Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union (review)

In a recent special issue of Slavic Review, Zsuzsa Gille laments the paucity of social science and humanities scholarship on environmental issues in postsocialist eastern Europe. Not only are such studies few in number—by Gille's count, the two major area-studies journals had between them published only five articles on "nature, environmental problems, or environmental politics"—but they are, with few exceptions, "untouched by the theoretical sophistication and methodological rigor that increasingly accrue to research on" other aspects of postsocialist society and politics, or to most environmental studies scholarship these days.¹ Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union beefs up the quantitative dimension of this reckoning, but it largely fails to break free from the pattern of theoretical weakness.

The editors—Julian Agyeman, a professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts, and Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger, a GIS specialist at Clark University—are centrally concerned with the relationships between "brown" and "green" agendas in environmental activism. Drawing on Agyeman's earlier work, they note that environmental movements can be mapped along a spectrum from environmental justice, with its anthropocentric focus on inequity in the distribution of environmental "bads," at one end, to the more ecocentric sustainable development agenda at the other. Bridging these poles are two "middle way" agendas: "human security" and "just sustainability," which integrate concerns for quality of life, intra-and intergenerational equity, and ecosystem limits. This volume aims to explore how these dynamics are playing out in the Soviet successor states following the collapse of communism. Specifically, the editors ask, "1. To what extent are increased popular environmental awareness and associated activism driving public policy and planning in the former Soviet republics? 2. Are there emergent, separate brown…and green … agendas or are these joining together in a single just sustainability or human security agenda?" (p. 4). More speculatively, the editors wonder "what shape, focus, and trajectory … activism and public policy and planning" might take in the region (p. 5).

The volume's ten substantive chapters examine six post-Soviet countries: five chapters on Russia and one each on Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Estonia, and Latvia. The findings are unsurprising for observers of post-Soviet politics. Thanks to the weakness of civil society and democratization there is little public participation in policymaking, and environmental concerns are given short shrift. (The situation is somewhat more favorable in the two western-oriented Baltic states). Among environmental groups throughout the region, the green agenda overwhelmingly dominates over the brown, and "there seem to be very few organizations that deliberately meld the [two]… platforms into a middle-way just sustainability/human security approach" (p. 9). Given these negative findings, one wonders whether the book might have been more fruitfully framed around a different set of questions, tailored more specifically to the post-Soviet context. As it is, some of the authors seem to be straining to fit their material into the green/brown framework, and the editors' speculative question about possible future trajectories gives rise to platitudinous musings at the conclusion of several chapters.

While all of the contributors address environmental sustainability in some form or another, six focus directly on environmental justice issues, which in the former Soviet Union largely "revolve around the industrial development and transportation of valuable natural resources—mainly fossil fuels, gold, diamonds, other mineral resources, and timber" (p. 22). Brian Donohoe demonstrates how indigenous people's rights to land and resources in Russia have been violated through manipulations of the legal system in the Putin era. Several authors provide local case studies of resource extraction: oil drilling on Sakhalin Island in Russia's far east and in Berezovka, Kazakhstan; the proposed construction of oil pipelines near Lake Baikal in Siberia; and diamond mining in the Sakha Republic in Russia's far north. The chapter on Tajikistan focuses on human security; in this overwhelmingly poor and rural central Asian country, certain groups—cotton farmers, households headed by single women (a...