ancient cities

246 Environmental Justice
justice, as when a jobs-starved community agreed
to a chemical plant in its midst.
Reconceptualizations
Growing awareness of the limited scope for case-bycase
solutions, combined with theoretical advancements
in the broader social sciences, prompted a
reconsideration of the conceptual and theoretical
underpinnings of environmental justice. Expanded
conceptualizations of justice, rights, environment,
and race have redirected the scope and approach of
environmental justice from a legal strategy based on
individual rights to a social and political movement
seeking broad structural change.
Recognition of the limitations inherent in focusing
exclusively on the spatial patterns of environmental
burdens increasingly directed attention
from distributional outcomes to causal processes
and from distributive to procedural justice. Within
a procedural justice approach, claims asserting a
right of communities of color to participate in distributional
decisions quickly gave way to more
vigorous demands for participation in decisions
affecting the production of environmental burdens
to be distributed and for pollution reduction rather
than mere redistribution.
Procedural justice demands in turn focused
attention on the constraining effects on participation
of entrenched social and economic inequality,
prompting a debate between structuralists calling
for the elimination of class, income, and racial
disparities as a necessary precondition for equal
participation, and proceduralists urging participation,
however initially imperfect, as a means for
exposing and thus challenging structural inequity.
Political theorists pointed to an underlying shift
within the environmental justice debate from a
Rawlsian liberal framework of individual rights
granted by the state to a structural understanding
of the social and political construction of nature
and the environment.
In practical terms, these reconceptualizations
shifted attention from seeking distributional
equity in the siting and location of individual
noxious facilities to pursuing environmental justice
in the large-scale structural processes through
which both people and environments are distributed
across the geographic landscape. A parallel
conceptual expansion broadened the theorization
of race in the attainment of environmental justice
from a concern with individual racist acts to a
focus on institutional and systemic racism pervasive
throughout society. In place of the traditional
understanding of race as a characteristic of individuals
differentiating people into preexisting categories,
environmental justice theorists advanced
the concept of White privilege as a diffuse social
practice that works through racial categories such
that privilege—including, in this case, access to
privileged environments—is differentially distributed.
The shift from individual noxious facilities
to the structural production of large-scale
environments, from individual rights to social
justice, and from the racial categorization of individuals
to systemic racist practices all cohere in a
conceptualization of environmental justice as a
responsibility shared not only by individuals held
liable for transgressing principles of equity but
by all those who benefit from membership in
a political community. Environmental justice, on
this account, is a responsibility of all.
Robert W. Lake
See also Environmental Policy; Landscapes of Power;
Racialization; Social Production of Space
Further Readings
Bullard, Robert D. 1990. Dumping in Dixie: Race,
Class, and Environmental Quality. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Dukic, Mustafa. 2001. “Justice and the Spatial
Imagination.” Environment and Planning-A 33:
1785–1805.
Kurtz, Hilda E. 2003. “Scale Frames and Counter-Scale
Frames: Constructing the Problem of Environmental
Injustice.” Political Geography 22:887–916.
Lake, Robert W. 1996. “Volunteers, NIMBYs, and
Environmental Justice: Dilemmas of Democratic
Practice.” Antipode 28:160–74.
Pulido, Laura. 2000. “Rethinking Environmental Racism:
White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern
California.” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 90:12–40.
Swyngedouw, Erik and Nikolas C. Heynen. 2003.
“Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of
Scale.” Antipode 35:898–918.