Not all People are Polluted Equally in Capitalist Society: An Eco-Socialist Commentary on Liberal Environmental Justice Theory

Introduction

In reaction to the economic and ecological injustices perpetrated by neoliberal capitalism and corporate-led globalization, as well as the global pandemic and deepening climate crisis, a deeper shade of green politics is coming of age throughout the world (Bond and Dorsey 2010; Martinez-Alier 2020). Peoples traditionally relegated to the political margins of society are challenging the wholesale depredation of their land, water, air, and community health. At the forefront of this new wave of activism are thousands of grassroots environmental justice (EJ) organizations working to reverse the disproportionate social and ecological hardships borne by Indigenous peoples, communities of color, ethnic minorities, peasants, women, rural communities and working class families. The importance of these struggles cannot be overstated. Now, more than ever, a truly mass-based, international movement devoted to environmental justice and ecological socialism is needed to confront the global ecological crisis and existential threat to humanity that is climate change.

There are many major challenges confronting activists as they try to forge such a movement. These challenges include the formation of a master “frame” that allows for activists to identify with the goals of the movement; the adoption of suitable organizational structures that will allow the movement to grow and prosper; as well as the utilization of effective political strategies and tactics necessary to bring about real transformation of dominative state structures, racial and gender oppression, class exploitation, and the global capitalist system.

Forging a socialist EJ movement is a daunting task. Transnational coalition building requires that activists frame EJ issues in ways that resonate with those in both the global South and North, and experience shows that this is often difficult to do. The diversity of people participating in these EJ movements is matched by the diversity of political paths taken to achieving environmental justice. Here, we wish to convey some thoughts on the limitations of the more liberal-oriented theoretical conceptions of environmental justice. Unless we are able to forge a more transformative environmental justice politics – one grounded in eco-socialism – the root causes of the ecological crisis will never be resolved (see Bell 2014; Pulido 2016; Sicotte 2016; Walker, Holified, and Chakraborty 2017; Faber 2018, among others). It is the goal of the Editorial Board of Capitalism Nature Socialism to take up this challenge in the coming months and years ahead. In this House Organ, we present some “food for thought” on this endeavor, and how the Left can contribute going forward.

Environmental Justice Theory in the Global North

In the United States and Britain, the environmental justice (EJ) movement is a poor people of color-led movement dominated by an identity politics orientation that publicly privileges environmental racism as the primary source of injustice. As a result, political mobilization is oriented to dismantling the institutional barriers that bar poor people of color from directly participating in the identification of problems and solutions for their own communities (Bullard 1994). The goal, as stated by the late EJ advocate (Dana Alston 1990), is for communities of color to “speak and act for themselves.” Often taking on a civil rights framework, EJ movement strategies seek to ensure the equal application of environmental law and policy to communities of color. However, absent a critique of racial capitalism – how systemic racism and class exploitation are mutually reinforcing – this view has a potential shortcoming. As stated by Pulido (1996, 17), “people of color in the environmental justice movement have articulated a broad but problematic conceptualization of racism that has allowed racism to subsume and become a metaphor for all forms of inequality impacting nonwhite groups.”

These shortcomings are replicated in liberal-oriented EJ scholarship that informs much of the EJ movement. Liberal EJ theory does not offer a deep theoretical critique of systemic racism, class exploitation, and racial capitalism (Richter 2018). Nor does it ground the political-economic forces producing environmental harm in the imperatives of capital accumulation and capitalist development (Faber 2008). As such, the political solutions offered by liberal EJ theory are inadequate to the task at hand.

On the other hand, eco-socialist theory identifies economic exploitation and the profit-imperatives of the capitalist system as the primary drivers of environmental injustice. In the global South, this understanding fortifies an environmentalism of the poor and liberation ecologies (Martinez-Alier 2002; Peet and Watts 2004; Martinez-Alier et al. 2016; Kojola and Pellow 2020). Class antagonisms and differing class interests related to the appropriation of nature are seen as central. This orientation is gaining momentum among Southern (and some Northern) EJ activists in the era of neo-liberalism and corporate-led globalization, as transnational capital and the law of value increasingly colonize formerly independent cultures, nation-states, and economies alike. It is less true in the United States and most of the global North where EJ movements have formed.

It is important to state here that differing EJ discourses are not always mutually exclusive. Sometimes a sublation of identity-based, radical democratic, or eco-socialist frames occurs. There is already a great deal of overlap in the identity-based and liberal democratic discourses around civil rights and environmental racism, for instance, along with a focus on the denial of specific political-legal rights to Indigenous peoples, and other culturally oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, in both the global North and global South. In fact, what many EJ-oriented movements share in the global South is a conscious recognition of the multiple forms of political domination, cultural oppression, economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and social resistance experienced by the most marginalized members of society (the subaltern) at the hands of the world’s ruling classes. This subaltern consciousness is more “deep” than traditional conceptions of working-class consciousness in that racism, neo-colonial status, caste and ethnic structures of domination, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression are seen as both intersecting and reinforcing of capitalism, and at the same time have some degree of “relative autonomy” from systems of class exploitation.

The U.S. and European mainstream environmental movements have long neglected to incorporate oppressed people of color into a more democratic, mass-based environmental movement. But the relationship of the EJ movement to White, working class organizations is also tenuous. How can the U.S. and British EJ movements, for instance, speak to both people of color and the White working class? It remains to be seen whether the dominance of an identity politics that privileges environmental racism as the primary driver of environmental injustice will deter or help facilitate the formation of larger alliances between working people of differing races, ethnic histories, and cultural backgrounds within the movement, as well as between people of color in the movement and working and middle-class Whites currently outside of the EJ movement (Faber 2005).

EJ theory has a critically important role to play in determing the answers to these questions. However, liberal EJ theory is insufficient to this task, and must be supplanted by a more radical perspective. In the next sections, we will review theories of environmental justice in the global North that are distributive, procedural, recognition, and transformative in nature. Notions of distributive and procedural justice are the dominant approaches in the field and in current policy circles in the United States and global North (McCauley and Heffron 2018), but may act to inhibit the development of a more radical and transformative EJ politics. Nevertheless, there is now evidence that EJ movements are adopting more critical frames as the limitations of “liberalist” EJ strategies become evident.

The Limits of Distributive Environmental Justice

In the United States and much of the global North, liberal-oriented EJ scholarship is focused on the unequal distribution of environmental harm, and not on how and why environmental hazards are produced. As such, the most commonly used distributional approach is inspired by the philosopher Rawls (1999). His approach emphasizes the equal distribution of basic rights and liberties, opportunities for self-improvement and social advancement, and access to the basic necessities of life necessary to life and self-respect. All of these material and cultural resources are viewed as the means for achieving a more ethical society. Rawls assumes that rational actors can set aside their class-prescribed interests, goals, and identities in order to contemplate an “original position.” From this standpoint, which entails a “veil of ignorance” that prevents agents from acknowledging their positionality, rational actors can supposedly contemplate the features of an ethical society free of class-based [and other] constraints.

The Rawlsian conception of justice has been applied to environmental justice planning and policy-making. In this context, it has been used to theorize the fair distribution of responsibilities and obligations when acting on a common resource problem (Bulkeley et al. 2013, 915). The philosophy has been applied, for instance, to determine each nation’s “common but differentiated responsibilities” to address their greenhouse gas emissions. While this Rawlsian distributional framing provides some analysis of why the responsibilities of nations are different, the focus remains on the fair outcomes of action or the consequences of inaction for the globe as a whole. Nations are seen as the main actors. But nations are not homogeneous. Structural inequalities exist within countries and in the global capitalist system, and actors range from nations to corporations and from local governments to individuals. Placing the emphasis on nation-states, sub-groups, and individuals, rather than corporate power structures and class relations, serves to obfuscate the role of capital. More recent liberal scholarship has even argued for a downsizing of the scale at which justice should be explored to that of the individual (Harris and Symons 2010).

Although the tactics for attacking environmental injustices are quite varied, one common political demand of most EJ movements is for greater democratic participation in the governmental decision-making processes affecting their communities. EJ scholars often refer to this ethical criterior as “procedural justice,” which can be differentiated from the “distributional justice” emphasized by Rawls (Hunold and Young 1998). By gaining greater access to policy makers and agencies, EJ advocates hope to initiate effective governmental regulation of the discriminatory manner by which capital distributes environmental risks. At the national level, this has led important segments of the EJ movement to draw upon liberal-democratic strategies aiming to reform the state’s institutional focus, particularly the manner by which the the state crafts and enforces environmental policy. In the United States, for instance, struggles by the EJ movement led President Clinton to sign Executive Order (12898) on Environmental Justice, ordering all federal agencies to begin initiatives aimed at reducing environmental inequities.

Despite these achievements, there are theoretical and political limitations to the distributional and procedural approaches. Aside from failing to transform the manner in which corporate money and power now dominate the electoral and policy-making processes, including the mechanisms by which state agencies become captured and subsumed by capital (Faber 2008), liberal EJ scholarship fails to address the “essential cause” of environmental injustice – the workings of a capitalist economy (O’Connor 1998). This is evident in a discourse which defines environmental justice in terms of eliminating the discriminatory or unequal distribution of ecological hazards rather than eliminating the root causes of the hazards for all people. In the U.S., President Clinton’s Executive Order on Environmental Justice, for instance, specifically associates environmental justice with federal agencies identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their programs, policies and activities on minority populations and low income populations in the United States.

But the struggle for environmental justice is not just about distributing environmental risks equally but about preventing them from being produced in the first place so that no one is harmed at all. A movement for environmental justice is of limited efficacy if the end result is to have all peoples poisoned to the same perilous degree, regardless of race, color, or class. Or to have an apparent victory against environmental racism by preventing the siting of a hazardous industrial facility in a poor community of color in Louisiana, only to see the relocation of that same hazardous facility to another poor community of color somewhere else in the world (Pellow and Brulle 2005; Faber 2008). The struggle for environmental justice must be about the politics of capitalist production per se and the elimination of the ecological threat, not just the “fair” distribution of ecological hazards via better government regulation of racial/class-based inequities in the marketplace.

The Limits of Procedural and Recognitional Environmental Justice

Out of liberal EJ scholarship grew other theoretical conceptualizations of justice that stressed a distinction between distributive justice on the one hand, and procedural and recognition justice on the other. Procedural justice focuses on the political processes through which inequities are debated and decided (Schlosberg 2007). Recognition justice is predicated on the assumption that full participation in decision-making processes is only possible when all people and communities are fully recognized and legitimized to participate in political institutions (Schlosberg 2013). In this respect, justice as recognition can also be seen as an extension of participatory justice. Malin, Ryder, and Lyra (2019, 111) describe recognition justice as identifying “historical and structural patterns of privileging certain (white, Western, patriarchal) worldviews and cultural systems over others” and encouraging, in their place, the “acceptance and inclusion of diverse cultures and worldviews in environmental decision-making.”

EJ scholars argue for the inclusion of procedural and recognition justice as critical because it requires movements to include the voices of historically marginalized communities, particularly low-income people of color and Indigenous communities. A more equitable participation in decision-making is seen has having a profound effect on securing better policy outcomes for EJ communties (Bulkeley et al. 2013, 915). For instance, Iris Young (1990, 34) emphasizes that procedural justice allows for the evaluation of decision-making processes against an ideal of “communicative democracy.” According to this liberal model, communities deliberate with the goal of generating shared ethical norms that can direct government policy. However, this procedural recommendation assumes that community actors can transcend their class-prescribed differences in order to arrive at binding normative agreements – that people will subordinate their own material interests to that of community cohesion.

Liberal scholarly accounts of procedural justice conceptualize the state as a “subject” – that is, as an entity enjoying “an absolute autonomy that refers to its will as the supposedly rationalizing instance of civil society” (Poulantzas 2000, 129). The assumption here is that government officials and state institutions possess the capacity to impartially arbitrate the many conflicting demands originating from within civil society, allowing the state to enact policies that subordinate the interests of capital to those entailed by the public good. If only regulatory officials were granted improved access to lay and marginalized perspectives, it is said, they could better account for the environmental hazards raised by polluting infrastructure and consequently avoid unjust distributional outcomes. This view is demonstrated, for instance, by the legal scholar Torres (1994, 453–454):

[I]f the EPA and other federal agencies are to offer solutions to inequities in the distribution of environmental burdens and in the laws by which those burdens are distributed, they must make environmental justice part of their culture … The only way that regulatory culture can be redefined is by including affected communities in the decisionmaking process. Only through such inclusion can the regulatory culture be instilled with awareness and understanding of the true problems.

But this is not enough. The benefits of procedural and recognition justice are extremely limited if communities are only presented with false or undersirable choices. Poorer communities often face the option of either rejecting construction of a toxic waste facility that poses significant health hazards, or of accepting such a site because of the greater job opportunities and tax revenues it affords. Unless EJ advocates can address the political-economic dynamics of capitalism which force communities to make such tradeoffs, their conception of environmental justice as “greater participatory democracy” and an “end to racial discrimination” [although extremely important] will remain limited.

And while increased participatory democracy by popular forces in governmental-decision making and community planning is desirable (if not essential), and should be supported, it is in-and-of itself insufficient for achieving an end to environmental injustice. From an eco-socialist perspective, reconstructing procedures that result in the unequal distribution of environmental problems (procedural justice in the traditional sense) cannot completely succeed unless activists also address the procedures by which these problems are produced in the first place (productive justice, which can be envisioned as a more extensive and radical form of procedural justice). And by adopting an eco-socialist theoretical standpoint that emphasizes the material reasons why state institutions immunize regulatory processes against popular rationalities, EJ advocates can more effectively dispel the illusion that political institutions are class-neutral entities which, if persuaded, adopt more inclusive cultural attitudes, could be rendered amenable to popular participation and therefore capable of arriving at environmentally just decisions.

In this respect, any attempt to rectify distributional inequities without attacking the fundamental processes that produce the problems being distributed focuses on symptoms rather than causes and is therefore only a partial, temporary, and necessarily incomplete and insufficient solution (Lake 1996, 165). What is needed is an eco-socialist politics for procedural justice that emphasizes democratic control and social ownership of the key industries through which environmental burdens are produced and then distributed. This view holds a much broader concept of environmental justice. As stated by Heiman (1996, 120), “If we settle for liberal procedural and distributional equity, relying upon negotiation, mitigation, and fair-share allocation to address some sort of ‘disproportional’ impact, we merely perpetuate the current production system that by its very structure is discriminatory and non-sustainable.” It is precisely this distinction between distributional justice versus productive justice which many EJ theorists and activists are now beginning to confront (Faber 2008).

Reparative and Transformative Conceptions of Environmental Justice

In more recent years, EJ scholarship has expanded to include new conceptions of reparative justice. Although beyond the scope of our discussion here, EJ theorists are also incorporating non-human animals and the rights of nature into an ecological justice framework (Wenz 1988; Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans 2003; Schlosberg 2007; Pellow 2016). The concept of reparative justice encompasses compensatory justice, as well as aspects of restorative justice (Schlosberg and Collins 2014; McCauley and Heffron 2018). More specifically, reparative justice embodies a corrective aim of returning communities to a state of well-being. This is achieved through various forms of compensation and the creation of new capabilities for marginalized communities to exert their rights.

Figueroa (2004), for one, emphasizes recognitional justice in his contention that culturally oppressed minorities deserve greater respect and opportunities for political participation. In cases where these rights are violated, he recommends a process of “restorative justice” whereby mediators bring victims and offenders into a dialogue in order to establish the parameters of apology that will be acceptable to the victims. While this conciliatory process can mend existing transgressions, Figueroa maintains that the prevention of future injustice entails the displacement of consumerist culture, which is said to enable society’s institutionalized disregard for subaltern identities. On the other hand, Schlosberg and Collins’ (2014) use the term to refer to the transfer of concrete resources from responsible groups to those individuals and communities most affected. McCauley and Heffron (2018) find principles of restorative justice as originating in the labor movements demands of the 1970–1980s for a Superfund for Workers displaced by environmental regulations, therefore connecting environmental restoration with working class demands for economic remediation. In this way, restorative justice overlaps with the term compensatory justice in the literature.

Compensatory justice seeks to provide reparations to victims of an event or past injustice for loss and damage. Page and Heyward (2017, 356) describe compensatory justice as it relates to climate change as aiming to, “make victims of climactic disruptions whole again,” particularly those in developing nations. The focus of a compensatory understanding of justice is that it is a victim-centered approach to neutralizing injustice focused on outcomes and seeks purely to restore a condition of well-being that existed before the harm occurred. It is not concerned with punishing capital and/or state institutions responsible for creating or accelerating ecological crises. Complementing compensatory justice is the notion of a capabilities approach based on Amartya Sen’s work that requires people have the capabilities – defined as access to opportunities and resources – in order for justice to be fully actualized and to disrupt patterns of vulnerability (Schlosberg 2013).

In the United States, these new theoretical conceptions of reparative justice are being incorporated into contemporary EJ struggles. For instance, Indigenous EJ theory is increasingly critical of the distributional equity approaches that do not adequately address the need for Indigenous nationhood, self-determination, and sovereignty (Gilio-Whitaker 2019, 25). Sovereignty is the key concept that in Gilio-Whitaker’s view differentiates the Native American experience from that of other poor people of color who struggle against environmental racism. As a form of compensatory justice, the Indigenous “land back” movement advocates for the material redistribution of land as a means for overcoming the settler colonial state’s claim to sovereignty over Indigenous people and their territories (Coulthard 2014). Such an approach, in fact, constitutes a more radical restorative and transformative EJ politics in that it advocates for a fundamental transformation of the political-economic structures of power that oppress Indigenous cultures.

Similarly, President Biden has signed an Executive Order that aligns closely with the Equitable and Just National Climate Platform, a national climate agenda co-authored by some 300 EJ and national environmental organizations. Specifically, the Justice40 Initiative seeks to redress the high levels of pollution, chronic disinvestment, and lack of access to capital in communities who have dealt with discriminatory environmental, housing, infrastructure, and economic policies. Under the initiative, the federal government will target 40 percent of its clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities of color. The Justice40 effort is slated to be headed up by the energy justice scholar Shalanda Baker, the author of Revolutionary Power, and aims to reduce distributional inequity and to facilitate greater participation by people of color in decision-making processes around reparative justice. Baker argues that people of color, the poorest elements of the working class, and Indigenous people must create a new and more democratic energy system in order to upend the unequal power relations found in current capitalist energy systems (Baker 2021).

In essence, distributive justice asks, “for whom are actions taken?” Procedural justice asks, “how and by whom are actions chosen, implemented and evaluated?” Reparative justice asks, “how are actions corrective or compensatory?” And transformative justice asks, “how do these actions transform systems of power and profit that result in the exploitation of people and nature?” Whereas reparative justice centers the restoration of communities already harmed, transformative justice is about addressing the root causes of injustice. Formerly described by Faber (2008) as “productive justice,” this theoretical framework argues for the wholesale dismantling and reconstruction of capitalist energy, agricultural, transportation, manufacturing systems, etc., that create and compound social and environmental inequalities.

Informed by an eco-socialist politics, a transformative environmental justice perspective would subsume harmful processes of capital accumulation to social ownership and control of key sectors of the economy. This transformative approach to justice would promote long-term democratic planning aimed at meeting the human and environmental needs of all present and future generations. Only then can we succeed in moving beyond single-issue or band-aid policy approaches to embrace more comprehensive solutions to the ecological crisis. This would include adopting pollution prevention measures which eliminate the use of dangerous chemicals, production processes, and consumer goods altogether (source reduction), rather than relying on costly and ineffective pollution control measures aimed at “containing” and “fairly” distributing environmental hazards once they are produced. In this respect, democratic eco-socialism is not only a form of praxis (practice), but must also become the telos (purpose) of movements for environmental justice.

Intersectionality: Towards a Eco-Socialist Environmental Justice Politics

In recent years, more Left-oriented environmental justice (EJ) scholars have begun to take an explicit intersectionality focus to their work, especially in the field of critical EJ studies (Pellow 2018; Malin and Ryder 2018). The term intersectionality was first coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Crenshaw, who created this lens to analyze how “power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects” (Crenshaw 1988). Her work focused on the ways different interlocking structures of oppression manifest as identity-based discrimination relative to one’s social location or positionality (Malin and Ryder 2018, 3). For instance, traditional feminist theory disregards the distinctive experiences Black women face compared to White women in the United States. For Crenshaw, the combined experience of racism and sexism, and how they play into each other to amplify the kinds of oppression Black women face, must be prioritized.

As suggested in such an example, real-life “intersectional experiences” are multiplicative, or greater than the sum of identity-specific experiences. An intersectional analysis is therefore more complex, nuanced, and reflective of real power structures and social relations in contemporary capitalist society. If we view class, race, or gender as stand alone concepts without considering how the life chances and experiences of a working class woman of color can be vastly different from that of an upper-middle class White man, we run the danger of a reductionism that can mask mutually reinforcing structures of power at work that are oriented to class exploitation, patriarchy, and systemic racism. A person’s positionality within these overlapping and mutually reinforcing structures of power in a capitalist society is a powerful indicator for predicting whether or not one lives in a clean, green neighborhood, or a community that is grossly over-polluted and under-resourced.

Building on the work of Crenshaw, critical EJ scholarship is focused on “the deep-seated concerns of people are who are subordinated within domestic and global expressions of racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism, and similar systems of political domination and economic exploitation” (Collins 2019, 10). It recognizes that a person experiencing environmental injustices may belong to multiple disadvantaged groups or identities within an integrated, capitalist social hierarchy. Critical EJ theorists refer to those people who experience multiple forms of economic exploitation, political domination, and cultural oppression as the subaltern (Faber 2008). It is the least powerful, especially the subaltern, that are on the front lines of climate change and other ecological crises. Climate and environmental injustices are built upon and perpetuated by exploitive power structures that intentionally target and disproportionately impact populations who lack the social, political, and economic power to resist the imposition of ecological harm by capital and/or the State.

By valorizing the experiences of the subaltern, the intersectional perspective defends their integrity and ability to interpret their own experiences of environmental injustice. Intersectionality is foundational for achieving real systems change because it makes visible not only the interconnected layers of identity, positionality, and power, but also reveals the basis of genuine solidarity for people from very different walks of life. This echoes a similar theme present in the abolitionist justice literature. Drawing on Black radical thought and feminist literature, Ranganathan and Bratman (2019, 8) insist on an intersectional and multidimensional understanding of the struggle for climate justice. They also acknowledge that efforts to make change must be rooted in an ethics of care that emphasis communal healing. Nevertheless, the overemphasis of identity and a more identity-based politics by many intersectionality theorists can be problematic, to say the least (Collins 2019, 138). Instead, a more critical intersectional analysis must prioritize interlocking structures of class exploitation and political domination that are mutually reinforcing.

If we want to build a truly international, multi-racial, EJ movement for ecological socialism, we need a more transformative environmental justice politics. A transformative EJ politics seeks to liberate humanity from the interlocking structures of power that foster economic exploitation, political domination, cultural oppression, and ecological degradation. It especially means freeing the popular classes from the control exercised by corporate power relations and the world’s ruling classes. Being able to see and acknowledge these interconnections reveals opportunities to build common cause across what are profound social divides so we can all see our shared material (or class interests) and role in the broader movement.

For this reason, an eco-socialist EJ politics is necessarily transformative in nature. The state’s structural biases implies that the realization of environmental justice requires the supersession of political institutions in their existing, capitalist form. Activists must therefore situate their immediate demands for distributive and procedural justice in a broader project rooted in the transformation of existing capitalist relations of production. This orientation to social change contradicts two equally undialectical and problematic strategic perspectives. First, it entails the rejection of revisionist illusions to the effect that environmentally just outcomes can be implemented absent radical institutional transformations; and, second, it reveals the deficiency of some Leftist attitudes that dismiss short-term justice claims as irrelevant given the more pressing need for revolutionary change. Rather, a consistently Marxist approach to environmental justice requires the sublation of immediate institutional demands and broader efforts to build eco-socialism – a project that could hardly be more necessary at a time when capitalism threatens to destroy the ecological foundations of human civilization.

An eco-Marxist perspective is therefore crucial to moving the rapidly evolving theoretical and political discussions around intersectionality currently taking place in more critical EJ movement and academic circles in a more radical direction. If EJ intersectionality theorists see each system of power revolving around class exploitation, racism, and patriarchy as similarly equivalent and interchangeable, then the political outcome could prove disastrous (Collins 2019, 40). Instead, neo-Marxist and eco-socialist theory can help demonstrate how class exploitation, racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression are mutually constructed and reinforcing under contemporary neoliberal capitalism (Collins 2019, 88). Analyses that otherwise fail to make these links between environmental injustices to the relevant hegemonic systems of class exploitation, racism, nativism, sexism, colonialism, ableism, heteropatriarchy, ageism, and beyond will prove inadequate for developing a more radical EJ movement (Pellow 2016).

And if liberal EJ theorists and activists alike continue to conceive of the ecological crisis as a collection of problems unrelated to capitalism, then it is doubtful that any combination of regulations, incentives, and technical innovations will succeed in making the distribution of pollution and resource destruction more “tolerable” and “equitable.” Poorer working class communities and people of color will continue to suffer the worst abuses, and the global ecological crisis will continue to deepen. If, however, the interdependency of issues is emphasized so that environmental devastation, climate change, poverty, destructive forms of resource extraction, crime, the lack of affordable housing and social services, underfunded public education, unemployment, the lack of good public transportation, dirty energy systems, and social despair are all seen as aspects of a multi-dimensional web rooted in a larger structural crisis of capitalism itself, then a more radical, transformative EJ movement for ecological socialism can be invented.

In this respect, an eco-socialist intersectional EJ politics is revolutionary. Only through social control and ownership of key industries and democratic governance over economic planning and community development priorities, can a potentially divisive “Not-In-My-Backyard” politics oriented to distributive justice be replaced with a “Not-In-Anyone’s-Backyard” politics oriented to productive and transformative justice. Such a program for social governance would require sublating the institutions of workplace and local direct democracy, liberal democratic procedures and Constitutional guarantees, long-term democratic state planning, worker/social ownership of the means of production, and the initiatives of popular-based social and environmental movements into a genuine ecological socialism. Only under such a system of democratic eco-socialism does it becomes possible to replace the car culture with more equitable and accessible mass transportation systems; to dismiss energy hungry and pollutive technologies favored by multinational oil companies in favor of clean, renewable alternatives; or to rationally plan community development and natural resource extraction on a sustainable basis. Only then will it be possible to end acts of ecological imperialism by which multinational corporations and transnational financial institutions evade and dismantle unions, environmental safeguards, and worker/community health and safety regulations by crossing national boundaries into politically repressive and economically oppressive countries in the global South.

In summary, the challenge confronting Left EJ theorists and activists is to help forge a truly broad-based international movement for democratic eco-socialism. The seeds for such a transformation have already been planted, taken root, and are beginning to germinate.

By Daniel Faber, Benjamin Levy, and Christina Schlegel.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro and Adi Forkasiewica for their comments and input. We remain responsible for all shortcomings.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.