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This article got me thinking about the difficulty in teaching concepts and examples of cumulative impacts, disproportionate burdens, and different forms of injustices, a challenge that I have encountered in co-teaching the Environmental Injustice course at UCI, which is built around these concepts. Early on in the course, students are often shocked at how government and corporate institutions are implicated in producing environmental injustice. The organized abandonment (RW Gilmore’s concept) of communities is a source of further government mistrust, inaction, and paralysis. We then ask students to imagine next-generation environmental governance with the help of reports and studies conducted by community-based organizations, and mapping/visualization tools mentioned in Lee’s article. They come up with nuanced case studies of environmental justice in California communities using a toolkit of concepts and rapid research design. I am interested in learning more about this shift in analytical and learning capacity of both educators and learners that occurs during this course. It connects to my broader concern of characterizing and mobilizing educators as environmental justice practitioners. 

Disproportionate impacts, cumulative impacts, symbolic politics, structural justice, recognitional justice, syndemics, social determinants of health, redlining 

“the EJ practitioner can now speak truth to power in ways never before possible. Not only are we now able to construct inarguable empirical statements that are commensurate with the deep historical and systemic drivers of environmental racism and injustice, but mainstream leaders and the general public are finally listening” 

“Both quantitative and qualitative data matter. Quantitative data provide measurable information about environmental risk and impact critical for decision-making purposes based on numerical standards and distributional analyses. Qualitative data help to explain how and why systemic inequities, unfair treatment, and the lack of meaningful involvement have persisted as issues relevant for examination of current situations. This information will be critical for designing solutions that truly fit the problem”

The text focuses on the challenges of “second-generation environmental justice” such as identifying, characterizing, and integrating an analysis of disproportionate burdens, systemic racism, and cumulative impacts, into existing environmental governance regimes. The main challenge according to Lee is the unsatisfying non-uptake of “disproportionate impacts” in federal and state-level environmental governance legislation and programs. Often, public participation is limited to “hearing people out” but not actually implementing it into law and action. Lee advocates for environmental governance reform by paying attention to the use of mapping and visualization tools that have made it possible for environmental justice practitioners to link disproportionate health burdens to a history of redlining and segregation in the United States. In doing so, he reframes environmental justice as a “spatial distribution of environmental burdens and benefits”.  He sees hope in contemporary reckonings of racial and environmental injustice in the US and globally, to shape the next generation of environmental governance.

Lee builds on the work of researchers who study how government agencies incorporate (or not) EJ in how they function on a quotidian basis, focusing on both federal and state-level policies. He also builds on the work of scientists and activists working on community and participatory models of engagement (e.g. Groundwork USA, Jeremy Hoffman), foregrounding the importance of both qualitative and quantitative data for different ends. I liked his concluding discussion on New Jersey’s new environmental justice policy as well, which Lee interprets as embodying the next generation of environmental governance.