New Frontiers

PART 1

Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern. Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.

In this episode Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—and political scientist Kemi Fuentes-George, discuss the environmental justice movement: some of its economic, political, social, and racial dimensions; how it’s manifest here in the United States and abroad; and what achieving environmental justice for marginalized populations might actually entail.

Mark Williams
Environmental degradation is an unfortunate reality of our times, and it's often seen as a byproduct of industrialization, resource exploitation, and production practices. Americans became more sensitized to environmental degradation in the 1970s. And as our understanding grew, so did our awareness that the costs of environmental damage weren’t born equally. Some Americans bear a lot more of the costs than do others. Why do more Black and Latino Americans live closer to or even within the midst of toxic waste sites than White Americans? What role do race and colonialism play in creating situations of environmental injustice? And what, if anything, can be done to promote greater environmental justice for all?

Here to discuss some of these things with me today is Kemi Fuentes-George, Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. Kemi is a faculty fellow at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, where he oversees the Center's Program on Security and Global Affairs. He's written extensively about international environmental policy, environmental conservation, biodiversity, the green economy and environmental justice, including in journals like “Global Environmental Politics,” a variety of book chapters, and in his own book “Between Preservation and Exploitation,” which was published by the MIT Press. Today, I'll talk with him about some of his most recent scholarship including a 2021 study on comparative environmental justice that was published in the “Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics,” as well as one of his new research projects on “why the colonialism of old still impedes indigenous participation in environmental management.” Kemi Fuentes-George, welcome to New Frontiers.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mark Williams
I'm glad you're here. Now, a lot of your research has been about environmental justice in a comparative perspective. So let's start with some definitions and instead of starting with what you focus on, which is environmental justice, let's begin with its inverse. What should we understand by the idea of environmental injustice? How would you define that?

Kemi Fuentes-George
All right. So environmental injustice is a little bit easier to define than environmental justice as we'll see in a second. But the basic idea is that, as a result of human activity we generate environmental impacts, whether this is land degradation or air pollution, or water pollution, or what have you. And environmental injustice occurs when the negative results of these impacts primarily accrue to populations who are marginalized or otherwise vulnerable, and the benefits of these processes accrue to populations that are already privileged. And you have a situation which marginalized and vulnerable populations are systematically shut out or disenfranchised from participating in the political system to help address how these goods and benefits are distributed.

Mark Williams
So, if I'm hearing you correctly, the bads of environmental degradation are concentrated among specific groups. Those groups themselves lack access to our input into discussions and policy making about environmental management.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right? Exactly. And then the definition of these groups is going to vary from country to country and in cases within countries. So in some cases, these groups are primarily identified by racial difference. So in the United States, you had mentioned Black and Latino populations, for instance. In some cases, these groups will be identified primarily by economic difference. So in Appalachia, for instance, some of the major victims of coal mountaintop removal are low income White communities. And there are of course, Black people who live in Appalachia but that is a predominantly White area. In some cases, these would be gendered communities. So there's a very complex story by this woman called Yvonne Braun, who's done work in Lesotho studying how the construction of dams and the damming in the Lesotho Highlands have had gendered impacts on women and girls who've been exposed to sexual assault, loss of land tenure as a result of how restitution, resettlement processes around dams have been carried out. And of course, there are ways in which these all intersect. Who is defined as a vulnerable population varies by context but there's always a sense of vulnerability and privilege.

Mark Williams
Okay. Well, you've partially answered a question that I was going to ask next. I wanted to know if you could give us some good prominent examples of what environmental injustice is, examples that would illustrate the definition. And I was going to ask whether the best examples were found in the United States, or whether the patterns of injustice were replicated beyond U.S. borders as well.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, I mean, the sad thing for humanity, and I guess the good thing for my research, is that environmental injustice is everywhere. And in some cases, the processes are primarily local, and in some cases, the processes are global. So, when we think of, or when I think of local cases of environmental injustice, for instance, I could think of, I mean, in the United States where this language kind of originated, places like Cancer Alley, which is in St. James Parish in Louisiana. In St. James Parish, there's this zone that was zoned as residential/industrial in 2014. And by zoning—this is a majority Black parish by the way, 85 percent Black—and in this zone, by having it classified this way, petrochemical companies were able to start building just entire highway lengths of petrochemical plants for refining and oil production in this parish. If you look at images of St. James Parish and Cancer Alley, you'll see just highways with just rows and rows of petrochemical plants, you know, belching smog into the atmosphere,

Mark Williams
And people are living there?

Kemi Fuentes-George
And people are living there. And so you have all of this, you know, local air pollution, local water pollution concentrated in these majority Black neighborhoods, and correspondingly, rates of cancer that are two or three times the rate that would be found in White neighborhoods of comparable social economic status but, you know, without the petrochemical plants. And of course, we as consumers, we benefit from petrochemical companies. We use plastics, we use oil, you know, we benefit from refined oil. Our ability to consume at the rate that we consume is facilitated by the fact that petrochemical companies are not paying the real cost for their production. Right? The cost is born by these low-income Black communities. When we think of global cases, a good case study to look at would be the city of Agbogbloshie, which is in Ghana, and it's now known as the world's digital dumping ground. So, this is a port city in which Ghana receives shipments of electronic materials among other things, as a port city. And a lot of these electronic materials are classified as recyclable or consumer goods but end up being, in many cases, dumped electronic goods or e-waste. And so there have been studies since 2006 by organizations like the Basel Action Network that have tracked how goods that are taken to places in the United States or in Germany for recycling old computers, old cell phones, old cathode ray tubes, like really old televisions and so on, are taken to places where consumers believe they're going to be recycled and then are taken on containerships illicitly, sometimes clandestinely, and taken over to Ghana and essentially just dumped in massive open air pits in which they can leach heavy metals like lead and mercury or persistent organic pollutants like PFAS or PFOA into the ground, into the air, into the water supply. And in which local children often will take these electronics and set them on fire in order to extract the gold and silver and platinum that's inside of them, thus further exposing themselves to toxic chemicals in the fire.

Mark Williams
I was going to say, it doesn't sound very healthy.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Oh, no, it's terrible. It's terrible. Right. So these are communities in Ghana that are low income, that are very heavily marginalized, that are desperate. They're not the ones buying Macs or PlayStations or flat screen TVs, right. We in the industrialized world are the ones who are using these things and then shipping them off to be hopefully recycled, but in reality, oftentimes at a scale that we don't really know, just disposed of and becoming environmental hazards and toxins for people who are on the other side of the digital divide.

Mark Williams
Could you tell me if, you know this arrangement with Ghana, this is something undertaken by the Ghanaian government as opposed to whatever the local authority might be, where the dumping grounds are?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah. So it's a little bit complex. So the way in which waste shipment works in principle is there's this international agreement called the Basel Convention. And the way that the signators to the Basel Convention, which include Ghana, the way that they're supposed to operate is that an importer country has to receive prior informed consent from an exporter country. So if an exporter country, you know, there's some goods originating there that are going to be traded on the international market, which includes waste to another country, you have to label them, explain to the importer what the possible hazards are, define which goods are waste, and which goods are recyclable, which goods are consumer goods. Verify that the importer company has the ability to process or dispose or treat of this waste. And in principle, what that should do is allow free trade and allow poorer countries to get electronic goods cheaper. We in the United States, we’re used to having the latest cutting-edge technology, but you could imagine a good argument for people who would otherwise have no access to technology, that they might benefit from having things that are slightly out of date that we've gone past, for instance. Right. The problem with the Basel Convention, and I think you just kind of hit on it, is that this is an agreement between governments, right. So if the Ghanaian government, for instance, decides that it wants to import e-waste or electronic goods from another country or another company but without having really much interest in ensuring that it's disposed of properly or taking care of disposal or recycling it or checking it. There's not really much that marginalized people inside those countries can do, especially when—this is not so much the case in Ghana but in other countries in Africa that are recipient countries like Sierra Leone—this is especially exacerbated when you have an authoritarian or autocratic country. In which case the government can completely wash its hands of taking care of e-waste and waste goods, because the people who are bearing the cost are so vulnerable and so far removed that their wishes could be ignored entirely.

Mark Williams
Thanks. Okay, well, let's flip it over. We now know what environmental injustice means. What about environmental justice? What should we understand by that concept?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, so this is actually kind of difficult to describe for a variety of reasons. So in 2016 there was this guy from the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society called Roger Clegg, and he was testifying in front of congress on environmental racism and environmental injustices. And he had this argument where he said, “We really should stop thinking about environmental injustice.” Because as I mentioned in the beginning, environmental injustice occurs when you have harms accruing to one population and goods and benefits accruing to a privileged population. And so, in this testimony, Clegg said the problem with these environmental justice advocates is that what they're arguing for is that pollution should be racially balanced and politically correct, right. So I want to emphasize by saying the point of environmental justice is we don't have environmental justice when you have a bad environmental situation that's equally shared. So, if you could imagine some hypothetical scenario in which you have a mixed-race city or district where everyone is equally exposed to the cancer causing chemicals, I don't think anyone would call that environmental justice. So environmental justice should have at least some component of a sustainable and well managed environment in which harms are not primarily accrued to a vulnerable population. Where it gets tricky though, is defining who are the actors that can make justiciable claims with regards to the environment. One of the big debates is whether or not things that are alive but are not human deserve environmental rights and environmental justice protection. So, trees for instance, right? Trees are, you know, alive. There's some who would make an argument that trees have a right life, that you could violate the rights of trees or beavers or any other kind of living organism by engaging in wanton destruction of the environment. And that as a result, what you need to have in order to have real environmental justice is some kind of mechanism by which the rights of living, but non-human things can be protected in a legal system. And so this idea that trees could be appointed, or any other living non-human thing could be appointed, a guardian or representative dates back, at least in the United States, to legal arguments of the scholar Christopher Stone, who advanced this very idea, and it may sound strange but it's really not that far-fetched. I mean, corporations, for instance, are entities that have representatives that can represent their interests in a court of law. And corporations are, you know, they're made up of people. But in reality it's a legal fiction, right? It's a legal actor, not a like a living actor in the way a tree or a bison would be. There are some however, who would say that this idea of extending rights to non-human things doesn't make sense. And so there's a philosopher called Richard Hiskes who argues that in order for a justice or rights claim to be meaningful, there has to be some sense of reciprocity or the possibility of reciprocity between the claimant and the claimee. And so his argument is that rights and justice claims can only take place between human beings because human beings have the capacity for reciprocity and living in a society, in ways that like a human and an otter do not.

Mark Williams
Well, it sounds like there's still an open debate there, and I'm wondering where you come down? How would you present your own view on environmental justice in a fairly succinct way? What does it mean to you?

Kemi Fuentes-George
For me, environmental justice would require a very real accounting of the costs that our rate of consumption are imposing on marginalized people. First of all something like Cancer Alley, to me, should not exist. There should not be such a concentration of environmentally toxic products and processes so close to, well, anybody, but certainly not towards marginalized populations. But that doesn't mean that I think that environmental justice would occur if you take those same petrochemical companies and just put them all over different places of the United States. I think part of the problem is that we've gotten so used to consuming at the rate that we're consuming, that we assume that environmental justice or that environmental solution would maintain our rate of consumption and just disperse the harms elsewhere. And I believe that environmental justice could only be possible if we radically curb how much of these toxic, you know, goods whether there's heavy metals or petrochemical products we consume overall.

Mark Williams
Okay. Great. In the study that you published with the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics you say something I'd like to quote and then get your response. You say “the language and rhetoric of environmental justice has origins that are largely American” and I'm wondering how is that, so, and could you elaborate a little bit about what you mean by that?

Kemi Fuentes-George
So the processes of environmental injustice date back basically to colonialism. But the language specifically of the words environmental justice and environmental racism came out of the 1980s in the American South, when Black and Latino communities became, I don't want to say aware because I'm sure they must have known about it, but they began gathering data, demonstrating to outside viewers that they were the victims of targeted environmental toxins and hazards. So things like dumping, you know, again the siting of chemical plants or industrial plants and so on, right? And in 1987, the United Church of Christ and local advocacy groups created a study in which they presented this information to the U.S. Congress and to the public at large, in which they said, in essence, a new civil rights battle for Black communities in the United States was going to be on the frontier of environmental justice and environmental racism. This language became globalized throughout the late 1980s and late 1990s, when in response to domestic pressure companies in the United States, industrial companies, electronics companies, found it harder to dispose of waste domestically, and therefore began shipping waste abroad, leading to, as I mentioned earlier situations like Agbogbloshie or dumping up waste in Haiti. Gonaives, Haiti was kind of one of the big instances of international environmental injustice. Now in the United States coalitions of activists, Black activists in particular, became aware of what was taking place in Haiti, and then linked up with some activists in Haiti in the 1980s to try to get industrial ash that was being dumped on the beach, taken away, and then disposed of properly. And so through that global connection, the language of environmental racism and environmental justice began spreading in other countries around the world. And then that language, over time, also became adapted to kind of frame what was taking place in different contexts, like in conservation issues, in water issues, in dam management issues, and so on.

Mark Williams
Outside of the United States.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Exactly. But at the same time, like when I was doing my research in Jamaica and Mexico, I found several instances of what I consider to be environmental injustice, but the people didn't use this terminology. They would talk about things being unfair or things being a threat to their culture, or a threat to their way of life. And there was a sense that they were victims of a government that was not responsive to their wishes, and that was doing work among rural people, marginalized rural people in Jamaica and in Mexico. But they didn't use the words environmental racism and environmental justice. And I think that's primarily a terminological thing. I'm not sure to what extent that language is necessary for the kind of coalition building that is needed to push back on these processes.

Mark Williams
Whether it is a benefit or whether it is a hindrance to employ that type of language and describing this phenomenon?

Kemi Fuentes-George
I guess my concern is that to these communities, I wouldn't want it to seem like the Americanization of their struggles, right? To bring in this terminology that did not originate in Jamaica or Mexico, what have you. I mean, if they adopted it themselves, I think that's fine. But it's funny because these processes are global and local at the same time. Rates of consumption, oil extraction, digital dumping. These are things that are now tied into the global economy but that are also mediated so much by local, political and social realities.

Mark Williams
Now, one of the things that I like about your research is that it doesn't just identify the cause of environmental injustice and stop, more or less with that gloomy conclusion. You also argue that there is a pathway out of this type of situation. Basically, you suggest that the key to environmental justice is through proper environmental management and conservation. And when I say it like that, it sounds relatively easy. But let me play devil's advocate a little bit here. Is it really easy, or are there certain conditions that really have to hold before conservation can produce genuine environmental justice?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, it's actually super hard. I think one of the things to pay attention to, right, is that I had kind of suggested earlier that environmental injustice takes space when you have marginalized populations who are disenfranchised from the political system, right? But having marginalized populations participate has to be taken into consideration with these broader kind of structural issues. And so, going back to Appalachia, for instance, some of the people who are most resistant to stopping mountaintop removal and coal mining in Appalachia are low income Appalachian residents. And they tend to do things like vote for people who are going to quote-unquote bring back coal. There's a lot of support for Trump, for instance, on that very basis, despite the fact that they're the ones facing the loss of the watersheds, air pollution, water pollution, what have you. And so there's a sense that if you have marginalized populations, whether White Appalachians, or Indians in the Ecuador in Amazon, or, you know, Maroons in Jamaica. If you have them participate and vote or support politicians who have a certain perspective on environmental management, if they continue to exist in a socioeconomic situation that creates tremendous pressure on them, that they see their only options are either have a job with terrible pollution or have no job and live in extreme poverty but in a clean environment, then it's kind of a difficult choice for them to make. And so addressing environmental injustice can only be done, I think, with addressing other kinds of structural issues—social welfare, social safety net, child care, medical care, access to food—all these other structural issues that are not immediately and obviously environmental but that would nevertheless enable people to participate in a way that that doesn't feel quite as dire and precarious as having, here are your two options: starve or, you know, live in this hell hole but you can pay the rent.

Mark Williams
And the way that you're describing it underscores just how complex it actually is. Environmental management is not something that exists in one dimension. It is intersected by multiple other dimensions and can be affected for good or ill by what's going on in those other dimensions.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right. Exactly. Exactly. And again, going back to an earlier point I made about consumption. We do have to pay attention to the fact that—I'm aware of this right now, right, I'm looking at my MacBook Pro right now—I am part of this consumer society that's gotten so used to this rate of consumption without really being cognizant about what it means for where the costs of these consumption are being born.

Mark Williams
The costs seem to be in significant ways externalized away from the beneficiaries. And concentrated in those who are less beneficiary.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right, exactly. And then if they're done that way, you don't need to pay any attention to them, right? You don't need to pay attention to, you know, the cost of cleanup. If we're not cognizant of these issues, then it becomes economically easy to remain at our current level of consumption. I mean, I think about oil production and oil extraction all the time. And exporter countries like Nigeria, for instance, where during colonialism, when the British found oil in the Niger Delta and began exporting it on the global market until Nigeria became independent in 1960 and basically continue this process. You know, you have this method of oil extraction that is environmentally very damaging. You have gas flares, you have regular oil spills, and then you have a level of violence against people within the area who are understandably upset at all of this supported by the state and supported by corporations. The murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the leader of the Ogoni people in like early 1990s I don't remember the exact year, was carried out because he was in opposition to the environmental devastation that was taking place in the Niger Delta. And so when I think about the calculation of the Nigerian government and Shell that it's cheaper to use violence against the local population and just spill oil everywhere and flare gas and destroy the local environment because that keeps their cost of production lower, it raises a question like, how much would oil cost if they had taken the oil out and not murdered people or thrown them off their land and made sure that the gas was being managed correctly and all of this? It would probably be a lot more expensive.

Mark Williams
If all the externalities were properly priced, what would the cost of gasoline actually be?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, exactly. And maybe we'd have more public transportation and maybe we would've had electric cars before. Now I don't know.

Mark Williams
Coming up, part 2—where Kemi and I turn our attention to the linkages between environmental injustice, and such forces as colonialism and racism—as well as the challenges of achieving effective environmental management.