Developing deeply intersectional environmental justice scholarship

When first discussing this special issue in 2015, we had no idea that by press time environmental justice activism, regulation, and research would be so vulnerable in the United States, where the movement began. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is now under the direction of Scott Pruitt, a fossil fuel-backed politician who has sued that very agency 14 times. As Pruitt’s EPA has overseen an 85% reduction in the money corporations spend on pollution-controlling equipment and remediation (Halper 2018), state agencies and communities are often crippled by inadequate budgets or personnel to enforce environmental regulations. The EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice has been specifically targeted for such drastic cuts and deregulation that long-time head of the division, Mustafa Santiago Ali, resigned in March 2017. Environmental justice communities that already coped with the intersecting uncertainties and vulnerabilities of living amid rampant pollution now also deal with the uncertainties of drastically diminishing structural support. As Cynthia Giles, who once ran Obama’s EPA Enforcement Office, recently told the L.A. Times, ‘This kind of drop is not a change of emphasis. That is abandonment. That is a very, very big deal’ (Halper 2018). The urgency is real. Environmental justice struggles intensify, as do related risks to socio-environmental equity and environmental health. The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health found that pollution kills nine million people worldwide annually and ‘threatens human societies’. As climate change accelerates, we will witness more extreme weather patterns, more frequent and intense disasters, and consequent environmental justice and health burdens as industrial toxicants and hazards are subsequently released. Intersecting issues of environmental injustice continue to become increasingly acute – and society’s most vulnerable members often bear the brunt of these increased risks (Milman 2017). For instance, 3 months after Hurricane Irma’s devastation, around half of Puerto Rico’s population remained in the dark and without formal support from the rest of the United States (Robles and Bidgood 2017). In August 2017, 40 million people in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal were impacted by extreme flooding that left 1200 people dead and countless others exposed to flood-related agricultural and industrial pollution (Siddique and agencies 2017). Individuals forced into migration as a result of climate circumstances are likely to number in the tens of millions by 2050. Issues of equity and environmental justice stand at the nexus of these intersecting socio-environmental problems. As we face multiple interconnected and overlapping socio-environmental dilemmas, how will we treat one another? How can we collectively create solutions geared toward the most equitable outcomes possible? Answers to these weighty questions do not exist in isolation, but are instead connected to intersecting forms of structural environmental injustice and dominant ideologies that operate as classist, racist, sexist, nativist, ableist, homophobic, and anthropocentric matrices of domination. In response to these forces, though, people use deeply intersectional, innovative strategies to resist environmental injustices. For example, the coalition that developed across interest groups and among Indigenous peoples around Standing Rock Sioux’s oil pipeline protests displays the deep intersectionality of contemporary environmental justice activism. Similar coalitions have formed around the siting of industrial prisons, rates of incarceration in the United States, and related environmental justice outcomes (Braz and Gilmore 2006). And Flint, Michigan, community activists utilized their water contamination crisis to highlight vital interconnections among leadpoisoned water, poverty, racial/ethnic marginalization, and deindustrialization. Our research can better capture this and codevelop alongside it. Environmental sociologists and other environmental justice researchers have the skill sets to address these intersecting dynamics. We can do much more, however, to increase the relevance of our research in identifying core drivers of environmental injustice and then shaping solutions – in part by illuminating