The Politics of Race, Space, and Environmental Justice Insights for Activists

Maya Burke

Date of Award

2005

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Fitzgerald, Keith

Keywords

Race, Space, Environmental Justice, Segregation, Civic Environmentalism, Grassroots Activism, Watersheds, Representation, GIS, Institutions

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

In 1987 the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice released Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, a landmark study alleging that people of color are forced to bear a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards. To date, most of the work regarding environmental justice deals with the ways in which poor people and people of color have come to live near these environmental hazards. The result has been work that has largely resembled scholarship on the structural processes contributing to a socially/racially segregated urban landscape. The progression of the environmental justice literature, however, has come to promote a notion of 'civic environmentalism' and a general concern for the political dimension of environmental justice issues. Although scholars of this persuasion have argued why grassroots activism, devolution, and a withering federal role may be especially helpful and appropriate for the amelioration of environmental injustices; there has been little critical attention devoted to understanding why federal level representative institutions have been unable to successfully address issues associated with the EJ movement. It is here that this project seeks to make an academic contribution. Although EJ scholars have made the importance of understanding the role of structural racism clear, they have not explicitly made the connection between such processes and their implications for the political goals aniculated in the environmental justice mission statement. This project proposes to make that linkage between race, space, and environmental justice empirically explicit by exploring the relationship between those structural processes and institutional arrangements that create the contexts necessary for effective political action. Specifically, this project explores the possibility of using watersheds as a new basis of representation as a means through which EJ activists may promote environmental issues, cultivate ecological citizenship, and make their voices heard.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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