Environmental Justice, Citizen Participation and Hurricane Katrina

The pursuit of social justice in the American South has a rich history and a vibrant present. A recent emphasis in social justice struggle in the region has been on environmental justice, a concept which is used to argue that people have a right to non-hazardous environments in which to live, work and play. Significantly, the concept of environmental justice (EJ) originated in the social relations of the southeastern United States. Emerging from a convergence of environmental and civil rights activists in the 1980s, the EJ movement claims that people have a civil right to an environment that is not harmful to health and well-being. The civil rights-based critique of environmental conditions focused at the outset on a tendency in the American South for hazardous waste facilities to be located in communities of color and of low income. This problem identification was bolstered by a government study that found that three of nation's four largest hazardous waste landfills were located in the Southeast, in predominantly African American census tracts (GAO 1983).

The notion that people of color in particular have borne a disproportionate burden of industrial development and pollution resonated well beyond the southeastern United States, and the concept has found broad purchase across the country and indeed globally. Since EJ was first articulated as a social goal in the 1980s, U.S.-based environmental justice activism has grown to encompass concerns about cultural imperialism, globalization, and the environmental consequences of militarism, nuclear power, and unchecked consumerism, among others. Globally, environmental justice has been incorporated into indigenous rights activism, and a commitment to environmental justice has even been written into the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (ratified in 1996). Indeed, the environmental justice movement currently forms a broad umbrella for a host of inter-related social concerns centered on the effects of human exploitation of the environment. The ideal of a civil right to a non-harmful environment provides a powerful lens for thinking through implications of industrial capitalism for socially, economically and politically vulnerable populations.

While earlier environmental justice activism and scholarship seemed to focus more on the past, parsing out the myriad sources or causes of environmental injustice, a higher proportion of recent EJ activity seems to focus on the present and the future, in particular, on fostering citizen participation in environmental justice-related government and corporate decision-making. In the southeastern U.S. as elsewhere, the concept is being influenced by the legal and administrative setting within which its meaning is negotiated. Activists have lobbied successfully for more citizen participation in a range of governmental decisions in which environmental justice might be at issue. The United States Environmental Protection Agency in particular has spearheaded efforts to foster citizen participation in Superfund remediation and redevelopment.

For some participants and observers, such opportunities for citizen participation in environmental oversight present progressive opportunities for a newly engaged "civic environmentalism," in the form of collaborative problem-solving (Sirianni and Friedland 1995). For others, such citizen participation is interpreted as a regressive localization of the problem of environmental injustice (see Lake and Disch 1992). Indeed, such collaborative problem-solving has some unwanted effects which include lengthening many decision-making processes in the effort to achieve consensus; some would argue as well that bringing EJ activists into the government fold in this way dulls the EJ critique of environmental exploitation under industrial capitalism (see Guldbrandsen and Holland 2001; Poncelet 2001) As such citizen participation is directed toward both remediation and redevelopment, however, Superfund stakeholder groups offer a rare opportunity for grassroots environmental concerns to play a role not only in redressing the past, but in shaping the future of affected communities.

Within this context, Hurricane Katrina's and Hurricane Rita's devastation of the Gulf Coast in August 2005 marks a key moment for thinking through the complex causes of environmental injustice, as well as an opportunity to imagine a more environmentally just future. The almost unimaginable destruction and dislocation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in particular highlights an aspect of environmental injustice that had gone largely unremarked beforehand—namely the ways in which the environmentally unsound...