What Winning Looks Like: Critical Environmental Justice Studies and the Future of a Movement

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the environment is becoming an ever more present concern. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Leonardo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour both foreground images of melting glaciers, dying coral, and people in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans stranded on their roofs as evidence that we have reached a pivotal moment in human history. DiCaprio quotes United Nations estimates, which predict that ignoring the threats presented by global warming could result in more than 150 million "environmental refugees" and a rapidly increasing extinction rate by the middle of this century. The subtitle of DiCaprio's documentary presents the audience with a choice: face catastrophe or Turn Mankind's Darkest Hour into Its Finest. The film features leaders from environmental and social justice fields (who even ten years ago may not have imagined working closely together) discussing how to turn crisis into possibility. These experts talk about their own research and innovations and refer to the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are working to build "carbon-neutral cities" and create zero emissions transportation. They acknowledge, however, that it will take more than technology to make a difference; it will take leadership and it will take ideas that emerge from a deep encounter between our values, our experience, and the monumental social challenges we face.

Long before Katrina made landfall, activists, scholars, and environmental leaders were beginning to agree that social and environmental crisis had more than a little to do with culture. They conceded that failure to make progress on linked environmental and social justice problems could be traced to a lack of creative leadership and vision. For example, when Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus released "The Death of Environmentalism," a 2004 report addressing the environmental movement's failure to achieve real successes on the issue of global warming, a spirited debate ensued.¹ Shellenberger and Nordhaus traced the advent of the environmental movement to John Muir and advocated technical advances, policy changes, and transformative alliances as the way to "get back on the offensive." In a response titled "The Soul of Environmentalism," activists and scholars of the environmental justice (EJ) and sustainability movements "saluted" the earlier report for jump-starting the debate over "our shared strategic challenges." It was true, they wrote, that many in both the environmental and social justice movements had lost sight of "what winning looks like." But it was important to note that the "environmental movement" was far older and more diverse than Shellenberger and Nordhaus had drawn it.² Its roots could be traced back to the abolition movement, which revealed the connections between colonization, conquest, slavery, resource exploitation, and capital. Clearly, many of the most successful strategies of early environmentalism were borrowed from the abolition and civil rights movements and any history of environmentalism that did not include W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez would need to be revised.

But the authors of "Soul" did not focus on the divisions between mainstream environmentalism and the environmental justice movement. They were more interested in the scale of the challenges we face and in moving the discourse forward so that more people could see the bigger picture and begin "fighting the big fights." What would it take to win? What would winning look like? David Naguib Pellow and Robert Brulle's Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement and Steve Lerner's Diamond: A Struggle for Environmental Justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor enter the debates surrounding the future of environmentalism at the precise moment these questions are being asked. Both of these books, like An Inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour, "Death...