This map is a fascinating and important image as it does NOT show the many sites of (ongoing) nuclear radiation contamination in communities impacted by uranium extraction and processing. For example, the Navajo Nation has around 270 unreclaimed open pit tailings piles. This is not official "waste" but is quotidian waste that creates longstanding environmental harm.
In their introduction, Vermeylen's argument for a particularist and decolonial approach to justice through a recognition of plural ontologies and epistemologies that decenters Western liberal discourse and its theory of justice. How does bringing the lens of coloniality into environmental justice literature alter our visions of energy futures? Can we make appeals to environmental justice without recourse to liberal theories of individual rights and property ownership? More specifically, I am wondering how our team can study and address this dynamic plurality of ways of understanding and experiencing in/justice in this site, and how can we engage this plurality in productive ways? What axes of difference and inequality should we be looking for/at (race, gender, class, sexual orientation, citizenship, housing status, etc)? If the Anthropocene is coloniality by another name, how can we foreground this in our approach?
Environmental justice narratives in the U.S. often fall into "sacrifice zone" narratives that universalize experiences on the community-level, reproducing specifically bounded narratives about American lives and livelihoods, relationships to nature and capital, and the kinds of knowledge and authority that matter. Vermeylen's article disrupts this idea, rightfully arguing that environmental justice requires a more upfront confrontation with the socio-historical causes of oppression brought about by coloniality, as well as the fact that we need to question the righteousness of EJ discourses that rely on white settler logics.
For the Austin Field Campus, how can we bring attention to Anglo-American settler colonialism in our approaches to EJ and gentrification? And thinking back to the NOLA Field Campus, what Texas histories should we be drawing from to understand energy transitions in the city?
The article focuses on rebuilding more resilliently,
"At the forefront of this work is NJIT’s Center for Resilient Design, housed at the university’s College of Architecture and Design. Established immediately post-Sandy, the Center conducts research and serves as a clearinghouse for expertise, ready-to-build designs, case studies and best practices. The Center is accessed by state and local leaders, business owners and residents living in areas especially vulnerable to flooding and storms."
The article focuses on rebuilding more resilliently,
"At the forefront of this work is NJIT’s Center for Resilient Design, housed at the university’s College of Architecture and Design. Established immediately post-Sandy, the Center conducts research and serves as a clearinghouse for expertise, ready-to-build designs, case studies and best practices. The Center is accessed by state and local leaders, business owners and residents living in areas especially vulnerable to flooding and storms."