5 Chapter 4: “Land Use Legacies: Sociomateriality and the Struggle for Environme
5 Chapter 4: “Land Use Legacies: Sociomateriality and the Struggle for Environmental Justice” by Leanna Smithberger
Land Use Legacies and the Struggle for Environmental Justice
One of the biggest challenges for environmental justice advocates is to avoid “activist burnout” (Rettig, 2006) when faced with slow progress and the difficulties of cultivating a culture of environmental equity. While this is a problem for all social justice activists, perhaps due to the deep emotional and spiritual connection advocates have to their cause (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003), it is especially difficult for environmental justice activists since activists must work within a discourse of imminent crisis and impending doom. In such a crisis discourse, the only acceptable form of action is rapid response, and any delays to significant action are experienced as failure. Unfortunately, as I will explore in this chapter, rapid response to environmental inequity is often impeded by material actors other than humans – namely legislation, land use regulations, and the built environment. In this chapter, I show how material agents like legal texts and human-built infrastructure perpetuate environmental inequity and thus are apt targets for advocacy work. For while land use decisions are made by humans, it is the material agents constituted by those decisions that continue to enforce those decisions and the ideologies they represent long after they are made. Before diving into a discussion of how land use planning and policy have shaped our environment, I want to clarify what I mean by environmental justice.
An Environmental Justice Orientation
I understand environmental justice as the movement toward the equitable access to environmental spaces and resources, distribution of environmental burdens and the consequences of degradation, and involvement in environmental decision-making and governing across all socioeconomic divisions. Inequity, not inequality, is the target of environmental justice-oriented advocacy. Inequality is inescapable due to the incredible variations in weather patterns and geographic features, as well as the diversity of indigenous plant and animal life, across the globe – a focus on equality would necessarily lead to homogenization and reduce the diversity that makes Earth such a wonderful anomaly in the universe. Inequity in how we experience accountability for environmental developments compared to how we feel the consequences of environmental developments is what leads to injustice.
Advocates for environmental justice must work to expose and call attention to the incongruity between accountability for making land use decisions and the felt consequences of living with those land use decisions. The goal of such advocacy work is to reduce disparities between those who make land use decisions, those who carry out land use decisions, and those who must live with land use decisions so that everyone may live in a healthy, sustainable environment. In the sections