Summary
margauxfToxic Truths examines the relationship between citizen science and environmental justice in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have long been an integral component of environmental justice struggles. However, post-truth politics threaten science in increasingly extreme ways: “rarely have science and expertise been so questioned, diminished, and vulnerable as they are today” (3). Through various case studies, the authors make a case for the significance of science, knowledge, and data as it is produced “by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards” (3), though they also recognize the limitations of data. They demonstrate how environmental justice activists both challenge and rely on science.
The authors recognize the lack of clear and specific definition for “environmental injustice” or “environmental justice” is part of its enduring appeal, though they pinpoint the crux of the concept as “based on the principle that all people have the right to be protected from environmental threats and to benefit from living in a clean and healthy environment” (4). Disproportionate vulnerabilities to environmental hazards amongst racialized lines has been linked by environmental activism and research to the idea of environmental racism in the United States.
The authors emphasize that despite suggestions that humans have entered a new age of toxicity (“the Anthropocene”), pollution is a product of centuries of unequal social relations. For instance, environmental inequality has come hand in hand with settler colonialism since at least the seventeenth century. Moreover, the authors emphasize that environmental injustice occurs in many different places, in different ways—and that the concept of environmental justice has traveled far beyond its origins in the United States. They seek to represent this global breadth in through case studies from across different countries and continents: “Through these chapters we will see how environmental justice is spatially dispersed, reaching far beyond the confines of the USA and the racialized geographies of the Deep South where the phrase “environmental justice” was first coined (Bullard 1990)” (6).
Davies and Mah also elaborate on what they mean by “justice” in environmental justice. While acknowledging the plurality and diversity of what justice can mean, they focus on three specific forms of justice: distributive (geographical); procedural (participatory); and capabilities (well-being). In elaborating on distributive justice, the authors noted that as environmental justice research and activism has moved beyond the racialized geographies of the United States, there has been a real need to expand notions justice beyond this geographic frame.
Procedural justice focuses on the need to involve those most affected by environmental injustice in decision-making (e.g. in developing, implementing and enforcing laws, regulations and policies). The authors highlight Barbara Allen’s research in southern France as a prime example of this form of justice. They also acknowledge that procedural justice can depend too strongly on the state and the legal system to protect those that are already being injured by the very structures of toxicity that compose the state.
The authors draw on American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and Indian economist Amartya Sen in highlight capabilities as a third form of justice. They define this form of justice as “centered around the ability of individuals to live freely and unhindered in the world” (5). This form of justice is focused on ensuring the wellbeing of a population and people’s ability to live a life they consider worthwhile. However, this form of justice has be criticized for emphasizing too strongly the significance of individual experiences of injustice, rather than providing attention to the wider community and the structural forces that sustain inequality. This aligns with Pulido’s critique of environmental injustice as overly focused on procedure and inattentive to structures of inequality and pollution reduction.
Such criticisms have produced new iterations of environmental justice, focused on “four pillars of critical environmental justice”: attention to intersectional inequality, scale as an importance factor in the production and potentially resolution of environmental injustices, the embeddedness of social inequalities in state power, and the indispensability of people, beings, and things that have been excluded, marginalized, and othered.
The authors turn to the role of science in environmental justice by listing the terms through which this application has been described: citizen science, but also civic science, popular epidemiology, street science, community-based participatory research, and participatory sensing. They describe calls for the democratization of science and expertise as the historical origins of this form of science. Yet they also remain cautiously critical about the capacity of citizen science for enacting environmental justice, noting that public participation must not be viewed as a cure-all for solving environmental inequalities.
“Post-truth” refers to struggles for control over determining what is possible through theories of truth and knowledge. Backlash against the term raises the point that debates over truth have a long history. In examining the role of truth in environmental justice, the authors emphasize the significance of scientific knowledge for making toxic issues visible—as well as the problem of ‘undone science” (Frickel et al. 2010), because of which the health risks of pollution are often overlooked. They argue that the threats science faces in the post-truth age jeopardize the ability to make environmental health claims. And yet they acknowledge that science itself is not enough: “if political structures go unchanged, environmental injustice will persist” (14). This raises the question: “ ‘What kind of science can serve as ‘changeagent’ knowledge – what are the ingredients that can facilitate action?’ (14).