SfAA Panel: Beyond Environmental Injustice
Essay for the double-panel "Beyond Environmental Injustice", 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 22-27, 2021.
Essay for the double-panel "Beyond Environmental Injustice", 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, March 22-27, 2021.
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?
The authors productively place three bodies of theory in conversation, abolitionist theories, urban political ecology, and decolonial theory, to rewrite the intellectual trajectories of EJ as extending the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition. What are our intellectual and political genealogies as students and researchers of the quotidian anthropocene? What genealogies are we pushing against? Drawing from their examples of spaces and historical moments of interracial solidarity, what kinds of coalitions do we see ourselves partnering with and contributing to as (largely?) newcomers to the activism in Austin?
In this fascinating review, the authors show how environmental justice is reproductive justice (following the water protectors at Standing Rock) and how this intersection reshapes understandings of the environment, embodiment, and exposure. I was particularly interested in the concepts of social and cultural re/production, and how we might think about this in light of Austin's rapid gentrification. They discuss an intersectional approach as a multi-scalar approach, from climate change to chemical exposure in the home - and I think this could be extended to a inter/multi-generational approach to justice (esp given our focus on renewables). The authors show how the RJ framework rethinks the individualism of reproductive choice as the right to conceive and bear children in conditions of social justice and human flourishing - then how does the current energy system (and future energy transitions) negate or create these conditions, and for whom? If we think about biological/cultural reproduction, how do we also incorporate the concept of reproductive labor into our analysis? Finally, I think they make an important point about the harms of documentation, and it would be great to hear everyone's thoughts (Esp those who have participated in earlier field campuses) on what the goal and ethics of our knowledge production are?
Walsh's piece gives us a concise history and geography of environmental racism in Austin, by drawing our attention to how ineequality is written into city law and urban planning. The ongoing legacies of segregation have shaped social life from access to public services to access to recreational spaces. Given the foundations of environmental racism in zoning laws and land use regulations, so succinctly highlighted by Walsh, how does/must the process of energy transition address these issues? Can there be zoning for justice, and what would that look like? In what way can our work at the field campus contribute to the existing work being done by orgs like El Pueblo and PODER?
I followed up on the FMD in the 1990s in Europe and how they followed up on the side of industrial meat production. I also followed up and did more research on what the term "biosecurity" actually means. Finally, I visited the website for the Center for Strategic and International Studies to figure out what they were all about.
There was a great deal of primary sourcing involved in producing this report. Additionally, the author used other reports and historical papers to build summaries and historical perspectives in this article.
"... when restrictions on residence rights continued to be extended... illness ... opened new avenues and, ambibuously, new hopes." (page 83)
"... the issuing of a diagnosis and a prognosis ... becasme a problem of conscience... bot for the doctor who refused... and for the one who overstated the seriousness of the condition..." (page 97)
"The logic os state sovereignty in the control of immigration clearly prevailed oer the universality of the principle of the right to life." (page 108)
This article discussses why Haiti can't "build back better" after the series of disasters that have come its way. The article mentions that Haiti has become reliant upon international contractors as aid when building back because of local and international distrust of the government. This combined with the fact that many public health experts think that the UN is responsible for the cholera outbreak has caused fewer donations, and those donations that are recieved to be used less efficiently.
Abstract