Environmental injustice in America and its politics of scale

Environmental burdens, such as proximity to hazardous sites, tend to be inequitably borne by poor Americans in general, and by Americans of color in particular. So argues a loose coalition of grassroots organizations and public-interest groups known as the Environmental Justice (EJ) movement. Prompted by that movement, the national government and some state legislatures have established policies to address future inequity. Those policies assume that the scope of environmental injustice spans the country, with many hazardous facilities dotting the landscape in communities of color and/or of the poor. However, various industries and also some social scientists call into question the argument that inequities occur on a national, or even state-wide, scale. Their counter-arguments typically espouse a market-based explanation that localizes the problem: any inequitable risks result from the impersonal forces of the marketplace functioning within individual communities. The politics of EJ pivot around defining the scales of inequity and its resolution. This paper examines the debates over environmental justice in terms of the tension between the scale(s) of the problem itself and the scale(s) at which the problem is to be resolved (or at least ameliorated) via government policy. The paper also sketches several theoretical and political implications of the debates. Theoretically speaking, market-based explanations tend to privilege the local scale, thereby ignoring vital factors that help us to understand environmental inequity as a phenomenon operating at a multitude of scales from the local to the national and international scales. Politically speaking, if the inequities were particular to discrete locales, then extensive governmental involvement would be unnecessary.