environmental justice

This page lists syllabi, articles, and other online resources on the topic of environmental justice.

Drawing on interviews with 25 Australian environmental leaders, the authors ask how international instruments with cosmopolitan ambitions influence the discourse and practice of national and subnational environmentalists attempting to find common ground with Indigenous groups.

Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.

The authors illuminate the power relations between state actors and the local people in accessing fuelwood in Zimbabwe, and how discourses of scarcity enhance these power dynamics.

The authors draw on empirical experience to assess the extent of the impact of race and social equity in conservation, with the aim of promoting sustainable and more inclusive conservation practices in South Africa. Their findings suggest conservation practices in post-apartheid South Africa are still exclusionary for the majority black population.

Teena Gabrielson examines the visual politics at work in website photographs depicting environmental justice issues in the United States. She argues for a more inclusive socio-ecological politics which requires visual strategies that resist racialized ways of seeing and make visible the injustice of disproportionate environmental impacts on low-income communities and people of color.

The authors highlight how the Indian state increasingly views adivasis (=indigenous people) as a possible ethno-environmental fix for conservation, and how non-adivasis project their environmental subjectivities to claim that they, too, belong.

This paper uses data from a long-term ethnography of both the local people and the conservation agenda in the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, to discuss how environmentalists used the National Policy for the Sustainable Development of Traditional Peoples and Communities (PNDSPCT) to justify the displacement of local people.