Environmental justice and political ecology

Environmental justice and political ecology

Ryan Holifield

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a chapter published by Taylor &Francis in the Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. Full chapter and

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INTRODUCTION

Environmental marginalization and inequality are at the heart of both the research program of political ecology and the concept of environmental justice. And yet until relatively recently, political ecology and environmental justice appeared tobe traveling down quite different paths. What took these two—seemingly such a perfect match—such a long time to meet? What finally brought them together, and what has come out of this encounter so far? And what might be some possible paths for theirshared future?

This chapter will venture some answers to these questions. Since the story of political ecology runs throughout the handbook, the chapter emphasizes the trajectories of environmental justice, along with related concepts like environmental equity and environmental racism, which are then brought into explicit conversation with political ecology. Environmental justice is sometimes presented as a distinct “approach” or “framework” within human-environment research, but I contend that it is better considered as a concept, topic, or phenomenon, for which there are numerous possible approaches to analysis. The chapter begins by tracing the early history of environmental justice, which emerged in a very different geographic setting than political ecology, and with very different purposes: specifically, to mobilize activism and shape

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policy and law within the United States (see McCusker this volumeon such policy orientations and goals). Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s did the two traditions begin explicitly to cross-fertilize, as political ecologists began looking more closely at the “Global North” and the concept of environmental justice begancirculating in the “Global South.”

But in bringing the concept and subfield together, just as important as this geographical shift was the emergence of alternative trajectories within environmental justice scholarship. These trajectories emphasized qualitative methods, radical political economy, critical social theory, and normative political theory, departing from the quantitative approach dominant among the field’s pioneering studies. The closing sections of the chapter assess selected outcomes of this more explicit engagement between political ecology and environmental justice, suggesting ways in which each has enriched the other, and introduces emerging frameworks, agendas, and approaches that might take the partnership in new directions in the future.

DIFFERENT ORIGINS, DIFFERENT PATHS

During the 1970s and early 1980s, while geographers and anthropologists in predominantly rural Third World settings were establishing the field of political ecology, US grassroots activists and their academic allies in sociology and related disciplines were commissioning and conducting the first analyses of phenomena variously identified as environmental inequity, environmental injustice, or environmental racism – often but not always associated with cities and urbanization. In many cases, the primary purpose of these analyses was to provide empirical support for the claims of civil rights and anti-toxics activists that environmental hazards were disproportionately located in areas with predominantly minority populations, and thereby to

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influence legislators, policymakers, and sometimes specific legalcases. For example, sociologist Robert Bullard’s (1983) classic study of the relationship between race and the distribution of solid waste sites in Houston initially served to support plaintiffs in a lawsuit alleging racial discrimination in municipal landfill siting (Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc.). Other important early environmental justice studies were commissioned by civil rights leaders, including a regional analysis of hazardous waste sites by the US General Accounting Office (1983) and a nationwide study of toxic sites by the UnitedChurch of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (1987). These studies eventually played key roles in convincing the US Environmental Protection Agency to place environmental equity on its policy agenda in the early 1990s. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order directing all federal agencies to identify and address environmental inequities based on low income or minority status.

As environmental justice studies subsequently proliferated, their overriding concern was a practical question of little interest to most political ecology research: that is, whether environmental inequity in the US was indeed a problem serious enough to require federal resources, policies, and regulations. Some analysts directly challenged the early studies’ findings of racial inequities in the spatial distribution of environmental hazards (e.g., Anderton, et al. 1994; Lambert and Boerner 1997), and others found that results varied with the scale and resolution of analysis (e.g., Bowen, et al. 1995; Cutter, Holm, and Clark 1996). Other studies accepted the presence of inequitable patterns, but they drew on longitudinal analyses of demographic change to challenge the claim that these patterns were results of discrimination in siting (e.g., Been 1993). Unsurprisingly, subsequent research challenged the skeptics, and debates increasingly focused on fine points of methodology (e.g.,McMaster, Leitner, and Sheppard 1997). Since the 1990s,

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quantitative environmental justice analysis has become steadily more sophisticated and complex, but its empirical, methodological, and practical preoccupations remain quite different from those of most political ecology, which has focusedinstead on expanding and refining its theoretical and political repertoire.

Despite considerable progress, quantitative environmental justice research has struggled to move beyond inferences of humanhealth impact based on simple residential proximity to hazards, and its capacity to establish causal relationships between environmental conditions and observed health outcomes remains limited (Chakraborty, Maantay, and Brender 2011). In part becausethis goal remains immensely challenging, many environmental justice activists and advocates have embraced community-based participatory research, which replaces the concern with verifyingpatterns of inequity with efforts to empower citizens and find practical solutions to community health problems (Shepard, et al.2002). In either case, the emphasis on human health in mainstreamenvironmental justice research marks another important differencefrom most political ecology (although see the chapters by Guthmanand Mansfield, and King, this volume). While political ecology has traditionally emphasized the dynamics of local-scale biophysical conditions, environmental justice research (with someimportant exceptions described below) has historically focused onthe impacts of environmental conditions on human health.

Political ecologists have sometimes criticized the absence of theory in mainstream environmental justice research, noting the latter’s predominantly empirical and methodological orientation (e.g., Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). Critical and radical social and political economic theory has indeed had little impact on this dominant trajectory, and overt theoretical considerations are absent from most of this research. In the exceptional studies that do apply theory to environmental justice

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analysis, we can frequently see parallels to what Paul Robbins (2012) calls “apolitical ecology.” Early efforts to theorize aspects of environmental inequality drew on classic sociological models of neighborhood change (e.g., Liu 1997) or rational choicemodels from economics (e.g., Viscusi and Hamilton 1999). More recently, interdisciplinary urban ecology projects have theorizedenvironmental justice using concepts from systems ecology and landscape ecology, such as disturbance and patch dynamics (Clark et al. 2007). So although mainstream environmental justice research has not been entirely atheoretical, its gravitation towards rational choice and systems models has been an important reason why this trajectory remains largely divorced from political ecology.

THE EMERGENCE OF ALTERNATIVE TRAJECTORIES IN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE RESEARCH

The mainstream approach to environmental justice analysis described above remains dominant within a number of disciplines, at least in in the US. However, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, several intellectual developments laid the groundwork for alternative trajectories in environmental justice research, whichin turn helped pave the way for deeper, more explicit engagementsbetween the concept of environmental justice and the field of political ecology at the turn of the 21st century. Although a complete account of these developments is beyond the scope of this chapter, in this section I highlight the influence of three important touchstones: the resurgence and rethinking of normativetheories of social justice; the influence of this rethinking on political-economic analyses of environmental change and conflict;and the extension of constructivist social movement theory and conceptions of discourse to environmental justice activism and Third World “environmentalism of the poor.”

Rethinking normative theories of social justice

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One important development that set the stage during the 1990s for a closer encounter between political ecology and the concept of environmental justice was the resurgence of interest within Marxian political economy and geography in normative theories of social justice. In the wake of his classic Social Justice and the City, Marxist geographer David Harvey (1973) departed from an explicit focus on social justice, and the concept remained in the background within critical and radical geography during the formative years for both political ecology and environmental justice. Of course, justice and injustice were central themes animating political ecological research from the beginning (Forsyth 2008; Robbins 2012). As Robbins (2012: 87) puts it, “Political ecology stories are stories of justice and injustice,”in particular for the marginalized populations at the heart of much classical political ecology. However, justice remained an implicit theme in much of this research, and many radical scholars of the time followed Harvey in setting justice aside as a bourgeois concept, by this time associated closely with the political liberalism of John Rawls’ (1971) A Theory of Justice.

Although multiple sources resurrected interest in normative theories of social justice in the early 1990s, the most influential was probably Iris Marion Young’s (1990) Justice and the Politics of Difference. Young critiqued the dominant distributive paradigm in liberal theories of justice, arguing that theories of justice should attend to deeper institutional and structural conditions, such as dynamics of domination and oppression, which generated and sustained unequal distributions. She emphasized procedural justice, and especially inclusion and participation in decision-making processes. But she also argued that by focusing on the abstract individual, other theories had overlooked the significance of embodiment, including race, gender, and sexuality, and its inseparability from group identity and membership. Along similar lines, she contended that political philosophy had paid inadequate attention to the discourses and

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experiences of marginalized groups and social movements themselves, urging normative theories of justice to engage with them directly. Inspired by Young’s feminist critiques of liberal theories of justice, David Harvey and his students, along with David M. Smith, played leading roles in restoring justice to the agenda of critical and radical geography (Harvey 1992, 1996; Smith 1994; Merrifield and Swyngedouw 1996).

Justice and the political economy of environmental conflict and change

A parallel source of inspiration that had begun to crystallize during the 1980s was new Marxist theorizing of environmental problems and conflicts, including Allan Schnaiberg’s (1980) concept of the “treadmill of production,” Neil Smith’s (1984) theorization of the production of nature, andthe inauguration of the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism with JamesO’Connor’s (1988) elaboration of the second contradiction of capitalism. Harvey brought the threads of justice, political economy, and environment together in Justice, Nature, and the Geography ofDifference (1996). In one influential chapter, he argued that the grassroots environmental justice movement’s conception of justice—although in many ways problematic and parochial—derived distinctive power and value from its grounding in the embodied, place-specific positionality of the groups most marginalized withrespect to global processes of capital accumulation.

Meanwhile, environmental justice began to appear as a topic in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and other radical journals like Antipode(a special issue in 1996). Some articles extended Young’s critique of the distributive paradigm to the analysis of environmental injustice. For instance, although the question of procedural justice came up even in some of the earliest research on environmental racism—including Bullard’s (1983) study of solidwaste sites in Houston—Robert Lake (1996) argued that most environmental justice scholarship continued to overlook this

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dimension and to overemphasize distributive patterns. Renewed interest in normative theories of justice also influenced political ecology, which in turn helped broaden the scope of the environmental justice concept beyond hazards to human health. Frequently this work continued to prioritize distributive notionsof justice (e.g., Gleeson and Low 1998; see Schlosberg 2007). ButYoung’s exhortation to look beyond the distributive paradigm lefta clearer mark on other political ecologists. For example, the case studies and essays in People, Plants, and Justice (Zerner 2000) showed in various ways how practices and norms of nature conservation and biodiversity protection involved dimensions of justice other than the distributive (e.g., Schroeder, 2000).

Another prominent critic of the distributive paradigm implicit in mainstream environmental justice analysis was geographer Laura Pulido (1996, 2000), whose influential historical-geographical research conceptualized environmental justice and racism in ways that resonated clearly with political ecology. She critiqued the limited conception of racism implicit in longitudinal environmental justice analyses—those designed to determine whether minorities or hazards arrived first to a particular area—arguing that their narrow focus on siting and intentionality obscured structural and hegemonic forms of racism,including white privilege. In addition, she criticized quantitative analyses for their limited conception of the spatialityof environmental injustice and racism, contending that their preoccupation with the scale and resolution of localized spatial distributions led them to overlook the complex, multi-scalar processes that generated environmental inequalities. Although Pulido’s research in Los Angeles focused on toxic pollution instead of land degradation, the latter critique resonated with political ecology’s longstanding emphasis on tracing local environmental changes to political, economic, and social dynamicsat broader scales. Alongside the important work of urban environmental historian Andrew Hurley (1995), Pulido’s research

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helped usher in a historical-geographical tradition within environmental justice studies (e.g., Pulido, Sidawi, and Vos 1996; Boone and Modarres 1999; Colten 2002; Gandy 2003).

Social movements, interpretive frames, and discourses

A third influence that helped nudge the concept of environmental justice closer to the field of political ecology was social movement theory, and in particular the constructivist approach of frame analysis initially developed by Erving Goffman (1974). Sociologists Robert Benford and David Snow and their colleagues argued that prevalent approaches in social movement theory, including the resource mobilization approach, had overlooked interpretive schemes as catalysts for mobilizing social movement activists against particular grievances (Snow, etal. 1986). The US environmental justice movement was rising to prominence at the time, and it was not long before the first analyses of a distinctive “environmental justice frame” emerged (Čapek 1993). The research that grew out of this constructivist approach shifted attention from patterns of environmental inequality themselves to the distinctive ways that communities and activist networks translated these patterns into grievances, attributed blame, and advocated remedies (e.g., Taylor 2000). Thegoal of this research, then, is not to build normative theories of environmental justice, but to understand the strategies, dynamics, and actions of environmental justice movement and policy actors.

The rise of interest in the dynamics of environmental justice as a social movement and interpretive frame provided still another source of resonance with political ecology research, in which various peasant and indigenous movements have long been important topics of study (Watts and Peet 1996; Neumann2005). In Varieties of Environmentalism, to take one of the most prominent examples, Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martínez-Alier (1997) used a political ecology framework to investigate

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“vocabularies of protest” and ideological underpinnings distinguishing environmental movements in the Global South from those in the Global North. Building on their earlier work (Guha 1990; Martínez-Alier 1991), and leading up to a subsequent volume, The Environmentalism of the Poor (Martínez-Alier 2003), this research was among the first to explore continuities between the US environmental justice movement and the Third World environmental mobilizations that had long interested political ecologists. Although political ecology, much of which gravitated towards poststructuralist approaches to discourse analysis, drew from a wider theoretical repertoire than sociological studies of social movement frames, there is significant overlap in that bothtraditions emphasize struggles over meaning as central dimensionsof environmental movements throughout the world (e.g., Escobar, 1998).

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND POLITICAL ECOLOGY: A DEEPENING ENCOUNTER

By the turn of the millennium, although mainstream quantitative environmental justice analysis continued on a path separate from political ecology, critical and radical scholars had set the stage for deeper engagements between political ecology and alternative approaches to environmental justice. First, the traditional geographic division that confined environmental justice to the US and political ecology to poorer countries had largely broken down. On the one hand, the concept of environmental justice began to travel from its largely urban US origins to circulate in some of the Third World settings that had long been of primary interest for political ecology (Schroeder et al. 2008; Holifield, Porter, and Walker 2009). In the first decade of the 21st century, articles on environmental justice activism in other countries began to proliferate, and scholars published anthologies on environmental justice in Latin America (Carruthers, 2008) and South Africa (McDonald, 2002), to

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name two examples. Meanwhile, a growing body of writing in the USattended to struggles over justice in rural land and natural resource management—the traditional purview of political ecology—especially within American Indian reservations (e.g., LaDuke 1999; Mutz, Brynner, and Kenney 2002). On the other hand, political ecologists began devoting more attention to First Worldcountries, including the urban environments previously neglected in political ecology but long emphasized in environmental justiceactivism and scholarship (McCarthy 2002; Schroeder 2005; Schroeder, St. Martin, and Albert 2006).

Second, alternative approaches to environmental justice havecontinued to build on the theoretical and empirical developments that initially brought the concept explicitly within political ecology’s orbit. Normative political theorists have elaborated onadditional dimensions of environmental justice, and social scientists have investigated these dimensions in practice. As political ecology has ventured into cities and urbanization processes, the flourishing subfield of urban political ecology has introduced new models for the conceptualization of environmental inequalities (see chapter by Swyngedouw, this volume). At the same time, environmental justice has traveled into new topical domains, such as climate justice and food justice. One thread that now connects much research in environmental justice and political ecology is an emphasis on science and the politics of knowledge production, which has led to shared interest in such approaches as actor-network theory—anddebates over the merits of such approaches (see chapter by Lave, this volume). Finally, scholarship on environmental justice movements, interpretive frames, and discourses has continued to proliferate and develop.

Dimensions of environmental justice as normative concept

Normative political theorists of justice have continued to complicate the distributive paradigm by introducing additional

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dimensions. Nancy Fraser (1997) has been among the most influential theorists of the dimension of recognition, conceived asthe dismantling or overcoming of institutionalized subordination preventing particular groups from full participation in social life. Meanwhile, Amartya Sen (2009) and Barbara Nussbaum (2003) have elaborated arguments about justice grounded in Sen’s longstanding concept of capabilities, referring to people’s liberty and capacity to achieve states of well-being. Following Young’s (1990) recommendation to listen closely to the discourses of activists themselves, David Schlosberg (1999, 2007) has sought toarticulate a conception of environmental justice that incorporates distributive, procedural, recognition, and capabilities dimensions. He also joins such theorists as Peter Wenz (1988) and Andrew Dobson (1998) in arguing for the extensionof principles of justice to the nonhuman world.

Empirical research on environmental justice and political ecology has begun to show the influence of Schlosberg’s work, investigating ways in which these other dimensions are expressed in specific conflicts and conditions. For example, Petra Tschakert’s (2009) scholarship on artisanal gold mining in Ghana emphasizes the misrecognition of small-scale, usually unlicensed miners as a form of environmental injustice. Government policy inGhana casts these miners as trespassers and criminals, who harm themselves and others by using toxic mercury to extract gold. Tschakert argues that this devaluation and ostracism—deployed to justify the exclusion of the miners from both gold-rich land and state programs for health and welfare—constitutes injustice in the form of what Nancy Fraser called “status injury.” As a potential corrective, Tschakert implemented a model of collaborative, participatory research aimed at fostering the miners’ capabilities. Indeed, the capabilities approach to justice also implicitly underlies community-based participatory research, as described above (see also Schlosberg and Carruthers

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2010), and it has been an important influence on political ecology (Forsyth 2008).

Urban political ecology, environmental justice, and scientific knowledge

The subfield of urban political ecology has rapidly become afertile intellectual terrain for the analysis of environmental injustice. Although urban political ecology takes multiple forms,the dominant thread has been grounded in traditions of Marxist political economy (Keil 2003; Heynen 2014). As Nik Heynen (2014) notes, urban political ecology has in a short time and in a wide variety of geographic settings generated empirical research on processes underlying numerous patterns of environmental inequality, from pollution to tree canopy cover. However, since urban political ecology is considered in another chapter (Swyngedouw, this volume), the discussion here will be brief and will focus on two questions, one straightforward and the other more complex.

The first of these questions is whether urban political ecology is an approach to be distinguished from environmental justice, or instead is one of several possible approaches to analyzing environmental justice. Some essays distinguish urban political ecology from environmental justice on the grounds that the former emphasizes processes and the latter emphasizes patterns. Ian Cook and Erik Swyngedouw (2012: 7), for instance, classify environmental justice as a “school of thought” or an “approach” separate from urban political ecology:

Whereas the EJ [environmental justice] literature is primarily focused on the patterns of socio-spatial environmental inequality and the political procedures throughwhich they are mediated, the urban political ecology (hereafter UPE) literature is primarily concerned with the political-economic processes involved in the reworking of

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human–nonhuman assemblages and the production of socio-environmental inequalities.

In contrast, Roger Keil (2003) identified environmental justice as one of four “clusters” or “exemplary strongholds” within what was then a still-emerging paradigm of urban political ecology. Myown position, which I have sought to support through the structure of this chapter, comes closer to that of Keil: that is,that urban political ecology is not an approach distinct from environmental justice, but a distinctive approach to environmental justice. Although mainstream quantitative environmental justice research has indeed concentrated primarily on analyzing patterns of inequality, the alternative trajectoriesthat have brought environmental justice to its deeper encounter with political ecology have long been concerned with political-economic processes and the production of inequalities.

The second, and more complex, question concerns the relationship between Marxist political economy and actor-network theory, an influential ontology and methodology that emerged initially within science studies. Marxist political economists frequently cast actor-network theory as inattentive to power relations and structural inequalities, while actor-network theorists often criticize Marxists for appealing to such power relations and inequalities as given, pre-assembled explanatory contexts, hidden to the actors but not the analysts (for more on this debate, see the chapter by Lave, this volume). But others have sought to synthesize elements of the two approaches, and urban political ecology has proven to be a particularly popular testing ground (see, e.g., Swyngedouw 1996; Castree 2002; Robbins2007; Perkins 2007).

Although I have argued against such a synthesis elsewhere (Holifield 2009), my aim here is not to repeat or revisit that argument, but instead to highlight the significance of this relationship for research on environmental justice and for

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political ecology more broadly. Specifically, actor-network theory (ANT) presents an approach to analyzing the production, circulation, and application of environmental knowledge, which haslong been recognized as a central axis of controversy and struggle in environmental conflict. It has become increasingly clear in environmental justice and political ecology research that attending to the production of environmental inequalities requires engaging with knowledge controversies, but it has provenchallenging to theorize these two phenomena together.

ANT is by no means the only contemporary approach to the study of science and technology. Other recent US-based environmental justice scholarship focused on the production of scientific knowledge has turned, for example, to Sandra Harding’s(1992) influential conception of “strong objectivity” (Allen 2003), Donna Haraway’s (1991) notion of the cyborg (Sze 2006), orNikolas Rose’s (2001) analyses of molecular biopolitics (Shostak 2004). Political ecologists studying other parts of the world engage with a similarly wide range of approaches from science andtechnology studies (see Goldman, Nadasdy, and Turner 2011). Nonetheless, at least some research on environmental justice has begun to experiment with actor-network theory as an approach to tracing the negotiations and translations that resolve controversies over environmental knowledge (e.g., Holifield 2012).

Social movement frames and discourses

Since the turn of the millennium, research on interpretive frames and discourses of environmental justice has continued to develop, further enriching the encounter between environmental justice and political ecology. In the US, new monographs based onethnographic and participant observation research, such as Julie Sze’s (2003) Noxious New York and Melissa Checker’s (2005) Polluted Promises, have provided empirically detailed accounts of the ways local residents and activists in particular places come to

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interpret grievances in the terms of environmental justice and racism. Much recent research on environmental justice politics builds on the work of Hilda Kurtz (2003), who developed the concept of scale frames to account for how actors fighting for or against the siting of a PVC facility in Louisiana deployed the scalar ambiguity inherent to quantitative environmental justice analysis. Scholars have found competing framings of scale to be crucial elements of conflicts over environmental management throughout the world, from unequal access to Brazilian agricultural land (Wolford 2008), to struggles over how to defineand manage a freshwater ecosystem in California (Sze, et al. 2009), to disagreements over whether a city in the UK Rust Belt is an appropriate site for disassembling and recycling toxic “ghost ships” (Bickerstaff and Agyeman 2009). Although not all ofthis research explicitly adopts a political ecology framework, itresonates with political ecology nonetheless, by situating the drivers of and constraints on these localized conflicts with respect to political-economic processes that extend far beyond the local.

Other recent research has examined the circulation of the “environmental justice frame” beyond the US grassroots environmental justice movement. Some studies have focused on the ways that environmental justice comes to be framed within US public policy discourse, highlighting discontinuities with the interpretations of activists and advocates (Sandweiss 1998; Holifield 2004). Others have traced the trajectories of environmental justice frames as they have traveled to different parts of the world (e.g., Debbané and Keil 2004; Walker and Bulkeley 2006; Walker 2009b). On the one hand, environmental justice has not caught on as a grassroots discourse in as many different places as one might expect, perhaps due to its origins in the distinctive racialized politics of the US civil rights movement (see, e.g., Reed and George 2011). In some countries, the early adopters of the language have been elites and

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policymakers, rather than activists (Walker and Bulkeley 2006). On the other hand, as it has traveled, the concept of environmental justice has taken on local inflections that in manycases have consolidated the connection with the traditional concerns of political ecology.

CONCLUSION

So has environmental justice been a part of political ecology all along? And has political ecology always addressed environmental justice? If we consider environmental justice in its broadest sense—injustice with respect to environmental conditions, both desired and undesired—and if we understand “political ecology” to refer to political struggles and conflictsover these environmental conditions, then the answer to both questions is yes. But as I have sought to show in this chapter, the answers are less straightforward when we consider the more specific meanings that the two terms have taken on in academic debate. Political ecology stories may be stories of justice and injustice, but it is only relatively recently that the academic field of political ecology has engaged explicitly with the concept and language of environmental justice, in its specific guise as activist and policy rhetoric that emerged within the United States. And although much critical and radical environmental justice scholarship undoubtedly qualifies as political ecology research—even if it does not explicitly identify with the approach—the methods and assumptions of the dominant form of environmental justice analysis have kept this mainstream trajectory at a distance from political ecology.

I will close with a few suggestions for continuing to deepenand enrich the shared path of environmental justice and politicalecology. First, Gordon Walker’s (2009a) call to examine the distinctive spatialities of procedural, recognition, and capabilitiesdimensions of justice has inspired several recent empirical studies (e.g., Urkidi and Walter 2011; Holifield 2012; Gibson-

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Wood and Wakefield 2013). However, this line of inquiry remains in its infancy, and political ecology provides appropriate conceptual frameworks for carrying it forward. For instance, political ecologists have long engaged with Sen’s concept of capabilities (Forsyth 2008), and they are thus well positioned toanalyze its spatial dimensions in struggles for environmental justice.

Second, there is much more research to be done to examine the relationship between environmental justice and the complex politics of scientific knowledge, especially with the rise of concerns about climate justice. I support the pluralism that characterizes current engagements between political ecology and science and technology studies, so long as the dialogues and debates among competing perspectives continue. For scholars interested in actor-network theory but skeptical of its approach to the “political” in political ecology, Bruno Latour’s (2013) “modes of existence” project may provide fruitful new conceptualizations of the ways that conditions of environmental inequality circulate within and among the worlds of science, politics, law, and even religion (which remains sorely neglected,despite its historical significance to environmental justice activism).

Finally, with respect to the environmental justice frame, aninteresting question that has emerged recently is why this language does not resonate in all places or in all struggles overenvironmental inequities. On the one hand, some suggest that the term environmental justice, by virtue of its breadth, longer history, and origins within influential activist networks, has influenced a wider range of struggles worldwide than related concepts like climate justice (Martínez-Alier et al. 2014). However, recent scholarship has shown how racial politics and positionality can trigger local resistance to the language of environmental justice(Little 2012), or how such a framing may fail to take hold within

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national political cultures less receptive than others to the linking of social justice and environmental concerns (Davies 2006; see also Benford 2005; Pellow and Brulle 2005). Political ecology could thus be at the forefront not simply of analyzing environmental justice as value, process, and discourse, but also of identifying strengths and limitations of environmental justiceas mobilizing concept.

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