging the industry.     

The Institutional Architecture of Extractive Reserves in Rondônia, Brazil

This paper examines the evolution and development of institutions involved in the establishment of extractive reserves. It focuses on the different actors, organizations and projects concerned with extractive reserves in Rondônia in western Amazonia, Brazil. Extractive reserves are widely seen as a means of integrating forest conservation and local socio-economic development. As such, they have gained the support of the international environmental movement, multilateral and state development organizations, and grassroots community and producer organizations. These institutions represent a vast array of diverse interests which range from conservation of biodiversity, economic and social cohesion, and regional and national development. Whilst the various actors and institutions claim mutual and complementary interests, they form shifting alliances and coalitions in order to further their interests. This paper maps these institutions and interests and describes how alliances have been formed and broken, and how this has contributed to the currently observed implementation of extractive reserves. The paper argues that extractive reserves are constrained by the dissonance or misfit in discourses and underlying worldviews, reflected by the aims and objectives, of the institutions which promote, oppose and lose and benefit from their implementation. This misfit is overcome, in part, by alliances formed between the different institutions, and in part by the creation of new institutions and projects.     

The Pecan. Its Culture and Commercial Value

Abstract

This paper addresses the neglect of social justice and social change in the undergraduate general education curriculum at a community college. The intended audience of this paper is community college instructors with heavy teaching loads of mostly general education courses. Without pretending to be a rigorous analysis of theories of radical pedagogy in the classroom, this article aims to balance a review of the discourse surrounding the undergraduate general education curriculum with examples of classroom practices.

The first step in preparing our students to become agents of social change is to equip them with understanding and empathy, in the hope of ending the alienation that is a barrier to action. Assignments in general education geography courses are shared and reflected upon as a first step in grounding theory and introducing students to the struggle for social justice at home and abroad.     

Applying the Political Geography of Scale: Grassroots Strategies and Environmental Justice

The grassroots environmental movement often protests locally unwanted land uses. Many grassroots groups have, however, expanded their agenda to the scale of environmental justice. Explanations for this scale transformation include historical circumstances, individuals' radicalization through activism, and the growth of environmental justice networks. This case study, grassroots environmentalists' opposition to a proposed electricity transmission line in Monroe County, WV, explores another explanation: appeals for environmental justice are also a strategic response to siting regulatory procedures. With concepts emerging from the political geography of scale, I interpret the Monroe Countians' efforts and show how their strategies link the grassroots scale with that of environmental justice.     

Applying the Political Geography of Scale: Grassroots Strategies and Environmental Justice

The grassroots environmental movement often protests locally unwanted land uses. Many grassroots groups have, however, expanded their agenda to the scale of environmental justice. Explanations for this scale transformation include historical circumstances, individuals' radicalization through activism, and the growth of environmental justice networks. This case study, grassroots environmentalists' opposition to a proposed electricity transmission line in Monroe County, WV, explores another explanation: appeals for environmental justice are also a strategic response to siting regulatory procedures. With concepts emerging from the political geography of scale, I interpret the Monroe Countians' efforts and show how their strategies link the grassroots scale with that of environmental justice.     

PLACE INVADERS: CONSTRUCTING THE NOMADIC THREAT IN ENGLAND*

Over the centuries, the image of nomads threatening sedentary ways of life has been a common pejorative representation. In order to understand what geographies underpin narratives about nomads, I examine how social theory and media representations invoke the image of nomads. Both media and academic representations are buttressed by limited understandings of place and space, framing nomads as the quintessential “place invaders.” Focusing on nomadic Gypsies and Travelers in England provides a contemporary example of this process. British media representations construct nomadic Gypsies and Travelers in England as out‐of‐place and threatening. Deconstructing essentialist geographical conceptions allows us to avoid reproducing the common image of placeless nomads, reveals how people utilize place to render others inferior, and highlights the fact that conflicts between nomadic and sedentary ways of life are not intractable and natural. Adopting a more nuanced understanding of place can challenge the dominant trope of nomads as place invaders.     

Toward an Integrative Framework for Environmental Justice Research: A Synthesis and Extension of the Literature

Over three decades, environmental justice scholarship has examined justice movements through diverse perspectives shaped by their research traditions and disciplinary boundaries. This article distills three themes of justice from these research traditions in order to propose a four-dimensional environmental justice model. The proposed model includes four justice-seeking strategies—cultural justice, material justice, processual justice, and political justice—that movement groups adopt to mobilize their claims. I apply this model to the study of an environmental movement in Land Between the Rivers, Kentucky. Research findings from the case study concludes that movement strategies are plural and changeable and that justice is best conceived as a repertoire of justice-seeking strategies that are influenced by political alliances, economic preconditions, and cultural contexts.     

'Cultures of GM': discourses of risk and labelling of GMOs in the UK and EU

The debate over genetically modified foods has become one of the defining environmental and social issues of the past decade. As the public naturalize biotechnology within existing cultural systems, this produces what I term 'cultures of GM'. This paper examines how these 'cultures' are legitimized and sustained through an appraisal of divergent North American and European conceptions of risk and their translation into food labelling policies. It is argued that the dialectical relationship between risk perception and its cultural context offers an instructive vantage point for critical reflection by geographers.     

Spatial practices and imaginaries: Experiences of colonial officers and development professionals

This paper explores the spatiality of colonial and postcolonial power and discourse as produced, performed and imagined by former British colonial service officers and contemporary UK international development professionals. It focuses on two key aspects of spatial practices. The first addresses the spaces inhabited by these colonial officers and development professionals overseas and how their locatedness, embedded or enclavic, shapes relationships to others. The second explores this distinctive social and spatial distancing through their relationship to, and imagined geographies of, home and away and how these are embodied in their institutional and cultural capital. The paper examines the regularities and consistencies that stand out from numerous individual practices through which both former colonial officers and development professionals negotiate the situations in which they live and work. It also specifies how authoritative management, privilege and distance informs their spatial practices despite changing global contexts and a more diverse composition of those who articulate contemporary relationships between 'first' and 'third' worlds. Finally, the paper suggests that the cultures which travelled over colonial space through being performed by colonial officers have been reworked throughout the postcolonial period, belying epochal historical periodizations that conjure up a clear disjuncture between colonial and development eras.     

Fiddling while Madagascar burns. Deforestation discourses and highland history

Madagascar has been highlighted as a hotspot for biodiversity because of its unique natural history and a high level of endemism. This heritage of biodiversity is believed to be at serious risk, due to deforestation caused by local people. This paper concerns the landscape of the Madagascar highlands, and how interpretations of them have changed the past century. A social constructivist approach reveals two opposing views about the vegetation cover and seeks to unfold which specific scientific paradigms, narratives or received wisdom they are based on. Most important are changing paradigms in ecology, from classic equilibrium ecology to non‐equilibrium ecology, and changes in social sciences from a structural to an interactionist approach. Another important aspect addressed in the paper is the impact of the re‐interpretations on environmental policy and management. The Ambohitantely Special Reserve is used as a case to illustrate how interpretations of forest history are influenced by the hegemonic discourse.     

Recognizing Carbon Forestry’s Uneven Geography: A Response to Purdon and the Structure-Agency Dichotomy That Never Was

We here respond to the critique by Purdon of an article on carbon forestry that we published in this journal last year (Carton and Andersson). While we welcome critical engagements with our work, Purdon’s argument is wide of the mark and appears based largely on misconceptions regarding our theoretical entry point and empirical findings. Underlying this are fundamental disagreements about the nature of carbon forestry, structure-agency dynamics, and how to understand environmental interventions in the global South more broadly. We argue that we are unlikely to “find common ground” in our respective analyses of the Trees for Global Benefits project unless we share a common understanding of the unequal power relations and fundamental geographical unevenness within which carbon projects operate. Contrary to what Purdon argues, this position has nothing to do with ignoring local benefits, nor with denying the agency of the smallholder farmers who participate in the project. We see no contradiction between an analysis that does justice to the various structural conditions that frame carbon forest projects, and a recognition of local agency.     

The nation-state and the city: introduction to a debate

In recent years, the urban political landscape has become infused with a potent and incendiary mixture of popular-democratic, anti-globalisation, and separatist rhetoric. One central process driving this has been the problematic relations between the nation-state and the city. This Debates and Interventions forum aims to prompt a debate about where the city should be situated intellectually in respect of the nation-state. Four questions are addressed: (1) How do contemporary processes of urban development reflect changing national geopolitical priorities? (2) To what extent are struggles around immigration, citizenship and recognition conducted within cities rather than around the nation-state? (3) To what degree does the city (as e.g. a physical form, social environment or discourse) help to mobilise, propel and/or contest this new urban politics? And (4) Is the concept of a “post-national” global order appropriate for understanding the city and urban politics today?