Critical environmental justice and the state: a critique of Pellow

ABSTRACT

How should movements for environmental justice orient themselves towards the state? Recent work in the environmental justice field critiques the legalistic basis of both environmental justice research and movement strategy based in juridical action, regulation, and advocacy within state institutions. Meanwhile, rightward-moving politics in the United States threatens to choke off even this limited strategy. Scholars have responded by urging movements to adopt a more skeptical strategic posture towards the state, one informed by an anarchist conception of states as uniformly repressive structures. This essay addresses the most systematic attempt at re-theorizing the state for these movements, David Pellow’s What is Critical Environmental Justice? While Pellow’s work to integrate intersectionality theory into environmental sociology has been recognized, less attention has been paid to his anarchist state theory, which implies an untenable strategy of movement withdrawal from politics. Environmental justice movements and scholarship need a state theory that allows for the possibility of action both against and within states. I introduce an alternative, ‘strategic-relational’ view of states, and suggest that changing structural patterns of environmental injustice will require re-thinking both the state and the ‘movement’ of environmental justice, as they are conventionally imagined.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental justice
• state theory
• strategy
• social movements
• anarchism

Disclosure statement

I am not aware of any potential conflicts of interest.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The ‘Green New Deal’ is a proposed climate policy framework involving ambitious public investment to rapidly decarbonize the U.S. economy and reduce inequality (Kurtzleben 2019). For recent Democratic Party climate proposals, see Irfan (2019). On organized labor and a ‘just transition’ to a decarbonized economy, see Isser (2020).

2. Scholarship documenting the disproportionate impact of toxics and pollutants has aided litigation to shut down some sources of pollution, and advocacy and research by scholars such as Robert Bullard, Bunyan Bryant, Charles Lee, and Beverly Wright eventually contributed to the establishment of both the EPA Office of Environmental Justice, and an executive order by President Bill Clinton in 1994 mandating federal agencies take into account the disparate environmental and health effects of government programs and policies on minority and low-income populations. For a review of this history, see Cole and Foster (2001).

3. Pulido’s endorsement appears on the back cover of Pellow’s book.

4. ‘Eco-anarchism’ is a broad and heterogeneous body of work, ranging from deep green/neo-primitivist arguments for radically simplified social and technological systems, to ‘communalist’ arguments that emphasize municipal-based politics. It is also possible to distinguish between work that attempts to define an ecologically sustainable, non-hierarchical future society, and arguments that focus on the present-day need for anarchist strategy. For communalism, see Bookchin (2007). For anarchist social ecology, see Kadalie (2019).

5. For a general review of the difficulties encountered by the environmental justice movement in attempting to use laws like Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, see Taylor (2014, 98–122). Taylor concludes that ‘plaintiffs bringing EJ [environmental justice] cases in the courts have found little success and filing Title VI complaints has been an ineffective strategy for halting or reducing the exposure to environmental hazards.’ (122)

6. The report notes that civil and administrative enforcement actions have similarly declined, and that state governments have been given ‘veto power’ over some EPA enforcement decisions. For a summary of anti-regulatory actions taken by the EPA from 2017–2019, see Popovich, Albeck-Ripka, and Pierre-Louis (2019).

7. .Though beyond the scope of this critique, it is worth noting that Pellow’s particular usage of intersectionality makes ‘hybridist’ ontological assumptions. It is ‘impossible’, Pellow writes, to delineate human and non-human aspects of built environments (20). Natural resources like water or oil should be treated as ‘agents... literally shaping our imagination, policymaking, and the material contours of nation states.’ (118, emphasis in original) For a critique of this position, see Malm (2018).

8. Pellow is clear that his theory applies to all modern nation-states, not just the United States (2018, 58). This represents a significant extension of Pulido’s critique of the state, which is in some ways similar but is applied only to the American state (2017, 525). Pellow also gestures towards a much more expansive theory of social inequalities as rooted in the ‘current social order’ and ‘reinforced by’ the state, but not reducible to it (2018, 22, 138). This broader analysis recurs occasionally throughout the book, but is never systematized. Pellow says early on that his argument will focus mostly on the state (22).

9. Pellow makes this statement in the context of a critique of more conventional movement approaches to the state (a rather broad list encompassing ‘legislation, institutional reforms, and other policy concessions’ [16–17]), but as we have seen, he extends the argument about reinforcing legitimacy to also justify turning away from more radical strategies like Cullors and Moore’s divestment-reinvestment proposal.

10. Eco-separatist movements that do literally ‘walk away’ from the state have experienced some success in Global South countries – the Zapatistas are a well-known example. For other examples of autonomous indigenous struggles in Latin America, see Gómez-Barris (2017). However, separatism in these cases is based on localized control of land and communitarian property relations. These conditions are very rare in the United States, and would require direct, violent confrontation with an immensely powerful state to establish through a strategy of direct action. This does not mean, as is sometimes assumed, that there can be no role for ‘prefiguration’. Yates (2020), synthesizing research in social movement studies, argues persuasively that movement cultures and, to an extent, forms of organization are always ideologically prefigurative, infusing present-day means with the ethos of hoped-for ends.

11. I believe that this view of the state is compatible with the claim, made by theorists of governance, that the configuration of power has changed in advanced capitalist societies, away from a preference for government, centralized and bureaucratic, and towards a logic of governance, with social power and authority seemingly ‘decentered’, networked, and non-hierarchical (Brown 2015, 122–27). Markets are the key model and technology of this neoliberal form of administration (Lockie 2014), which favors ‘partnerships’ to mobilize non-state actors (Alstyne 2015) and involves a depoliticized fetish for ‘problem-solving’ and ‘consensus’ between ‘stakeholders’. State agencies structured around a logic of governance struggle to integrate movement framings based around justice, or even agent-driven politics as such (Liévanos 2012). The effect is to produce a diffused modality of power quite distinct from the post-war system that preceded it. But the state, though its borders have clearly become more porous in the era of neoliberalism, has only been ‘decentered’ in an ideological sense: it remains in reality the central locus of social power. Strategically, social movements will need to remain aware of the diffused, networked character of power in neoliberal society. But rolling back oppressive forms of governance will, I contend, require movements to first focus on achieving and exercising government.

12. What I have called Pellow’s ‘weak’ argument about strategy suggests exactly this kind of approach. He writes: ‘...by building and supporting strongly democratic practices, relationships, and institutions, movements for social change will become less dependent upon the state, while any elements of the state they do work through may become more robustly democratic.’ (24, emphasis added) However, his ‘strong’ skepticism about the state, rooted in his functionalist theory, leads him to consistently emphasize the first part of this formulation (building ‘practices, relationships, and institutions’ outside the state) to the detriment of the second.

13. Of course, none of these movements to transform deep structures of economic and cultural oppression have been entirely successful. Each has also posed predictable contradictions for environmental protection and the rights of indigenous communities on the land, as Rivera (2017) demonstrates in a careful analysis of state-movement interaction in Ecuador.