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The political process is also always a learning process, a process of attunement. And becoming attuned to relations of power also means becoming compromised, to a certain degree, despite whether this attunement takes the form of compliance or resistance. For instance, the oil and gas industry has had a large influence on the structure and character of renewable energy advocacy in Austin, Texas, even as it was being developed as a strategy of resistance to petroculture. In particular, there was the purposeful move to imitate the mineral rights contracts that the oil and gas industry had developed in order to drill on private land, creating similarly structured leasing agreements for what would come to be known as “wind farms” in many of the same locations as former drilling sites. The idea here was to create a wealthy landowning class that could help lobby for renewable energy, much like previous land owners had for the oil and gas industry. Secondly, the Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association (TREIA) collectively decided to invite the utility industry to join their ranks in order to pursue renewable energy at the utility scale through the use of Renewable Portfolio Standards. And while Austin’s early energy advocates still speak of this as a winning strategy (and indeed it was), it also reproduced the utility as a center of power and promoted a top-down style of environmental advocacy that had long shut Austin's minoritized and marginalized communities out of its environmental benefits. Building support in this way, by appealing to those who are not only likely to share your perspective and its blindspots, but that have also already shaped the political landscape in their interest, this creates the perfect conditions for injustices to transpire, persist, and even intensify. Thus, part of the struggle for just transition entails keeping the question of what counts as environmental justice or injustice held open at the same time that the former is being pursued and/or the latter resisted. 

Adam, James. 2023. "Petro-ghosts." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

Among those now working to oppose the long-term release of more than 1.3 million tons of Fukushima’s radioactive wastewater, contemporary activists can draw inspiration and perspective from an earlier transnational movement during the 1970s, when Pacific Islanders were central to stopping a plan by the Japanese government to dump 10,000 drums of nuclear waste into the Mariana Trench (Branch, 1984; Avenell, 2017). The mobilization of Pacific activists significantly contributed toward achieving the suspension and eventual cancellation of the ocean-dumping plan by taking their stories to audiences in Japan while working in collaboration with Japanese activists. In a strategy that proved crucial for influencing changes in Japanese attitudes toward ocean dumping, Pacific activists shared moving accounts of the environmental and historical injustices to which the Pacific Islanders had been subjected. They gave witness to the harm caused by 67 nuclear weapons tests between 1946 and 1979, which had resulted in the loss of homelands as well as higher rates of leukemia, lymphatic cancers, and genetic defects. These powerful testimonies challenged Japanese audiences to oppose the committing of further aggressions against those with whom they could identify as fellow atomic victims. In “Pacific Solidarity and Atomic Aggression” (2017), historian Simon Avenell writes, “This Pacific iteration of environmental injustice opened the eyes of many antinuclear advocates to the ways Pacific activists connected the radioactive waste issue to a longer struggle for independence and the obliteration of nuclear neocolonialism.” That in turn complicated the victim consciousness which had long informed antinuclear protest in postwar Japan. The activists' intervention made plain the moral case for Japanese people to act in solidarity with their counterparts in the Pacific Islands, who had similarly suffered from the lethal toll wrought by the use of nuclear technology in ways that devalued human life and the natural world. Given the breakthrough achieved through transnational activist solidarity, this historical precedent serves as a reminder that the nuclear wastewater issue must not be relegated to the politicized nationalist frameworks that have become common in contemporary media accounts. Notably in 2021, the unilateral decision to release Fukushima's radioactive wastewater alienated not only residents of neighboring countries but also many of Japan's own citizens, resulting in a breach of public trust which needs to be addressed by stopping the release and pursuing a sincere dialogue with stakeholders - not simply a campaign to attempt persuasion - according to nuclear engineer and Nagasaki University professor Tatsujiro Suzuki (2023). To attain public trust and to honor the moral and ethical legacies surrounding questions regarding nuclear waste and the Pacific Ocean, such a dialogue must extend to transnational stakeholders, and Indigenous knowledge must factor highly into the debate over an issue with vital transboundary and transgenerational consequences. 

Image: GRID-Arendal, www.grida.no/resources/7365.

Kim, Nan. 2023. "A Precedent of Success: Pacific Islanders' Transnational Activism Against the Ocean Dumping of Radioactive Waste." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.