Environmental Justice

Palgrave Macmillan Journals and Northeastern Political Science Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Polity.

http://www.jstor.org

Northeastern Political Science Association

Identity Politics, Disinterested Politics, and Environmental Justice Author(s): Sylvia N. Tesh and Bruce A. Williams Source: Polity, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Spring, 1996), pp. 285-305Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3235374Accessed: 08-03-2015 00:42 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 152.118.24.10 on Sun, 08 Mar 2015 00:42:51 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Identity Politics, Disinterested Politics, and Environmental Justice* Sylvia N. Tesh University of Michigan

Bruce A. Williams University of Illinois

The environmental justice movement practices two kinds of politics- an identity politics basing appeals on the experiential, subjective knowledge of its grassroots members and a disinterested politics basing appeals on the expert, objective knowledge of scientists. Yet each form of politics currently undermines the other because they draw on very different assumptions about the nature of scientific knowledge. The movement can increase the likelihood of reaching its goals if it reconciles its two forms of politics by propagating social constructionist views of knowledge stressing the inevitable interrelation of facts and values.

Sylvia N. Tesh, a political scientist, is Assistant Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She is the author of Hidden Arguments: Political Ideology and Disease Prevention Policy (1988). Bruce A. Williams is Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and Research Associate Professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. He and Albert A. Matheny are co-authors of Democracy, Dialogue, and Environmental Disputes: The Contested Languages of Social Regulation (1996).

In the last few years, a number of environmental activists, both academics and members of grassroots groups, have argued that our coun-

*Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 1994 meetings of the American Political Science Association and the American Public Health Association. The authors thank Bunyon Bryant, Gregory Button, George Coling, Arline Geronimus, and Paul Mohai for their help.

Polity Volume XX VHI, Number 3 Spring 1996 Polity VolumeXXVIII, Number3 Spring 1996


userHighlight

userHighlight

286 Identity Politics & Environmental Justice

try's shameful history of discriminating against racial minorities and poor people extends to environmental policy. Prompting a call for "environmental justice," the argument has induced policymakers to reevaluate their priorities and has strengthened the environmental movement as a whole by bringing to it new groups of supporters. What kind of long-term effect the environmental justice movement will have, however, may depend on whether, and in what way, it decides to reconcile the contradiction between the two types of politics it employs.

At present, the environmental justice movement bases its appeals to policymakers on both apparently objective scientific research and mani- festly subjective experiential knowledge. We suggest that the movement should reconcile these two kinds of politics by arguing forthrightly to policymakers that scientific knowledge is socially constructed. Such an argument would not just bring into the political arena a dialogue now carried out primarily in academia, but, if successful, would increase the rate at which the environmental justice movement achieves its goals of a cleaner environment and a more participatory democracy.

I. The Evolution of the Environmental Movement

The current environmental justice movement is the third wave of U.S. environmentalism. The first wave, which came to political prominence in the late 1960s, was formalized in the organization of new public interest groups dedicated to protecting our natural resources. The movement was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather part of a much broader ques- tioning about the worth of technological progress and the ability of established political institutions to represent the public interest.1 What set it apart from other social movements was its theme that people have a responsibility to nature, not just to each other. Using symbols like the photographs of Earth taken from outer space and pictures of wounded animals and devastated forests, the first wave conveyed the new idea that our planet is fragile and that everyone living on Earth must work together to protect it.2

1. See Bruce A. Williams and Albert R. Matheny, Democracy, Dialogue, and Social Regulation: The Contested Languages of Environmental Disputes (New Haven: Yale Uni- versity Press, 1996), esp. ch. 1 and 2.

2. On this first wave of environmentalism see Peter Borelli, ed., Crossroads: Environ- mental Priorities for the Future (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1988); Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); James P. Lester, ed., Environmental Poli- tics and Policy: Theories and Evidence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989); Walter A.


userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

Sylvia N. Tesh & Bruce A. Williams 287

The second wave of environmentalism shifted the emphasis. Instead of being about the ways humans destroy the environment, it was about the ways a polluted environment destroys people. Coming of age in the late 1970s, this second wave turned attention to the health consequences of exposure to hazardous waste, and to the powerlessness of people- especially those in poor and working class communities-to protect themselves. This second wave depended less on professional lobby organizations than on grassroots associations of ordinary people whose primary task was to reject proposed waste facilities and secure relocation or compensation for families exposed to pollution. The members thought of themselves not as protectors of nature and defenders of wild- life but as abused victims, exploited and exposed primarily because they were not rich or powerful.3 For this reason they eventually began refer- ring to their goal as environmental justice and to their campaign as the environmental justice movement.4

The third wave, evident by the late 1980s, also called itself the environmental justice movement but defined the problem and identified its membership more precisely. It asserted that people of color were the greatest victims of environmental mistreatment and set itself apart from the second wave with the concept of environmental racism. "Environ- mental racism," coined in 1987 by Benjamin Chavis,5 posits that government and industry pursue policies that disproportionately expose racial minorities to hazardous wastes.6 This linkage between racism and en-

Rosenbaum, Environmental Politics and Policy (Washington, DC: Congressional Quar- terly Press, 1991); and Robert C. Paehlke, Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).

3. For this wave of environmentalism, see Lois Gibbs, Love Canal: My Story (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1982); Nicholas Freudenberg, Not in Our Backyards! (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Raymond L. Goldsteen and John K. Schorr, Demanding Democracy After Three Mile Island (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991); Michael R. Edelstein, Contaminated Communities (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988); Paula DiPerna, Cluster Mystery: Epidemic and the Children of Woburn, Mass. (St. Louis: C.V. Mosby, 1985); and Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

4. Everyone's Backyard, the newsletter of The Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, began identifying itself as "The Journal of the Grassroots Movement for Environ- mental Justice" with the Jan./Feb. 1990 issue. CCHW is the premier national organization established to aid grassroots environmental groups.

5. See Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., "Preface," in Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, ed. Robert D. Bullard (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994).

6. U.S. Government Accounting Office, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (Wash-


userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight


vironmental pollution gave new clarity to the concepts promoted by the second wave of the movement. Fitting into categories of thought already well developed by the civil rights movement, it unambiguously identified a special category of people who had been treated unjustly, and provided fresh energy and coherence to community organizing.7 Today "environmental justice" is increasingly the frame within which Latino farm workers explain their demand for better working conditions, Native Americans defend tribal lands, and African Americans protest unsafe neighborhoods.8

By arguing that America's commitment to equality and justice, as well as its environmental integrity is at stake, the second and third waves of the environmental movement have extended environmentalism's appeal well beyond the white middle class and have placed new obstacles in the way of those who would ridicule the campaign to protect the land, air, and water from industrial pollution. But the environmental justice movement has the potential to do something even more important. It could change the very terms of public debate on the environmental issue, for it could bring into the political sphere the proposition, now confined to academic circles, that science is socially constructed.

Social constructionists contend that scientific knowledge can never be wholly objective, for scientists inevitably bring to their work their own beliefs and values as well as the world view of the society in which they live. Were lawmakers and bureaucrats to adopt-or even to seriously debate-constructionism, the policymaking process could be changed profoundly, for the mystique of science would be pierced, public participation in policymaking would be newly legitimated, and environmental policies would be more protective of public health.

Whether the environmental justice movement actually brings social constructionism into the political arena depends largely on the degree to which the movement wants to resolve the contradiction between the two kinds of politics it uses. Sometimes the movement uses identity politics, basing the legitimacy of its calls for political change on the experiences

ington, DC: GAO, 1983), RCED 83-168; United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: United Church of Christ, 1987).

7. Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai, "Introduction" in Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).

8. The March/April 1992 issue of the EPA Journal is devoted to the link between race and environmental exposure, and contains statements by some thirty activists, scholars, and government officials describing virtually all civil rights struggles in terms of environmental justice.


userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight


and values of its members. At other times the movement uses what we call disinterested politics, basing the legitimacy of its demands on the published findings of (presumedly) neutral science. Identity politics makes the implicit claim that true knowledge is subjective. Disinterested politics makes the implicit claim that true knowledge is objective. As we will note, some movement leaders suggest that a resolution between these two kinds of politics is possible. But the books, articles, and newsletters currently written by and for movement adherents, as well as their verbal statements in public meetings, typically jump back and forth between these politics, never remarking on their incongruity.

The environmental justice movement is not at all unique in employing these two kinds of politics; all social movements do the same to some degree. But the struggle for environmental justice is unusual because it draws-and must draw-almost equally on science and on identity. Other movements are freer to concentrate on one more than the other. For this reason the environmental justice movement must address dilemmas other movements can dodge.

The rest of this article is divided into four sections. First we describe the movement's use of disinterested politics and argue that disinterested politics puts the whole movement at risk because the science supporting it is so vulnerable to criticism. Then we describe the movement's use of identity politics and argue that this, too, is risky because it can easily marginalize the movement. From there we turn to a discussion of social constructionist theory, proposing that it sits at the intersection of positiv- ist and interpretivist epistemologies, and thus offers a reconciliation between disinterested and identity politics. Finally, we discuss the ways that social constructionism might support the fight for stronger environmental policies.

I. Disinterested Politics

Many people, scientists and ordinary citizens alike, expect that policymakers will do the right thing if they have the true facts. The history of environmental justice groups typically starts with someone simply phon- ing a government official, explaining that the community is exposed to an environmental hazard, and presuming that the official will take care of the problem. With this straightforward act, the caller begins practicing what we call disinterested politics. When the phone call does not solve the problem (and it rarely does, to the often profound disillusion- ment of the person making it) and community members begin to organize, they continue to practice disinterested politics. They just do it with more sophistication and more force. They gather scientific data and


userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight


present them to policymakers, pointing out, in a variety of ways, that the data are the objective, unbiased explanations for their demands. At Love Canal, the Picciano study showing that residents had high levels of damaged chromosomes was a key piece of evidence for activists.9 At Woburn, the Harvard health survey tying the cases of childhood leukemia to exposure to contaminated drinking water served as verifica- tion.10 At Times Beach, citizens supported their case with estimates of risk levels provided by the Centers for Disease Control.1

All of today's groups similarly rest a large portion of their campaigns on scientific research. Members are aided by two movement publications which spread information about the latest developments in epidemiology and toxicology throughout the grassroots. The Environmental Health Monthly, put out by the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, reprints scientific articles from the mainstream peer reviewed journals (prefacing each with a page-long commentary). Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly12 is an older, independent newsletter consisting of articles that report on but do not reprint the scholarly literature. Both publications signify to activists and outsiders alike that there are neutral, apolitical means to settle environmental disputes, and that the challenge for the movement is to get policymakers to base their decisions on disinterested scientific research.

Virtually all the articles and books on environmental racism written by or for the movement refer to scientific studies showing that minorities and poor people are more likely than whites and better-off people to be exposed to environmental toxins.13 The most authoritative and commonly-cited publication is the 1987 report by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. The UCC study examined information on the location of all 415 operating commercial hazardous waste facilities in the U.S. (as of May 1986), as well as the location of all 18,164

9. Adeline Gordon Levine, Love Canal: Science, Politics, and People (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1982).

10. Phil Brown and Edwin J. Mikkelsen, No Safe Place: Toxic Waste, Leukemia, and Community Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

11. Michael R. Edelstein, Contaminated Communities: The Social and Psychological Impacts of Residential Toxic Exposure (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), pp. 134-35.

12. Formerly "RACHEL's Hazardous Waste News." 13. For example, see Bunyon Bryant and Paul Mohai, eds., Race and the Incidence of

Environmental Hazards; Robert D. Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: Southend Press, 1993); Benjamin A. Goldman, The Truth About Where You Live: An Atlas for Action on Toxins and Mortality (New York: Times Books, 1991); Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environ- mental Quality (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990).


userHighlight

userHighlight

userHighlight


closed or abandoned hazardous waste sites (as of early 1985). Its major conclusions are that in the nation as a whole, communities with the larg- est number of commercial hazardous waste facilities have a disproportionate percentage of racial and ethnic minorities, and that race is a more significant indicator of the location of these hazardous waste facilities than is class. Scholars and activists also regularly call attention to other studies coming to the same conclusion, and to research that correlates poverty with exposure to toxic substances.14

It is certainly not difficult to agree with the general theme of this research. Everyone knows that people of color are disproportionately poor and that a frequent characteristic of poor neighborhoods is their proximity to dirty industries. Many people also know (although this is a newer and different kind of knowledge) that the protection of public health requires regulating the disposal of industrial waste. Thus it might seem that scientific studies are hardly necessary to defend the environmental justice movement. But of course they are. In the first place, social movement history teaches that appeals to plain common sense are never enough to change long-standing policies and institutions, so all movements play disinterested politics to some extent. In the second place, the environmental movement as a whole is deeply involved in disinterested politics because, unlike other contemporary social movements, it is primarily about cause and effect. To be sure, environmentalism entails a moral claim-the startling new idea that mistreating nature is as un- ethical as mistreating humans. But this idea is still far too radical to support calls for social change all on its own. Environmentalism cannot suc- ceed unless it also uses causal reasoning. It has to show that if we do certain things to nature there will be bad consequences. To show this, it must turn to science, the modern world's only authoritative discoverer of causality. The great irony, however, is that as soon as the environmental justice movement asks science to corroborate its common-sense knowledge, it runs the risk that its knowledge will be questioned and its per- suasiveness weakened. This can, in turn, weaken the movement itself. Science, by its very nature, is never certain. There are usually conflicting studies; every study is imperfect. Thus in the case of the environmental justice movement, some scientific studies support its position and some do not, and it is possible to find many flaws in the research the movement relies on.

14. The exact number of studies is unclear, since writers in this field frequently include secondary literature in lists they prepare and do not always distinguish between studies on race and studies on class. See, for example, the widely cited essay by Paul Mohai and Bunyan Bryant, "Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence" in Race and the Inci- dence of Environmental Hazards.



The most frequent criticism of the studies on environmental racism is that researchers did not ask about the racial composition of the communities in question at the time of the initial dumping. It is possible, critics say, that racial minorities moved into the area afterwards because property values around the site declined or because new jobs were available. If that is what has happened, environmental racism in siting hazardous waste facilities has not occurred (although disproportionate exposure could certainly still exist). A second criticism is that a question- able measure of social class was employed to conclude that race, not class, predicts the location of the facilities. Social class is famously difficult to measure, and in the United States, where race and class are so highly correlated, distinguishing between the two is especially difficult. The UCC study, for example, uses mean household income and the mean value of owner-occupied homes as a proxy for class, and these may be misleading since both could be affected by the presence of hazardous waste facilities. A third criticism is that the classification of "facility" is too general to capture the fundamental problem. The UCC study lumped together facilities that treat, store, or dispose of hazardous waste, and failed to distinguish between new, state-of-the-art facilities and aging, poorly run sites. Thus it is possible to argue that some, or even many, of them pose no danger to public health.

Finally, the studies are unclear about who, if anyone, is actually exposed to the hazardous waste facilities because of the way they define the affected communities. The UCC report uses zip codes to represent neighborhoods, thereby implicitly defining "community" in a variety of ways-sometimes limiting the definition to a small urban area, other times including large rural tracts. Thus the actual danger of exposure presented by each hazardous waste facility could vary markedly from community to community. Moreover, the UCC's data do not include the location of the facility or facilities within the zip code area so there is no way of knowing how many of them are actually near people.15 Exact site information would be only partially useful, however, for general proximity to a hazardous waste facility does not necessarily mean exposure to it. The danger more likely comes with living downstream or downwind.

But even if the exposure data were sharper, the studies the environ-

15. Vicki Been, "Locally Undesirable Land Uses in Minority Neighborhoods: Dis- proportionate Siting or Market Dynamics?" The Yale Law Journal, 102 (April 1994); Douglas L. Anderton, Andy B. Anderson, John Michael Oakes, and Robert R. Fraser, "Environmental Equity: The Demographics of Dumping," Demography, 31 (1994): 22947; Michael Greenberg, "Proving Environmental Inequity in Siting Locally Unwanted Land Uses," Risk: Issues in Health and Safety, 235 (1993): 244-49.



mental justice movement cites on the outcome of exposure could still be criticized. While no one doubts that many synthetic chemicals are extremely toxic at high doses to certain laboratory animals, and while some studies on very large populations have been able to correlate lung diseases with exposure to some air pollutants,'1 and one study has shown a relationship between birth defects in large populations and hazardous waste sites,17 there is surprisingly little scientific information from which to conclude that synthetic chemicals have actually caused diseases in the general population. Epidemiologists have found it especially difficult to link diseases in a particular community with environmental hazards.

The reasons may be largely technical, because environmental epidemiology is a very limited tool for identifying the effects on communities of exposure to toxic substances. The latency period between exposure and disease is usually so long, the size of the community exposed is usually so small, the difficulty of measuring the exposure is usually so great, and the problem of distinguishing among multiple diseases and multiple possible causes is so onerous that community health studies are typically either inconclusive or negative.18 Most of the time, therefore, when environmental justice activists point to a relationship between the diseases of people in their communities and the presence of environmental pollution, they have no really good data to back them up.

We are not suggesting that the public's exposure to environmental pollutants is benign. Nor do we conclude that worries about a special risk to minorities are irrational or ill-founded. Our point here is that the scientific data confirming the dangers are especially vulnerable to criticism. Thus, disinterested politics can easily backfire on the environmental justice movement. The movement cannot escape appealing to science to corroborate its basic claims-that minorities and the poor get the short end of the stick on environmental exposures just as they do on everything

16. For a bibliography of small studies and a recent large study, see C. Arden Pope, III, et al., "Particulate Air Pollution as a Predictor of Morality in a Prospective Study of U.S. Adults," American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, 51 (1995): 669-74.

17. Sandra A. Geschwind, et al., "Risk of Congenital Malformations Associated with Proximity to Hazardous Waste Sites," American Journal of Epidemiology, 135 (1992): 1197-1207.

18. National Research Council, Environmental Epidemiology: Public Health and Hazardous Waste (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1991), pp. 101-52; Ken Sexton, et al., "Estimating Human Exposures to Environmental Pollutants: Availability and Utility of Existing Databases," Archives of Environmental Health, 47 (1992): 398-407; Glyn G. Caldwell, "Twenty-two Years of Cancer Cluster Investigations at the Centers for Disease Control," American Journal of Epidemiology, 132, Suppl. No. 1 (1990): S43-S47.



else, and that synthetic chemicals harmful to laboratory animals are also harmful to people-because the movement is largely about science. But when it offers the results of scientific studies to policymakers as support for its demands, it also unavoidably offers the results to the scientific community for re-evaluation.

Moreover, the appeal to science legitimates all scientific studies, including those with results that do not support the environmental justice position. The movement thereby hands over an enormous amount of control to outsiders. This means that scientists become the arbiters of the movement's knowledge. If the scientific community examines and rejects the evidence supporting the movement, the entire struggle for environmental justice is at risk. The movement has two recourses. It can ignore the critics and continue to exhibit as dramatically as possible all the research that supports the movement's cause. Alternatively it can charge that scientists who carried out the dissenting studies were biased, incom- petent, or dishonest. In fact, the movement uses both these options, and some of its successes may be the result of having done so. Nevertheless, the movement cannot achieve its goals through disinterested politics alone. The opposing forces it rallies are too powerful.

III. Identity Politics

Using identity politics is another, different, way to win. Instead of basing demands for new laws, rules, policies, and practices on the results of disinterested research, identity politics bases demands on the lived experiences, common knowledge, and shared values of ordinary people. It is a politics particularly evident in the women's, gay and lesbian, and civil rights movements, where members struggle to replace negative stereo- types with strong and positive images of themselves.19 But all social movements engage in some version of identity politics when they represent the collective identities of people who share characteristics, values, or experiences different from the mainstream. This representation of collective identities is one of the purposes of all social movements. People who join the peace movement, the labor movement, the populist movement, or the environmental movement do so at least partly because the movement expresses something essential to their sense of self.20

19. See Craig Calhoun, ed., Social Theory and the Politics ofIdentity (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1994).

20. Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Jean L. Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contempo-


userHighlight


That movements also help create this sense of self is critical to an understanding of their impact on both their adherents and the policymaking process. Social movement ideas and activities inspire previously disparaged or ignored people to think of themselves as a collectivity and to assign political importance to who they are and what they think. They come to feel that their own knowledge, drawn from their own lived experiences, is consequential. At its best, as Todd Gitlin says, identity politics overcomes "exclusion and silencing." It provides "an enclave where the silenced [can] find their voices."21 In short, social movements empower their members.

Identity politics plays out somewhat differently in the second and third waves of the environmental movement. When the initial grassroots environmental groups formed, activists started from scratch. They had to invent new collectivities based on the shared experience of being exposed to toxins and being ignored by government authorities. The later campaign against environmental racism drew on the already-formed, powerful collective identities shared by racial minorities. What the two waves have in common is a collective identity as victims of polluting industry and as ordinary people-not experts, not elites. That identity, because it emphasizes their experiential knowledge, gives them a powerful rationale to keep fighting. "Experts can't solve your problems," writes Stephen Lester, the science director for the Citizens' Clearing- house for Hazardous Waste, in the organization's newsletter. "No one knows more about a community and its situation than the people directly affected.... Trust your instincts; rarely will you go wrong if you follow what you know in your heart to be true and right."22

Sociologist Celine Krauss has analyzed this form of identity politics particularly well. After interviewing women active in environmental justice groups, she writes:

Unlike the more abstract, issue-oriented focus of national groups, [these] women's focus is on environmental issues that grow out of their concrete, immediate experiences. . . . What emerges is an environmental discourse that is mediated by subjective experiences

rary Social Movements," Social Research, 52 (1985): 663-716. See also the chapters by William Gamson, Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, and Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam in Frontiers of Social Movement Theory, ed. Aldon D. Morris and Carol McClurg Mueller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

21. Todd Gitlin, "From Utility to Difference: Notes on the Fragmentations of the Idea of the Left," in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, p. 153.

22. "Science Lessons for the Real World," Everyone's Backyard, 11 (September/ October 1993): 17.


userHighlight


and interpretations and rooted in the political truths women con- struct out of their identities as housewives, mothers, and members of communities and racial and ethnic groups.... Through their in- formal networks, they compare notes and experiences and develop an oppositional knowledge used to resist the dominant knowledge of experts and the decisions of government and corporate officials.23

Similarly, Cynthia Hamilton, writing about African American women fighting an incinerator in South Central Los Angeles, points to their use of knowledge gained through everyday life. Expert assurance that health risks associated with dioxin exposure were less than those associated with eating peanut butter unleashed a fury of dissent. All the women, young and old, working class and professional, had made peanut butter sand- wiches for years.24

It is this kind of challenge to their experiential knowledge that has emboldened many previously silent people. A woman in Albuquerque, describing a meeting between community members and representatives from a variety of government agencies, recounts her realization that she knows more about the issue than the experts.

I didn't want to say much. ... I'm not well educated. I can't speak the way they do. But when they got to talking, they were wrong at what they were saying. I knew I was right. So I just got up and said, "Wait a minute!" And since then I am not afraid of anybody. I live here. I know what is going on.25

Another woman offers a similar explanation for her activism:

I did not come to the fight against environmental problems as an intellectual but rather as a concerned mother.. .. People say, "But you're not a scientist. How do you know it's not safe?" ... I have common sense ... I know if dioxin and mercury are going to come out of an incinerator stack, somebody's going to be affected.26

23. Celine Krauss, "Women of Color on the Front Line," in Unique Protection, pp. 257-58 and 261.

24. Cynthia Hamilton, "Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles," in Unique Protection, p. 215.

25. Quoted in Michael Guerrero and Louis Head, "Organizing the Frontlines," in We Speak for Ourselves: Social Justice, Race, and Environment, ed. Dana Alston (The Panos Institute, December 1990), p. 34.

26. Guerrero and Head, "Organizing the Frontier," p. 209.



These messages-"I live here so I know what is going on" and "I have common sense"-come through over and over again in statements by environmental justice activists, whether they are minorities or not. When your environment is polluted, they say, and you see many diseases among your neighbors, it is obvious that the pollution caused the health problems. As a member of a South Bronx group writes:

Our community has one of the highest rates of infant mortality, persons with compromised immune systems, lead poisoning and asthma. But this comes as no surprise, because in our immediate community there are over 65 waste transfer stations transporting asbestos, lead piping, construction debris, medical waste, sludge and many other toxins to places all over the U.S.27

Perhaps the most politically significant expression of this kind of knowledge took place in February 1994 during the Symposium on Health Research and Needs to Ensure Environmental Justice, a national conference sponsored by seven government agencies. The organizers had scheduled EPA chief Carol Browner to speak at the plenary session, but when the time came she spontaneously turned the session over to the audience. For the rest of the morning dozens of community people lined up behind the microphones to testify. The published proceedings of the conference fail to really capture the emotional intensity of that morning, but they do transmit the participants' clear message: scientists and government officials do not understand the problem; it is the community who has the definitive wisdom about exposure to environmental pollution.28

The message was particularly well expressed by the many Native Americans in attendance, who argued that Native Americans have a special kind of knowledge garnered from generations of conscious interaction with nature. But it also came, throughout the conference, from a whole variety of other Americans, minorities and whites, including some scientists. One researcher, for example, proposed that scientists should classify environmental burdens according to how they are experienced by

27. Nina Laboy, "Struggle for Survival in the South Bronx," Everyone's Backyard, 12 (March/April, 1994): 4.

28. Symposium on Health Research Needs to Ensure Environmental Justice, February 10-12, 1994, Arlington, Virginia. Sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the NIH Office of Minority Health Research, the Environmental Protec- tion Agency, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Center for Environmental Health.



the affected community.29 And a physician declared that minority fac- tory workers themselves can tell scientists and government agencies how toxic chemicals get into the body and what to do about it.30

This is important testimony and neither the EPA nor any other environmental policymaker can ignore it. The imperative of democracy alone requires that attention be paid. So do the moral underpinnings of the environmental movement with its widely accepted ecological reasoning that what harms nature is likely to harm humans as well. In addition, the now-familiar literature on risk perception legitimates experiential knowledge, for it defines citizens' views of risk not as irrational but as perfectly sensible forms of reasoning.31 Nevertheless, in practicing this kind of identity politics the environmental justice movement courts danger. For all its ability to empower people, knowledge arrived at through intuition and personal experience is simply less highly valued in our culture than knowledge arrived at through apparently objective, scientific means.

This is especially true when the contrast is with the so-called hard sciences, which investigate empirical phenomena. No matter how movingly people testify that their health is imperiled by environmental pollution, government agencies can continue to ask for "the facts" before they act. In contrast, members of the civil rights movement and the women's movement can get away with only practicing identity politics (or at least with primarily practicing identity politics). The declarations they make about the status of their lives are seldom scientific statements and thus cannot be authoritatively challenged by any other group of people. For environmental justice activists, however, identity politics is not enough. As an EPA scientist declared at the 1994 conference, "The credibility of environmental justice decisions depends on science, and better data is [sic] needed to identify risk."32

29. Comments by David Ozonoff of the Boston University School of Public Health. See p. 41 of the conference proceedings.

30. Comments by Linda Rae Murray, director of Winfield Moody Health Center in Chicago. See p. 9 of the conference proceedings. We have not given direct quotes for either Dr. Ozonoff or Dr. Murray, since it is impossible to tell from the published conference proceedings which words are actual quotes and which are paraphrases, and Tesh, who attended the conference, does not have verbatim notes.

31. Paul Slovic, "Perceptions of Risk," Science, 236 (1987): 280-85; Baruch Fischhoff, et al., "How Safe is Safe Enough? A Psychometric Study of Attitudes Towards Techno- logical Risks and Benefits," Policy Sciences, 9 (1978): 127-52; Harry Otway and D. von Winterfeldt, "Beyond Acceptable Risk: On the Social Acceptability of Technologies," Policy Sciences, 14 (1982): 247-56.

32. Ken Sexton, director of the EPA office of health research. See p. 6 of the conference proceedings. Here again, these may not have been his exact words.



The danger the environmental justice movement courts is that while policymakers may pay attention, they will treat the movement as an irri- tant. There will be a lot of talk about the importance of justice and equity; there will be a handful of mainly symbolic actions (of which the tiny, poorly-funded EPA Office of Environmental Justice is one) but policymakers will take few concrete actions specifically to protect minorities and the poor from environmental pollutants. Those actions they do take will be widely construed as politically necessary (or worse, politically forced), but not scientifically or "really" necessary.33

IV. Social Construction of Science

We have painted a bleak picture. The foregoing suggests that regardless of the success of the environmental justice movement in revitalizing environmentalism, politicizing new groups of citizens, and getting attention from the EPA, it may have minimal effect on actual environmental policies. The movement is extremely reliant on scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is easily challenged. The movement is also extremely reliant on experiential knowledge but that knowledge, too, is easily contested. Moreover, the movement itself implicitly undercuts its own arguments as it practices both kinds of politics, simultaneously claiming that objective scientific information proves its case and rejecting scientific expertise in favor of community experience.

It is possible, however, that the movement could turn its very use of both kinds of politics into a powerful new argument for environmental justice. It could insist that disinterested politics and identity politics are interrelated. Instead of switching back and forth between the two, the movement could place them both within the single framework of social constructionism. If it did so successfully, it could considerably reinforce its demands to policymakers for better environmental policies.

To constructionists, reality is not simply "out there." What people discern and give meaning to from the jumble of phenomena that con- stitutes the world is the result of a complex and not wholly understood interaction among empirical objects, cultural values, personal interests, and political power. This applies to what scientists discern, also. As Thomas Kuhn argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, over- arching and unexamined "paradigms" tell scientists what kinds of prob-

33. An excellent example is Elizabeth M. Whelan's diatribe against the environmental movement: Toxic Terror: The Truth Behind the Cancer Scares (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993).



lems to study and what kinds of methods to use.34 His book has inspired a substantial literature showing that scientific facts cannot be separated from the people, the institutions, and the cultures that generate them. Some scholars say that these situational factors affect only the direction of scientific inquiry.35 Others go even further, arguing that not only the questions, but also the answers, are inescapably influenced by the social context within which the scientific enterprise occurs.36

Some proponents of constructionism have taken it to justify a kind of radical impartiality. If the way even scientists look at the world cannot be disentangled from social values, this reasoning has it, then there is no truth. Any one person's view is as acceptable as any other person's view. By this logic, the risk perception studies we mentioned earlier (which describe the special kind of rationality non-experts use to rate risks) vali- date any and all opinions on environmental hazards; everything, one often hears these days, is perception. Thus many scholars who study risk perception simply argue that both expert knowledge and popular knowledge should inform risk management.37 Relativism of this sort is also seen in some versions of identity politics. Environmental justice activists reflect it when they insist that lay opinion about environmental hazards is just as reliable as scientific opinion.

Regardless of the enthusiasm with which some people promote this application of egalitarian ideals to knowledge, it is troublesome for policymakers. If expert knowledge says that a chemical is not harmful to human beings and lay knowledge says that it is very harmful, there is no way to treat these two pieces of information equally and simply blend them into one risk management strategy. A blending would require compromise and a compromise invalidates the initial premise that truth is relative, for it implies that one or both kinds of knowledge is inaccurate. In a more politically loaded example of the conceptual problem, consider a situation where citizens insist that children infected with the AIDS virus

34. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

35. This view is closely associated with the work of Robert Merton on the sociology of science. For a recent application of this work to the social sciences, see Paul Diesing, How Does Social Science Work? (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1991).

36. Helen Longino, Science as Social Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Bruno Latour, We Have NeverBeen Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1993).

37. See, for example, Susan Hadden, "Public Perception of Hazardous Waste," Risk Analysis, 11 (1991): 47-57; Daniel J. Fiorino, "Technical and Democratic Values in Risk Analysis," Risk Analysis, 9 (1989): 293-299.



pose a public health hazard and should be not allowed to attend public school. If lay opinion is as reliable as expert opinion, health agencies have no authoritative superior knowledge to argue for a more humani- tarian policy.

But constructionism need not imply these kinds of dilemmas. Just because facts include values does not mean that facts disappear. Nor does it mean that all values are equally acceptable. Instead, social constructionism can turn our attention to the values scientists accept. Following this line of thinking, some scholars argue that when scientists are unaware of the extent to which values influence their work, they are susceptible to the unconscious employment of their society's undemo- cratic, racist, sexist, or ethnocentric assumptions.38 For example, Evelyn Fox Keller shows how "masculine" notions about the desirability of hierarchy in society prompt most biologists to see hierarchy at the cellular and sub-cellular levels even when other ways of seeing are more accurate.39 In a similar vein, Nancy Krieger and her colleagues maintain that the generally accepted models scientists use to investigate inequali- ties in health are racist.40 Other scholars take a somewhat different tack. They argue not that unacknowledged assumptions guide research but that the assumptions fill in the inevitable gaps in completed studies. Michael Mulkay, for example, shows that although Darwin did not have enough empirical evidence to prove that natural selection occurs, his studies were embraced by his contemporaries because they reinforced commonly held religious beliefs about God, philosophical principles about nature, and political assumptions about the structure of society.4'

It is this understanding of social constructionism-the uncovering of the hidden assumptions that affect science-that we find most intriguing. Instead of concentrating on the relativity of facts, it concentrates on the power of culture. It thus raises some vital issues. Which of society's values should guide scientists' formation of questions, choice of method- ologies, and interpretation of results? What assumptions about a society's goals and structure should fill the inevitable gaps in scientific studies? We recognize that these are enormous, enduring issues. But

38. Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism. 39. Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1985). 40. Nancy Krieger et al., "Racism, Sexism, and Social Class: Implications for Studies of

Health, Disease, and Well-being," American Journal of Preventive Medicine (December, 1993): 82-122.

41. Michael Mulkay, Science and the Sociology of Knowledge (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1979).



unless scientific studies have no implications at all for public policies, both scientists and citizens need continually to grapple with them.

Thus social constructionist theory means more democracy. By calling attention to the dependence of science on society, it gives new legitimacy to public participation. It demands-no, it requires-the citizenry to deliberate over the values that will guide science. It disallows waiting for experts to work out the "best" policies in the privacy of their offices. It says that science alone cannot show us how to find the common good, but that the pathway is always a complex combination of scientific facts and social values. In this way social constructionism supports those political theorists who emphasize the importance of the deliberative process in strengthening public policy.42

V. Social Constructionism and Environmental Justice Over the past decade the environmental justice movement has been mov- ing toward arguments that some values are better than others and that the better ones should guide science. The point was made straightfor- wardly, for example, during a two-day conference on environmental justice attended by about a hundred academics and community activists at the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources in January, 1993. In one of the principal addresses, Conner Bailey, a sociologist from Auburn University, contrasted two world views. The first, techno- cratic, linear, and rational, is a world view where expertise and neutral information predominate. The other, democratic, world view emphasizes individual experience, community participation, and subjective under- standings of reality. Conference attendees responded enthusiastically to Bailey's presentation. Embracing the second world view, they discussed for half an hour or so its implications for the environmental justice movement. At the end the consensus seemed to be that the values most scientists bring to the study of environmental pollution prevent them from finding problems, and that different, more democratic values need to be used to guide scientific research.43

42. John Dryzek, Discursive Democracy: Politics, Policy, and Political Science (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Par- ticipatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

43. Although the published papers from the conference do not include Bailey's presentation, Tesh attended the conference and this synopsis comes from her notes. The published papers do contain an essay by Bailey and others arguing that specialization contributes to the power scientists have over community people. See Conner Bailey et al., "Environ-



Robert Bullard, the leading environmental justice scholar, has discussed more precisely how constructionist theory can be employed to alter public debate. In one essay he contrasts the conclusions drawn by using normal scientific assumption and by consciously adopting an environmental justice framework.44 His example is the health effects of eating fish contaminated with toxins. Investigators using the traditional assumption of a largely homogeneous public will conclude that because the "average" consumer eats little fish, the levels of toxins observed are not hazardous to public health. Investigators using an environmental justice framework, however, will not envision a homogeneous public. Aware that many people's lives are deeply affected by poverty and racism, they see a public composed of various discrete groups. Some of these groups are so poor that they depend on fish caught in local contaminated water for a large part of their diet. For these people, the level of toxins observed in fish will be a significant health hazard. A scientist working within the environmental justice framework will conclude, therefore, that contaminated fish are a public health hazard.

Taking the social construction of science seriously, as Bullard does in his essay, has profound implications for the way the environmental justice movement practices politics. It cannot continue to play disinterested politics by labelling certain scientific studies as neutral and demanding that policies be based on their findings. Nor can it retreat into identity politics and say that "perception" trumps "evidence." Rather, it must argue to government agencies and the wider public that science necessarily involves values just as politics involves values and there is no single privileged position from which to study toxic pollution. It then must make the case that the values it champions are the ones that should guide science and be incorporated into studies of toxic pollution.

These are only relatively difficult tasks for the environmental justice movement. The movement already knows how to use scientific studies to argue for better environmental policies and it already knows how to employ appeals to values. It even knows how to put the two together. What it needs to do is put them together consciously and consistently.

The principal problem for the environmental justice movement in

mental Justice and the Professional," in Issues, Policies, and Solutions for Environmental Justice, ed. Bunyon Bryant (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan School of Natural Resources, 1994).

44. Robert D. Bullard, "Unequal Environmental Protection: Incorporating Environ- mental Justice in Decision Making," in Worst Things First? The Debate over Risk-Based National Environmental Priorities, ed. Alan M. Finkel and Dominic Golding (Washington, DC: Resources for the Future, 1994), quote on page 250.



advancing this view is that it clashes dramatically with the value-neutral model of science assumed by the government decisionmaking process and by most citizens. Whatever the overt claims of policymakers that they do consider the limits of scientific evidence for deciding policy issues, again and again the techniques employed within regulatory agencies presuppose that neutral expertise can decide contested policy issues. So, for example, the EPA's National Priority List to determine the allo- cation of Superfund monies for hazardous waste clean-up was designed to objectively rank the severity of sites, without regard for the social set- ting within which the sites existed.45 Throughout the Reagan-Bush years, funding to support public participation in policymaking was cut back on the grounds that the use of "objective" techniques like cost/benefit analysis made such participation unnecessary at best, and an impediment to good decisionmaking at worst.46 All the evidence so far suggests that this model of science's role in the policy process is also the "official" model of the Clinton Administration.

This conception of a neutral science as the way to decide policy con- troversies means that, given the weaknesses of the scientific studies used by the environmental justice movement, policymakers are constrained from taking the movement's claims into account. If they consider the claims, they can do so only on political grounds, not on grounds that science supports them. If, however, the environmental justice movement can successfully undermine this model of neutral science and replace it with one emphasizing the social construction of scientific evidence and the relevance of values to the production of knowledge, it may be able to prevent its claims from being placed somewhere on the periph- ery of the decisionmaking process. The great strength of the social constructionist view of science as a basis for making demands on government is that it calls attention to the relevance of the totality of lived experience. It connects environmental pollution to past and current racial discrimination, economic inequality, and all of their consequences. But the very logic of most scientific studies, seeking to isolate individual variables while controlling for everything else, draws our attention away from this broader context. It is this bias that is highlighted by many of the critiques of science originating from the social constructivist argument. And it is this bias that the environmental justice movement is in such a good position to contest.

45. Williams and Matheny, Democracy, Dialogue and Social Regulation, ch. 2. 46. Richard A. Harris and Sidney M. Milkis, The Politics of Regulatory Change: A Tale

of Two Agencies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).



Were the environmental justice movement to take on the challenge of raising the social constructivist critique in the political realm, it would be working to advance not only environmental policy but also the whole democratic process. This challenge is not trivial. The ability to evaluate competing claims is central to the goal of protecting people and nature from harmful pollutants. A scientific practice and discourse that forthrightly included the values of justice and the recognition of past discrimination would go a long way to getting us to that goal and to a more just society.


Environmental Justice

Documents

Transcript of Environmental Justice