David Pellow

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of California, Santa Barbara

Research on the linkages among climate change, public health, and mental health is still in its early stages, with scholars just beginning to explore possible causal pathways between anthropogenic climate disruptions and a range of impacts on human well-being. Heat waves, rising temperatures, wild fires, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts, des...

This article aims to frame the state violence and socio-ecological injustice perpetrated against prisoners through the lens of both critical environmental justice studies and the concept of the Wasteocene. We seek to uncover the socio-ecological relationships that have historically shaped the enforcement of the prison and waste systems through a fo...

A low-carbon energy transition is essential for mitigating climate change but can also cause energy justice and equity impacts on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), low-income, and other frontline communities. Examples include exacerbating energy burden, inaccessibility and unaffordability of low-carbon energy and electric end-use tech...

We build on the critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework by exploring mutual aid as a means of practising and realising transformative environmental justice that allows activists to build environmentally resilient and just communities beyond the state. We draw on the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Black Radical Tradition, and other critical appr...

In this article, we will not engage with the scientific Anthropocene, rather, we are interested in challenging what Jason Moore has called the popular Anthropocene, that is, a narrative about the present socio-ecological crisis and its causes. The Wasteocene is part of a wider critique of the Anthropocene narrative that stresses the need to look at...

Over the last decade, I have been drawn toward the study of how climate change and other socioecological threats have intersected with the criminal legal system. In this essay, I consider how one case offers important challenges and possibilities for communicating dreams of radical environmental and climate justice in the context of the criminal le...

For more than a century, wildlife conservation in the United States has been built on the notion that nonhuman animal populations are resources to be regulated by law and managed efficiently, according to the best available science and in the public trust. This approach, known as the North American Model of Wildlife Management, has come under incre...

Access to safe drinking water is considered a universal human right. In the U.S., exposure to arsenic contamination in drinking water disproportionately impacts small, groundwater-reliant communities and communities of color. These inequities are driven by a combination of natural, built, and sociopolitical factors. The United Nations calls upon st...

Prisons and jails around the globe are sites of heart-wrenching, stomach-turning violence and brutality, perpetrated by the governments and corporations that build and manage them. We briefly outline each chapter within this report, which links the ways laws and policy have impacted or created conditions of environmental injustice in prisons, jails...

Carceral logics permeate our thinking about humans and nonhumans. We imagine that greater punishment will reduce crime and make society safer. We hope that more convictions and policing for animal crimes will keep animals safe and elevate their social status. The dominant approach to human-animal relations is governed by an unjust imbalance of powe...

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. In fact, the population of the United States accounts for less than5% of the global population but holds 20% of the world’s prisoners. As of 2020, more than 2.3 million people were incarcerated in the United States and of that number, more than 555,000 people have not b...

How can university scholars and community activists effectively collaborate to produce generative, empowering, and materially impactful knowledge and actions concerning climate change and climate justice? In this paper, we report on a collaborative effort between climate justice non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and university faculty and stude...

As global environmental changes continue to accelerate, research and practice in the field of conservation biology may be essential to help forestall precipitous declines in the earth’s ability to sustain a diversity of life. However, many conservation programs have faced scrutiny for the social injustices they create, especially within the paradig...

Comparative scholarship that examines the intersections and tensions among animal rights, environmental justice, and climate justice movements is sorely needed because of the clear overlapping interests among these political formations and the potentially high impact of these movements converging in either discursive or material registers, or both....

The complexities and scope of environmental issues have not only outpaced the capacities and responsiveness of traditional political actors but also generated new innovations, constituencies, and approaches to governing environmental problems. In response, comparative environmental politics (CEP) has emerged as a vibrant and growing field of schola...

The climate emergency increasingly threatens our communities, ecosystems, food production, health, and economy. It disproportionately impacts lower income communities, communities of color, and the elderly. Assessments since the 2018 IPCC 1.5 Celsius report show that current national and sub-national commitments and actions are insufficient. Fortun...

The critical environmental justice (CEJ) framework contends that inequalities are sustained through intersecting social categories, multi-scalarity, the perceived expendability of marginalized populations, and state-vested power. While this approach offers new pathways for environmental justice research, it overlooks the role of firms, suggesting a...

This handbook defines the contours of environmental sociology and invites readers to push boundaries in their exploration of this important subdiscipline. It offers a comprehensive overview of the evolution of environmental sociology and its role in this era of intensified national and global environmental crises. Its timely frameworks and high-imp...

Prisons and jails around the globe are sites of heart-wrenching, stomach-turning violence and brutality, perpetrated by the governments and corporations that build and manage them. These abuses intersect with and reinforce a myriad of environmental injustices. Specifically, the evidence of water contamination, air pollution exposure, poor nutrition...

The field of environmental justice studies has blossomed into a multidisciplinary body of scholarship in the last few decades with contributions across the social sciences, humanities, law, and the sciences. Our framing of environmental justice scholarship centers on the necessity of examining the role of state and institutional violence in produci...

Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new information and communications technologies as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or otherworldly, these tools and tech...

This article offers insights into conceptual, pedagogical, and programmatic crossings and conflicts between the fields of Environmental Studies and Ethnic Studies. It highlights both the important intersections between the two fields and their potential value, while also addressing the challenges posed in the development of programmatic collaborati...

'Environmental Justice: Key Issues' is the first textbook to offer a comprehensive and accessible overview of environmental justice, one of the most dynamic fields in environmental politics scholarship. The rapidly growing body of research in this area has brought about a proliferation of approaches; as such, the breadth and depth of the field can...

Environmental injustice occurs when marginalized groups face disproportionate environmental impacts from a range of threats. Prisons are increasingly being uncovered to be areas of extreme environmental injustice through exposing incarcerated populations to environmental threats like toxic water and air, and for polluting the environments where the...

In this paper I ask how might environmental justice studies scholarship be recast if we consider the phenomenon of environmental injustice as a form of criminalisation? In other words, since environmental injustice is frequently a product of state‐sanctioned violence against communities of colour, then what are the implications of reframing it as a...

Environmental injustice occurs when marginalized groups face disproportionate environmental impacts from a range of threats. Environmental racism is a particular form of environmental injustice and frequently includes the implementation of policies, regulations, or institutional practices that target communities of color for undesirable waste sites...

Mobility can indicate a powerful or privileged relationship with one’s environment. The ability to exercise mobility or not (of oneself or others) is an exertion of power that demarcates where particular people belong and under what kind of environmental conditions. This essay focuses on the significance of borders in creating environmental privile...

The term critical environmental justice (EJ) studies was perhaps first used in the early 2000s and has been become more mainstream in the last two years. R. Scott Frey’s research on the transnational trade in hazardous substances reveals that he was producing critical EJ studies scholarship well before that. Frey’s body of work has advanced the fie...

Environmental injustice is a term used to describe the fact that environmental threats in general, and climate disruptions in particular, affect communities, nations, and regions of the globe differently and unevenly, with low income and global south communities, people of color communities, and indigenous communities being hit the hardest. Prisons...

This afterword discusses the need to move toward analyses of just/ unjust sustainability to just resilience. To better move towards robust and just sustainability, we need a better vocabulary and analytic to not only diagnose problems, but also to understand how their efforts replicate existing epistemological and political problems. To better disl...

In this wide-ranging conversation, Pellow and Pulido discuss the past, present, and future of environmental justice studies and environmental justice politics

An Unfinished Foundation: The United Nations and Global Environmental Governance. By Conca Ken . New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 332p. $99.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. - Volume 14 Issue 4 - David N. Pellow

TOWARD A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE STUDIES: BLACK LIVES MATTER AS AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE CHALLENGE-CORRIGENDUM - David N. Pellow

In this paper I expand upon the recent use of the term " Critical Environmental Justice Studies. " This concept is meant to capture new developments in Environmental Justice (EJ) Studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. Because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, I take this opportunity to...

In an Editorial now published in “Global Environmental Change”, 18 climate policy researchers argue that analyses of equity and justice are absolutely essential for our ability to understand climate politics and contribute to concrete efforts to achieve adequate, fair and enduring climate action for present and future generations. Climate change ac...

Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, ea...

This book is a story about inequality, its many forms and far reaching consequences, and unconventional efforts to challenge it. The book expands our understanding of inequality by making sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species. I consider how radical environmental and animal rights m...

Environmental racism has made headlines during the last three decades, in large part because the movement for environmental justice has placed this issue on the public agenda. In this chapter, I consider the ways in which discourses and practices of institutional racism are complicated and deepened by teaching environmental racism. I explore this t...

I consider the social, legal, and political implications of state repression not only for the radical earth and animal liberation movements, but also for freedom movements more generally. Finally, I suggest a number of philosophical, symbolic, and strategic points of intersection and possible collaboration between radical ecology movements and move...

The focus of this chapter is the first dimension of total liberation: anti-oppression and justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems. But first I consider why activists were motivated to embrace this framework to begin with. Many elitist, patriarchal, racist, and homophobic elements are quite strong in animal rights and environmental movements,...

A considerable amount of movement energy is directed at providing political, legal, financial, material, and emotional support for those activists in prison or who are under pressure from the criminal justice system to share information on movement activities with authorities. This chapter charts the range of activities movements practice to suppor...

Direct action is a core part of radical environmental and animal rights movements’ tactical repertoire. Activists mobilize people to prevent institutional practices and policies they believe are harming humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animals; and they support and engage in property destruction, sabotage, and personal confrontations with offending...

This chapter presents the author's account of the social change potential of two alternative projects that bridge the gap between campus and community. He helped create the Transatlantic Initiative on Environmental Justice (TIEJ), a network that links universities, legal support centers, and community organizations in the United States and central...

Since 1985 I have been intimately involved in struggles against environmental racism and human rights abuses occurring in the United States and globally. My activism began with a youth movement organization in my hometown, Nashville, Tennessee, and continued with my participation and leadership in anti-apartheid, solidarity, animal rights, antiraci...

On December 13, 1999, the City Council of Aspen, Colorado-one of the country's most exclusive recreational sites for some of the world's wealthiest people-unanimously passed a resolution petitioning the U.S. Congress and the president to restrict the number of immigrants entering the United States. The language of the resolution suggests that this...

Examines the export of hazardous wastes to poor communities of color around the world and charts the global social movements that challenge them. Every year, nations and corporations in the “global North” produce millions of tons of toxic waste. Too often this hazardous material—inked to high rates of illness and death and widespread ecosystem dama...

The role of working-class Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Silicon Valley's high technology revolution has been obscured by imposed silences, erasures, and a fixation on the relatively few who have become wealthy from the electronics boom. In this article we consider the thousands of Asians/Pacific Islanders who make Silicon Valley possible by...

The role of working class Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Silicon Valley’s high technology revolution has been obscured by imposed silences, erasures, and a fixation on the relatively few who have become wealthy from the electronics boom. In this article we consider the thousands of Asians/Pacific Islanders who make Silicon Valley possible by...