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39
GLOBALIZING
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
Radical and transformative
movements past and present
Leah Temper
Berta’s struggle was not only for the environment, it was for system change, in opposition
to capitalism, racism and patriarchy.
This quote comes from a statement delivered by the family of Berta Caceres, a Honduran
Indigenous, female, environmental activist who was assassinated in her home on March 3,
2016, while this essay was being penned. Berta, a leader of the Lenca Indigenous people,
and General Coordinator of the Civic Council of the Indigenous and Popular Organizations
of Honduras (COPINH), was best known for her struggle against the Agua Zarca dam, for
which she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015. The case became
a global symbol because after COPINH staged a blockade for over a year, they managed
to get the world’s largest dam company, Chinese State-owned Sino-Hydro, to abandon
the project.
Berta’s death, unfortunately, is not an extraordinary occurrence. In 2015, environmental
activists were killed at the rate of three per week (Global Witness 2016). Nor was it a surprise –
she was a known target. What was unexpected perhaps, was the scale and breadth of the
globalized reaction to her death. Her tragic assassination triggered an unprecedented global
response demanding justice for Berta and an end to impunity and corruption of extractive
projects. The call came from Indigenous and human rights groups, LGBTQ activists, those
contesting extractivism including mining and hydropower, climate justice activists, and
feminists. I argue that in this out-pouring of solidarity, we can begin to trace the contours of
an incipient and increasingly coherent global movement for environmental justice.
One dimension of the EJ movement’s globalization has been its diffusion throughout the
world.
Environmental justice struggles are taking place across the Global North and Global
South. They include movements of agrarian resistance against land-grabbing led by La Via
Campesina, climate justice movements fighting dirty coal plants and pipelines that are rallying
to “Leave the Oil in the Soil”, as well as those contesting new processes of commodification
of nature through mechanisms such as REDD, carbon credits and bio-diversity offsets; move-
ments defending rights of access, such as pastoralists claiming access to watering holes and
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Globalizing EJ movements
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waste-pickers to revalorized waste resources being commodified by “green” incinerators. Over
the past three years, the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJatlas), a project I co-direct with Joan
Martinez-Alier, has traced the outline of this incipient global movement for environmental
justice through its localized manifestations (Figure 39.1). The EJatlas (www.ejatlas.org)
currently tracks almost 1900 ecological conflicts around the world (as of October 2016).
Each point represents one conflict defined as a local mobilization against an environmentally
destructive activity or policy (Figure 39.2). Each case or data-sheet is documented by an
organization involved in the resistance, or an activist scholar, and outlines the history, actors,
impacts, claims and outcomes of the conflict as well as photos, references, and links (for a
description of the project see Temper et al. 2015).
While these cases are collected under the banner of environmental justice, it should be
noted that many of the peasant and urban movements documented may not explicitly adopt
an environmental justice discourse. There is no global unified environmental justice move-
ment per se (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016), but rather a plurality of movements and struggles with
their own agency and ideological hybridity (Baviskar 2005) that are increasingly networked
and brought into strategic alliances. Environmentalism is thus one representation of several
contending subjective meanings attached to struggles, along with gender, class, caste, ethnic
and nationalist meanings. This networking and alliance-building between struggles constitutes
a second dimension of the EJ movement’s globalization.
Recent scholarship has thus grappled with the question of how to define “global environ-
mental justice” (Schlosberg 2009, 2013; Martinez-Alier et al. 2016; Sikor & Newell 2014;
Agyeman 2014; Walker 2009). This work has made productive contributions regarding the
dimensions of justice and inequality across both locations and the global trans-national insti-
tutions and interconnections that join them, continually highlighting the plurality of justice
norms across diverse cultural, social and environmental contexts. Following Guha and Martinez-
Alier’s seminal work (1997) that introduced the “environmentalism of the poor” it has been
generally accepted that there is an important distinction in terms of origins and forms of arti-
culation between the ways in which environmental action characteristically expresses itself in
the North and the South. While Northern and particularly US environmentalism is deemed to
be aesthetic and moral, rooted in the politics of consumption, Southern environmentalisms
are understood to be about survival and subsistence, the ecosystem people against the omnivores
(Gadgil & Guha 1995).
Here I would like to attempt to move past this distinction, agreeing with Newell (2005)
that the generic categories of North and South are increasingly inadequate for the study of
global environmental politics. As local political ecologies are becoming increasingly trans-
national and interlinked across geographies, new points of convergence are manifold as
campaigns around biofuels and food sovereignty, land-grabbing, climate and food justice
simultaneously address sectors such as agriculture, energy generation, water management and
financial markets, demanding action at a global scale of governance.
This chapter contributes to clarifying the nature and shape of the global environmental
movement, drawing on literature on the history of environmental protest as well as on the
empirical evidence from the Global Environmental Justice Atlas. Through these narratives,
as well as literatures from political ecology, environmental philosophy, eco-feminism, eco-
logical economics, history, anthropology and sociology, this chapter aims to distill some of
the core characteristics, unresolved tensions and relevant future lines of enquiry of an emerg-
ing radical and transformative global EJ movement. These include a focus on ecological
justice that takes into account relations with nonhuman nature and navigates the tension
between conservation and livelihoods, considered in the first section; a global materialist
Figure 39.1 The online platform of the Environmental Justice Atlas (www.ejatlas.org)
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Globalizing EJ movements
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perspective that questions the structural basis of the economy, taken up in the second; and
the increasing globalization and interconnectedness between struggles and their simultane-
ously oppositional and constructive politics, illustrated in the third. The article concludes
with avenues for future research.
By drawing on historical as well as current examples, I hope to demonstrate that EJ, while
only recently defined as such, has a long and rich history around the world that far predates
Western environmentalism as we know it. This brings attention to the need for diverse and
situated understandings of environmentalism, and for going beyond northern theoretical
understandings of environmental justice to one informed by non-Eurocentric epistemologies
and ontologies.
Within this diversity, this chapter outlines defining characteristics and tensions that have
endured over time while also highlighting how a globalizing world has served to transform
environmentalism through an emerging planetary consciousness.
Exhibit A: justice for human and nonhuman
nature – the eco-dharma of the Bishnois
Environmental justice has generally been considered an anthropocentric endeavour, primarily
concerned with the displacement of environmental risks onto parties not implicated in
their production. This framing may imply that the activities themselves do not need to be
questioned, only the distribution of risks. In contrast, ecological justice has been used to refer
to the justice of the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world (Low &
Gleeson 1998), and calls for addressing the ecological quality of our practices (Stevis 2000).
While environmental justice has traditionally positioned itself counter to an environmentalism
of conservation and wilderness protection (Guha & Martinez-Alier 1997), the global brand of
EJ transcends and dissolves some of these distinctions – pointing to the inseparability between
justice for nature and justice for humans.
To illustrate this blurring of the distinction between environmental and ecological justice,
we can turn to what is perhaps the oldest recorded protest event in environmental history,
Figure 39.2 A case in the Environmental Justice Atlas: Yanacocha mine, Peru
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the story of the Bishnoi collective martyrdom against deforestation in India in 1730 CE. The
campaign was led by Amrita Devi, the first known tree-hugger and eco-feminist, and a
follower of the Bishnois, an offshoot sect of Hinduism, based on the teachings of Guru
Jambhesvara (Jain 2010).
When the Maharaja Abhayasingh of Jodhpur demanded wood from his subjects to build
a fortress and the Bishnoi community defied his orders he sent soldiers to their village to cut
down the Khejari trees which grew in the area. When Amrita Devi came to know about it,
she faced the soldiers and proclaimed that anyone wishing to cut a tree would have to first
cut through her, saying: Sar santey rookh rahe to bhi sasto jaan (If a tree is saved even at the cost
of one’s head, it’s worth it). It is said that weaponless, she hugged the nearest Khejari, and
the axe-wielding soldiers cut through her neck and the tree, severing both. Her daughters
followed in her footsteps and also lost their heads. In response, the community decided that
for every tree cut, one Bishnoi volunteer would sacrifice his or her life. When the Maharaja
was informed of the events, he ordered the felling to be stopped. Yet by this time, 363 Bishnois
had been martyred (Dwivedi 2005).
The story is probably preserved for posterity because the Maharaja, in recognition of their
courage, apologized and issued a royal decree, engraved on a copper plate, prohibiting the
cutting of trees and hunting of animals within the boundaries of Bishnois villages. The case
is exceptional in that despite the bloodshed, it represents a rare record of historical success
in what we may term proto-environmental justice activism. The territory remains a protected
area until today, while the Bishnois’ struggle has gone on to inspire other movements in
India, particularly the Chipko Andolan “forest huggers” movement in the Himalayas led by
women (Shiva & Bandyopadhyay 1986) and can thus be seen as an important influence for
global EJ (see also Chapter 48).
The Bishnois case highlights the often spiritual and religious aspect of environmental
defence, which they term an ‘eco-dharma’. It was inspired by the tenets of Guru Jambhesvara
(1451–1536) who, after witnessing drought that led to decimation of the local wildlife for
meat, had a vision where he saw people quarrelling with nature and destroying the environ-
ment that sustained them. He realized that humans have to sustain the environment around
them in order for nature to sustain the humans. His 29 tenets of the religion include everyday
practices of ecological activism aimed to enable the flourishing of life and a synthesis between
ecological, social and community health in harsh desert conditions. Informed by this philosophy
we can say that the Bishnoi defence of the forest went beyond a conservationist ethic, instead
emanating from a religious reverence for nonhuman life, and can also be understood as the
defence of the underlying basis of their social ecology.
The Bishnois philosophy can be seen as an early example of EJ activism that appears
to transcend anthropocentric and eco-centric approaches to justice. Increasingly this perspective
is gaining prominence demonstrated by a push to progressively broaden the claimants of
justice to include nonhuman nature. The Principles of Ecological Justice from the First People
of Color Leadership Conference, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Bolivian “rights of Mother Nature” initiative,
as well as numerous other declarations on environmental and climate change by indigenous
peoples support this view (Figueroa 2011; Maldonado et al 2013; Kopnina 2014).
Such initiatives are informed by Indigenous environmental epistemologies and often rely
on a narrative of reciprocity and relational ontologies based on natural law, which defines
the relationship and responsibility between people and the environment. As Indigenous EJ
scholar Winona LaDuke (1994; ix) explains, “All parts of the environment—plants, animals,
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Globalizing EJ movements
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fish, or rocks—are viewed as gifts from the Creator. These gifts should not be taken without
a reciprocal offering, usually tobacco or saymah, as it is called in the Ojibwa language.”
On the surface, there may appear to be a contradiction between an ecological perspective
based on the rights of mother nature, and issues of access represented by the livelihood
approach of the environmentalism of the poor. Schlosberg (2009), for example, eschews an
a priori hierarchy among species, considering various models of political deliberation among a
plurality of parties, including nonhumans. However, scholars making such claims tend to
underestimate the potential for serious conflict among the various dimensions of and claim-
ants to ecological justice and the political implications of “subjectifying” nature. When it is
humans against nature, who comes first?
This question was brought to the members of the 17th World Congress of the
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in 2013, when the motion ‘Justice for people
should come before justice for the environment’ was debated (Kopnina 2014). Those in
favour, including Amita Baviskar (2005), pointed to the social costs of nature preservation
and how conservation is frequently a tool of neo-colonialism insensitive to local cultures,
arguing that anthropologists have a duty to uphold human (economic and social) rights and
Indigenous entitlements against Western environmentalists.
Those against the motion countered that humans, other species, and the material world
are bound together in communal processes of production and reproduction that are
interdependent and that only a recognition of this interconnectedness and a consideration
of the rights of nonhuman species simultaneous with the social justice movement holds
the promise for long-term sustainability and justice (Kopnina 2014). At the end, the attendees
overwhelmingly supported this position.
This tension between justice for humans and justice for nonhuman nature, between conser-
vation and access, is not easily resolved and remains an ongoing challenge for the practice,
policy and study of global environmental justice. For example, EJ activists have been vocal
supporters of new legislation that aims to give rights to nature such as the implementation
of Ecuador’s constitution on the rights of Mother Nature (Fish 2013) and a more recent
initiative to give the Te Urewera National Park in New Zealand juridical status similar to
corporations under the stewardship of the Maori (Magallanes 2015). Such initiatives have
been lauded for integrating Indigenous cosmo-visions and ontologies that grant subjectivity
to nature. However, the translation of such rights on paper into real rights is fraught with
difficulties and the politics of socionatural hybridity remain very much under construction.
Granting rights to nature, while discursively powerful, still calls for someone to defend
those rights. Accepting that nonhuman beings have interests that need to be taken into
account in public decisions necessitates accepting that these interests will be voiced by
human agents. As O’Neill (2006: 262) says, “The nonhuman natural world does not speak to
us. Neither does nature listen.” This leads him to the question: Who speaks for nature? With
what legitimacy? Nature is not a single and homogenous entity but a complex ecosystem
with competing interests among organisms at the local scale, as well as between scales. Further,
nature cannot elect a representative nor represent itself.
One potentially productive avenue when deciding who can represent nature is to draw
on eco-feminist epistemology which draws a parallel between domination over women and
other marginalized groups and domination of nature, contending that nature and women
are both socially constructed as something “other” to have power over (Mies & Shiva 1993).
Feminist scholars suggest that the way forward is to work towards the dismantling of dualisms
such as man/woman and culture/nature and instead bring attention back to the distributions
of power and privilege at play (Mies & Shiva 1993; Plumwood 2004). A feminist lens directs
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our attention away from questions of whether nature’s rights are being harmed towards the
underlying power dynamics, asking “what specific social/institutional configurations make
it such that . . . many do not have the resources to attempt to ‘live in integrity’ with nature?”
(Davion 2002: 57). Recast this way, even the soldiers who severed Amrita’s head were acting
in the way they thought they were supposed to behave within their cultural and structural
constraints. This perspective calls attention to the reality that since nature cannot represent
itself, many will speak for the environment, and such voices need to be heard within concrete
contexts of power and privilege.
The story of the Bishnois illustrates a rare historical victory for sub-altern voices, albeit
at a price. It also serves as an early example of how engagement with local identities and
meanings, norms and existing taboos can inform environmental management based on
widespread participation and deliberative democracy and informed by an ethics of care. This
does not foreclose the political act of relating to nature, but requires an expression of the kind
of relationships we want to build and the power relationships embedded in them.
Exhibit B: social metabolism and the environmental
philosophy of Tanaka Shozu
Another key concept relevant to understanding global EJ is an understanding of how local
issues and struggles are affected by larger-scale processes and vice versa. Relevant frameworks
for analysing these dynamics include social metabolism and the related concepts of unequal
ecological exchange and ecological debt. The concept of social metabolism refers to the
physical throughput of the economic system, in terms of the energy and materials associated
with economic activities, as either direct or indirect inputs or wastes (Fischer-Kowalski &
Haberl 2007). Geographically uneven and socially unequal metabolic processes are key to
understanding environmental inequality, which in turn both reflects and reinforces overt
forms of hierarchy and exploitation. EJ informed by ecological economics brings attention
to the metabolic patterns driving environmental change and gives further insights into how
uneven flows of matter and energy and transformations in the extraction and provision of
natural resources characterize different socio-ecological transitions (Fischer-Kowalski 1997;
Fischer-Kowalski & Haberl 2007) and lead to novel forms of social contestations.
The earliest recorded case in the Environmental Justice Atlas is that of the Ashio copper
mine in Japan (1903). It provides a fruitful illustration of early EJ activism driven by new
socio-metabolic transformations. While environmentalism in the West emerged primarily
out of a concern for preserving nature and wildlife, early movements in Japan were very
much focused on the local social and health impacts associated with new forms of industrial
pollution, similar to the US EJ movement (Imura & Schreurs 2005).
The leader of the movement against the mine, Tanaka Shozo (1841–1913), widely acknow-
ledged as Japan’s “peasant environmentalist” (Martinez-Alier 2009), can also be heralded as
one of the country’s first public EJ activists and thinkers. He played a dual role in mobilizing
and participating in direct action as well as representing the villagers in the National Diet in
Tokyo. Yet the prescience and significance of his ecological thought, laid out in detail by
Stolz (2006, 2007), remains under-appreciated and is worth examining as it holds continuing
relevance for global EJ today.
Tanaka developed a sophisticated ecological theory of society informed by his experience
of activism, based on the twin processes of nature: “poison” (doku) and “flow” (nagare) (Stolz
2006). When the government concluded that the solution to the mine pollution was flood
control and the construction of a dam, it instituted a massive re-engineering of the watershed,
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signalling “the beginning of the Japanese state’s systematic intervention in nature”. Tanaka,
the anti-mining activist, became a water justice activist and went on to develop his funda-
mental River Law (konponteki kasenho), foreshadowing recent studies such as that of the
World Commission on Dams (2000) by over a century, by pointing to the intertwined
environmental and social harms that come from ignoring the dictates of an active nature in
the name of absolute human agency (Stolz 2006):
For Tanaka, because motion was inherent in nature, the state’s policies of control
through constriction and manipulation of the rivers’ currents would not have the
desired effect of wholly controlling the river. On the contrary, they would result in
a harmful “backflow” or “reversal of flow” (gyakuryu) as the river confronted the con-
crete banks, sluices, and reservoirs and reversed itself, resulting in flooding upstream.
(This is precisely what happened.) . . . As Tanaka’s thought developed, doku came to
describe not only the presence of toxins in the watershed’s fields, but also the horizon
of beneficial human intervention in nature.
(Stolz 2007: 4)
Tanaka showed how the accumulation of harm from bad environmental policy moved from
the environmental to the social realm, making the link between environmental issues and
social justice at the heart of EJ. He demonstrated how the increase in doku led inevitably to
social and political repression, including the repression of the anti-mine petitioners, the
taming of the river through damming and an escalating cycle of displacement of externalities
culminating in the destruction of Yanaka village. Tanaka stated, “the mine poison problem
has mutated; it has become the theft and destruction of homes” (Arahata 1999: 8, quoted in
Stolz 2006).
Tanaka’s ideas about flow and poison foreground the global perspective on EJ today, in
the acknowledgement of how impacts at one scale radiate outwards. His description of doku
can be seen as a precursor to Georgescu-Roegen’s work on entropy and the economic
process (1987), where he demonstrated how societies generate order by continually importing
low-entropy matter-energy from the environment and exporting high-entropy matter energy
back to the environment. Georgescu-Roegen’s work has been extended by scholars such as
Hornborg (1992) to explain how environmental inequality is a result of both uneven access
to the basic sources of low entropy energy – solar and terrestrial or stored energy (such as
coal and oil) – as well as the uneven flows of high entropy wastes (such as carbon dioxide
and other pollutants) that are discharged from the economic metabolic system and displaced
onto the most vulnerable populations. This socio-metabolic perspective brings to the fore
how conflicts over oil extraction, coal and fossil fuels (of which 352 have been documented
to date in the EJatlas), and the sea-level rise, droughts, floods and tornadoes associated with
climate chaos, are opposite sides of the same coin. Global environmental and climate justice
activists increasingly bring attention to this interconnectedness between access to resources
and risk, and from sources to sinks.
Climate chaos represents the most cogent example of the unequal transfer of entropy
at a global scale. Thus, a Black Lives Matter protest in Britain in September 2016 blocked
London airport, arguing that “the climate crisis is a racist crisis” because seven out of the ten
countries most impacted will be in Africa. Activists deploy concepts such as the ecological
debt from North to South, a concept born in Latin America in 1991 (Martinez-Alier et al.
2014), and “ecologically unequal exchange” to draw attention to how the high material
standards of developed countries are dependent on net transfers of materials and energy
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from the periphery to the industrial centre; while the less developed countries and regions
exporting the resources experience a net increase in entropy (disorder), leading to environ-
mental disruption and degradation, as natural resources and traditional social structures are
dismembered (Hornborg 1992).
Across the world, those protesting against environmental injustice increasingly go beyond
asking for compensation or access to resources, and instead question the basic configuration of
the global socio-metabolic system based on a false growth imperative and on prices that
do not reflect environmental costs. In this way, the discourse of global EJ goes beyond a mere
quantitative question of distribution or of reducing the size of the economy and its material
and energy throughput. It includes calls for a complete transformation of the economic system.
A central element of this transformation is recognition of the reproductive and care labour
undertaken by women, as well as nature, which are both considered free gifts to capital (Salleh
2010). Thus it can be said that while the US Environmental Protection Agency considers
that EJ will be achieved when “everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environ-
mental and health hazards”, global EJ assumes a more radical position, claiming that only the
restructuring of dominant economic models, social relations and institutional arrangements can
address social, political, economic and environmental inequities.
Exhibit C: globalizing resistance – the Unist’ot’en camp
A global EJ perspective highlights how localized processes of resistance are intertwined
with processes at larger scales brought about by expanding capitalist markets, multiple forms
of commoditization, and global flows of resources and information. Those engaged in place-
based struggles can contest the “spaces of flows” of global capitalism through a variety of
strategies. This may include “scale jumping”, or forging alliances with actors at different
spatial scales and with differential access to networks of institutional, financial, and political
support, to externalize their political claims (Smith 1996).
At the same time, local movements motivated in part by material demands, such as those
of the environmentalism of the poor, are increasingly linking their struggles to impacts and
processes occurring at much broader scales and of global concern, while they propose new
alternatives. The degrowth movement, the global movement for food justice, and Indigenous
activists and their allies are not mobilizing due to concern for their own livelihood and
security alone. Instead, they share the concern that environmental pressures wrought by
capitalism, its crises, and its “spatial and temporal fixes” are threatening the material basis of
the entire planet. Global environmental justice can thus be said to be motivated by a new
planetary consciousness and understanding of the interlinked nature of geographies of
environmental injustice. This networking between struggles and movements constitutes the
global EJ movement.
The case of the Unist’ot’en camp of the Wet’suwet’en is instructive. The Wet’suwet’en
First Nation territory spans over 22 000 km in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, and
lies directly in the path of several proposed gas and oil pipelines. Since 2010, the Unist’ot’en
clan, members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, have been reoccupying and re-establishing
themselves on their ancestral lands in opposition to these projects. They have set up a camp
on the GPS coordinates of the pipeline route and refuse to allow any pipelines to cross their
territory, which they term as “occupied and un-ceded” as the tribe has never signed a treaty
with the Government of Canada.
The First Nation claims they have not been properly consulted, and objects that the
pipeline contributes to expanding shale gas extraction through hydraulic fracturing
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(‘fracking’), which uses and destroys enormous volumes of fresh water. They also claim that
they are operating in solidarity with neighbouring communities who want to stop all pipe-
lines, reverse climate change, shut down tar sands and oppose what they claim are false
solutions to climate change: carbon marketing; carbon, boreal and biological offsets; and
reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).
The position of the Unist’ot’en camp is counter to a NIMBY approach, which would
confine their resistance to concerns for distributive impacts on their territory alone. They
are uncompromising; neither the Pacific Trails Pipeline nor any other pipeline will be
allowed through their territories. This complete opposition to all pipelines – existing, proposed
or approved to expand – has generated wide support for the camp, which has become a
symbol against extractivism. This networked resistance is a defining characteristic of global
environmental justice today, as groups working on global climate change create alliances with
local place-based movements to demand structural transformation of the economy. As Combes
describes of the fracktivist movement (in Temper et al. 2013), while part of the struggle
keeps a local defensive attitude, another line is focused more on proactive work to broaden
the mobilization beyond the locality, integrating discourses on energy democracy, sovere-
ignty and climate justice. Similarly, we see global anti-incineration movements forming
coalitions with local waste-picker and recycling movements. They point to how they reduce
greenhouse gas emissions through the reuse of materials and are fighting for recognition of
their significant environmental contributions in recycling and the role this plays in climate
change mitigation and a healthy economy.
While the Unist’ot’en checkpoint disrupts flows of capital and blocks the movement of
resources out of the territory, it simultaneously creates a space where the people may practice
and assert their sovereignty and enact what they view as their sacred responsibility to all life
within their territory. For example, the Unist’ot’en have erected an Indigenous healing
centre within the pathway of multiple pipelines meant to cross their territory (Temper et al.
2015). As Mel Basil, a member of the collective, says: “I don’t have a right to these fish –
I have a responsibility to this river and I will not let that responsibility be diminished.”
The recent announcement of the Canadian Government revoking the licence of the
Enbridge oil pipeline largely in response to Indigenous protest, including that of the Unist’ot’en
camp, attests to how this power of responsibility can indeed be exercised from below. It
demonstrates how environmental justice activism contributes to re-ordering and reshaping
social and material relations, and the spatial organization and distribution of risk, pollution,
entropy, and environmental inequities for some time to come, and at a global scale.
Conclusion
We are Nature Defending Itself
(activist slogan from 2015 Paris Climate Summit)
This chapter has drawn from both historical and emblematic cases from the Environmental
Justice Atlas to describe key features of an emerging global environmental justice discourse
and a globalizing movement. The tools may have changed across time – today the response
to Berta’s death is globally transmitted and shared through digital communications. However,
violence against nature and women is an omnipresent motif, from Amrita to Berta, mostly
unchanged in shape and form. In Ashio, the dam was a means to stem and control the
polluted floodwaters from the mine; meanwhile the Agua Zarca dam that COPINH is resist-
ing is one among 48 dams planned or underway on their lands, primarily for hydro-power
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for mining projects. An ironic reversal. A reflection on these key historical and current
examples demonstrates both the permanence and the novelty in how popular environ-
mental activism expresses itself, the values that drive it, the response from the state and
power-holders, and the impacts of activism across time and space.
Numerous scholars have contended that climate change and a convergence of crises over
food, fuel, energy and finance are contributing to an “environmentalization of social issues”
(Acselrad 2010). While EJ movements are sometimes painted as defensive and reactionary,
I argue that then as now, global EJ displays characteristics of being both confrontational and
constructive. Counter to Swyngedouw’s (2010) concern that environmental questions are
becoming part of a new “post-political” consensus, this chapter suggests that global environ-
mental justice offers the possibility to position environmental questions within a larger
critique of unequal social relations and the capitalist globalization process they are embedded
in. According to authors such as Acosta (2009) and Svampa (2013), the escalation of socio-
environmental conflicts has often been accompanied by the emergence of new forms of
political mobilization and civic participation focusing on defending the commons, biodiversity,
and the environment. They lead to the introduction of new forms of governance across
multiple scales as well as new forms of participatory democratic decision-making. Concrete
examples include the spread and diffusion of popular consultations as regards mining projects
in Latin America (Walter & Urkidi 2015).
A globalized EJ calls for the need for intercultural communication and acceptance of other
worldviews and a plurality of ways of understanding nature. In this way it reminds us that
conflicts over the environment are epistemic struggles wherein other forms of the political,
other economies, other knowledges are produced and theorized and hegemonic world-
views are questioned and reformulated (Escobar 2016). And that new knowledge practices
are created through processes of struggle (Temper & Del Bene 2016), through the reversal
of enclosures of land and resources, and through the active defence of existing and new
commoning practices and social relations as communities understand and contest the
mechanisms of their oppression (Casas-Cortés et al. 2008; Brownhill et al. 2012). Engagement
in processes of struggle offers a space to exercise a citizenship and participation that is often
denied, and for the expression of plural values that may conflict in ways that simply cannot
be neatly or even satisfactorily resolved. The practice of environmental justice through struggle
opens up this space for contesting claims, and for competing definitions of nature and justice
to be expressed and debated.
The EJatlas and the current 1850 cases (and growing) provide empirical material for a
research agenda that contributes to understanding how inequalities are shaped through socio-
metabolic transformations in the economy and how they are contested, and to what outcomes.
Further documentation and analysis via a comparative political ecology holds significant
promise for extending both the praxis and theory of environmental justice and geographical
scholarship.
Further, the EJatlas offers fruitful opportunities for comparative research delving into
the shape of global EJ and the differences and similarities between environmentalisms
across locations, as well as on how local political contexts shape strategies and action-forms.
For example, we may ask: Are environmentalist concerns in some countries more likely to
be expressed in a contentious manner? What is the role of disruptive protest and how does
escalation of protest activities lead to differing outcomes? How are different languages
of valuation such as identity politics deployed? How is the technical language of Western
environmentalism (increasingly used for strategic reasons) combined with arguments about
identity and culture, and to what effect? How do new forms of action appear and how
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are they diffused across time and space? Which of the sustained actions achieve their goals
and why?
Finally, while the EJatlas clearly illustrates what environmental injustice is and contributes
to understanding the mechanisms of enclosure, exclusion and externalization through which
it operates, a question demanding further study is whether the positive ideals of EJ exist in
practice. If so, what does it look like and when and how does it obtain? What is the relation-
ship between EJ and transformations to sustainability? How and when have communities
been able to put their alternative practices and visions into place?
An examination of global EJ through the stories of struggle can help point towards
practicable paths to equitable and sustainable society–nature relationships. At the same time,
an ecologically informed global resistance under the banner of EJ can serve as a convergence
issue where diverse movements challenging diverse forms of oppression, including racism,
sexism, speciesism and physical and epistemic violence can coalesce and potentially where
new solidarities and alliances can be born.
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