Ryan Holifield

Environmental Justice as Recognition and Participation in Risk Assessment: Negotiating and Translating Health Risk at a Superfund Site in Indian Country

Geographic research on environmental justice and risk is moving beyond its conventional focus on proximity and spatial distribution, increasingly recognizing multiple spatialities entailed in other dimensions of environmental justice—including recognition and participation—and in risk itself. Critical scholarship on environmental justice, however, has insufficiently considered the process of risk assessment, and research on the construction of risk has not fully engaged with the implications of environmental justice. Through analysis of human health risk assessment at the St. Regis Superfund site, on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, this article investigates intersections between spatialities of risk and spatialities of environmental justice as participation and recognition. I argue that the historical production of the reservation as place, territory, and scale lies at the origin not only of distributive injustices but also of injustices of misrecognition and marginalized participation in the assessment and management of risk. On the other hand, I contend that changing scalar and network spatial relations enabled the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe to strengthen the risk assessment by taking the significance of the reservation into account, as a place and territory associated with rights to tribal traditional lifeways. Nonetheless, the circulation of dominant assumptions about race and property continues to structure the “playing field” of risk assessment as uneven, and scholarship and policy on environmental justice and risk need to attend to this asymmetry.

The Place and Time of the Political in Urban Political Ecology: Contested Imaginations of a River's Future

Urban political ecology (UPE) has become an important and influential paradigm for the geographic analysis of socioecological transformation. Despite considerable progress in its empirical and theoretical sophistication, however, what it means to analyze the specifically political dimensions of change in UPE accounts remains largely unspecified and underdeveloped. One option receiving attention is to confine analysis of the “properly political” to the disruption of prevailing orders by egalitarian challenges. As an alternative, we propose and elaborate a pragmatist approach to political analysis that has emerged in science and technology studies. Through accounts of two efforts to imagine the socioecological future of an urban river, we aim to demonstrate the potential of such an approach. We argue that in addition to local variation and the deployment of knowledge, analyses of the political trajectories of issues should address historical variation and the mobilization of desire. We contend that such an approach provides a methodology for tracing connections between conventional political processes and extraordinary moments of disruption and that it is also compatible with multiple perspectives on the “political” within UPE.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice

In this chapter we aim to provide an overview of the variety of topics and methods that characterise the evolving set of environmental justice discourses in Western Europe. In the first section of ...

ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEWS AND CASE STUDIES: Accounting for Diversity in Environmental Justice Screening Tools: Toward Multiple Indices of Disproportionate Impact

To comply with President Bill Clintons Executive Order 12898 addressing environmental justice, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been working for over two decades to develop consistent indices and screening tools to measure disproportionate impact and identify environmental justice communities. Its efforts have been complicated by methodological problems, divergent interpretations of policy, and concerns about the misuse of such screening tools. This review of recent scholarship and developments in EPA environmental justice policy proposes that instead of a single index of disproportionate impact associated with a single type of environmental justice community, regulatory agencies should aim to produce screening tools that incorporate multiple indices of impact and a diverse typology of environmental justice communities. It argues that adopting such an approach would not only better reflect the environmental justice movements emphasis on difference and diversity, but also produce more effective and acceptable screening tools that are less susceptible to misuse.

Regulatory Science and Risk Assessment in Indian Country: Taking Tribal Publics into Account

Studies of the geography of scientific knowledge production have shown how securing the credibility and objectivity of a scientific claim requires erasing or masking traces of the “local.” In order for a claim to be credible and objective, it needs to be true everywhere, not just in the place it was formulated (Latour, 1987; Law & Mol, 2001; Livingstone, 2003). Otherwise, the claim is doomed to remain “local knowledge”: subjective, place-bound, and unverifiable.