Global Capitalism, Reactionary Neoliberalism, and the Deepening of Environmental Injustices

Introduction

The systemic crisis of neoliberal capitalism is not only economic and ecological in nature, as is manifest in the explosive growth in global economic and ecological inequalities, but is also witnessed as a growing crisis of legitimacy for traditional political parties and ruling power structures that have long controlled the system. The political manifestations of this crisis can be seen everywhere, especially in the United States with the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency (Faber et al. 2017). It is also witnessed by the rise of authoritarian and proto-fascist forces in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific; the growing power of racist, anti-immigrant parties in Italy, and northern and east-central Europe; and the weakening legitimacy of European labor and social democratic parties (and the challenges to the European Union itself, as seen in UK’s Brexit). The larger, system-wide crisis of global capitalism is spawning a new subjective political voice in the form of reactionary populism. Termed xenophobic authoritarianism by Inglehart and Norris, reactionary populism discourse typically

favors mono-culturalism over multiculturalism, national self-interest over international cooperation and development aid, closed borders over the free flow of people, ideas, labor and capital, and traditionalism over progressive and liberal social values. Hence Trump’s rhetoric seeks to stir up a potent mix of racial resentment, intolerance of multiculturalism, nationalistic isolationism, nostalgia for past glories, mistrust of outsiders, traditional misogyny and sexism, the appeal of forceful strong-man leadership, attack-dog politics, and racial and anti-Muslim animus. (Inglehart and Norris 2016, 7)

As such, Trump’s presidency represents the ascendancy of an even more hard-nosed brand of capitalism.

The rise of rightwing populism is a response to the failures of what Nancy Ingehart and Norris (2017) terms “progressive” neoliberalism to provide adequate economic security to broad swaths of the world’s working and middle classes. In the United States progressive neoliberalism was predicated in good part on an uneasy alliance between Wall Street, the Democratic Party, and many of the more mainstream organizations within new social movements working on feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, antiracism, and LGBTQIA issues. This uneasy alliance revolved around an economic agenda for the deregulation of the banks and financialization of the economy, free trade agreements, a rollback of the welfare state and some environmental measures, and the projection of U.S. military power abroad. Both the Clinton and Obama administrations famously co-opted mainstream environmentalists and engaged in preemptive “containment” of costly and far-reaching environmental policy proposals. Both administrations sought accommodation with the environmental and environmental justice (EJ) movements by allowing limited victories in specific instances of high-profile public mobilization. In exchange the polluter-industrial complex would be rewarded with weaker regulations, generous subsidies and access to energy and other natural resources on federal lands, and other forms of economic compensation. These concessions to industry often came at the expense of other battles being waged by grassroots environmental organizations around the country.

The strategy of the Clinton/Obama neoliberals was to enlist the support of the business-friendly organizations in the ecology movement around a number of highly symbolic policy proposals, and thus give Democrats the appearance of being pro-environment. The actual progressive segments of the movement were split off. For instance, President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development was stacked with executives from some of the worst polluters in the country, along with conservative environmentalists such as Jay Hair of the National Wildlife Federation, Fred Krupp of the Environmental Defense Fund, John Sawhill of the Nature Conservancy, and John Adams of the Natural Resources Development Council. All are noted for their cooperation with industry and support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which most of the environmental and EJ movements opposed. By manipulating the pro-corporate elements of the movement, the Clinton and Obama administrations operated in concert with a conservative Congress and the polluter-industrial complex to introduce more flexible, market-oriented and “cost-effective” neoliberal policy approaches over the “command and control” typical of the liberal regime of regulation.

Trump is now rewriting these rules of engagement. Under a progressive neoliberal regime of environmental regulation, tackling climate change would require an alliance between the state and the environmental movement in supporting the adoption of carbon trading and the commodification of pollution. But Under Trump and a reactionary neoliberal regime of environmental deregulation, the state now acts in opposition to the movement, denies the science of climate change, and pulls out of the Paris Climate Accords, at least in the United States. Similarly, under a progressive neoliberal regime, meritocratic policy approaches could be adopted ensuring that “talented” women, racial and ethnic minorities, and members of the LGBTQIA community are not discriminated against in labor markets, or even murdered, and can rise into higher class status hierarchies based upon their abilities. In a reactionary neoliberal policy regime, a full frontal assault is initiated on the rights and status of these same groups in order to protect the privileges of white males. It is therefore no accident that the greatest support of rightwing populism is grounded in older generations, men, the less educated, ethnic majorities, wealthy suburbanites and the petty bourgeoisie, and to a lesser degree among those class strata experiencing greater unemployment—populations that are susceptible to the rightwing propaganda machines that present women, immigrants, and minorities as the primary threats to their economic security (Inglehart and Norris 2016, 4; and Faber et al. 2017). Only by restructuring the policy aims of new social movements into more meritocratic and market-oriented policy approaches compatible with the restructuring of American capitalism could the more harmful economic impacts (especially on labor) of progressive neoliberalism be initiated (Fraser 2017, 3). Under Trump, these movements are now on the outside of the reactionary neoliberal hegemonic power bloc currently in control of the state, and are the subjects of attack and ridicule.

Now that he is in office, Trump has largely abandoned the more populist economic dimensions of his campaign platform (the imposition of tariffs on steel and some other imports aside), and has instead embraced a more hyper-reactionary neoliberal politics. Reactionary neoliberalism aims to continue to expand the power and profits of not only finance capital, but also the polluter- and military-industrial complexes. It is fundamentally about deepening the redistribution of wealth to the owners, managers and—to a minimal degree—the workers, of the big banks on Wall Street, defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Raytheon, the Koch Brothers and petrochemical giants. Former CEOs, lobbyists, and policymakers from these sectors of American business now dominate the Trump administration on every level. Facilitated by renewed calls for big expansions in funding for the military and Homeland Security (militarization), greater rollbacks of governmental regulatory “interference” with business practices (deregulation), further takeovers of former public services and state agencies by domestic and/or transnational capital (privatization), reductions in social welfare and environmental budgets at the state and federal levels (fiscal conservatism), and rollbacks of civil liberties and human rights (political repression), the reactionary neoliberal agenda currently being advanced by the Right is at the heart of an unprecedented frontal assault on the past gains and goals of environmentalists, EJ and climate justice activists, and other social movements.

This attack is being echoed in other parts of the world, and is accelerating the appropriation of nature by capital on a global scale. World labor forces, natural resources and energy supplies, technology and machinery, genetic material and biosystems, and other “productive inputs” are becoming economically integrated into the circuits of global capital and the organizational structures of transnational corporations and banks. The heightened geographic mobility of global capital grants polluting corporations the capacity to locate production facilities in virtually every corner of the planet and take advantage of the less stringent environmental regulations and more profitable business climate afforded by this reactionary neoliberal agenda (Li and Zhou 2017). As a result, climate change and the global ecological crisis are getting worse. And in the new world economy, because the widespread adoption of Export-Oriented Industrialization (EOI), economic programs throughout the world and the increased mobility of capital have rendered domestic and world export markets more competitive. Cost minimization strategies lie at the heart of global business strategies for profit maximization, and are rendering the anti-ecological dynamics of capital accumulation more acute.

Generally speaking, from the United States perspective there are two mechanisms related to the ecological crisis—one domestic, the other international—by which capital is reducing costs, increasing efficiency, and facilitating capital accumulation. First of all, in the United States and the global North, capital is responding to threats posed by the growth of low-cost imports from foreign competitors, as well as the need to boost the competitiveness of its exports abroad, by reducing the costs of doing business inside their home countries. Along with labor costs, environmental protection measures are considered by many “dirty” industries to be some of the most burdensome. Companies therefore seek to protect profits not only by “downsizing” the labor force but also by cutting “unproductive expenditures” on pollution control equipment, environmental conservation, and worker health and safety. Simply put, the key to cost containment lies in processes of capital restructuring that enables corporations to extract greater value from labor power and nature in less time and at a lower cost (i.e. to increase the rate of exploitation of labor and nature). Under the reactionary neoliberal regimes this entails launching a renewed domestic political assault on the EJ movement, trade unions, environmentalists, and other progressive social movements in order to contain wages and benefits, cut back on worker and public health and safety laws, dump more pollution into the environment, engage in more destructive and “extreme” forms of dirty energy and natural resource extraction, continue to burn fossil fuels and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and place cancer-causing chemicals in our food, water, and consumer products.

But not all people are equally impacted by these social and ecological costs of capitalist accumulation. In order to bolster profits and competitiveness, capital and the neoliberal state embrace various strategies for displacing negative environmental “externalities” that are simultaneously the most economically efficient and politically expedient. Most citizens see the act of releasing dangerous toxins into the air and water as a form of anti-social behavior, a violation of their most fundamental human rights to a clean and healthy environment. Residents will seldom “choose” to see their family members or neighbors poisoned by industrial pollution, especially if they are aware of the dangers. In fact, the successful imposition of such public health dangers is symptomatic of a lack of democracy and the ideological hegemony of the polluter-industrial complex. Once aware of the dangers, affected residents are likely to oppose the offending operation. As a result, capital adopts more cost-effective practices for exploiting natural resources and disposing of pollutants that offer the path of least political resistance.

Following the path of least resistance often means targeting the most disempowered communities in society for the most ecologically hazardous industrial facilities, toxic waste sites, and destructive forms of natural resource extraction and energy development. The less political power a community of people possesses; the fewer resources (time, money, education) the people in that community have to defend themselves from potential threats; the lower the level of community awareness and mobilization against potential ecological threats, the more likely they are to experience arduous environmental and human health problems. The weight of the ecological burden upon a community depends upon the balance of power between capital, the state, and social movements responding to the needs and demands of the populace. In capitalist countries such as the United States, it is working-class neighborhoods, ethnic minorities, and poor communities of color that most often experience the worst problems. Environmental inequality is now increasing faster than income inequality in the United States (Boyce, Zwickl, and Ash 2014).

Similar to the “domestic” strategy of reducing production costs by displacing ecological and public health hazards onto poor people of color and the white working class inside the United States and other countries of the global North, corporations also reduce costs by adopting the “international” strategy of exporting ecological hazards outside America’s national boundaries (Pellow 2007; Faber 2008). The worsening ecological crisis in the global South is directly related to an international system of economic and environmental stratification in which the United States and other advanced capitalist nations are able to shift or impose the environmental burden on weaker states (Adeloa 2000; Li and Zhou 2017). In fact, one of the primary aims of the neoliberal agenda is to facilitate the displacement of externalities by capital onto poorer nations.

The export of ecological hazards to the global South reflects the economic logic of neoliberal policymakers aligned with the interests of transnational corporations, which deems human life in the global South worth much less than in the North. If the poor and underemployed masses of Africa become sick or die from exposure to pollution produced by domestic capital or exported from the North, it will have a much smaller impact on the profits of international capital. Aside from the higher costs of pollution-abatement in the advanced capitalist countries, if highly skilled and well-compensated workers in the global North fall prey to environmentally related health problems, the expense to capital and the state can be significant. Similarly, if African Americans living in Flint, Michigan are so devalued that their “premature deaths” do not constitute a cost to the capitalist system, neoliberal policymakers will remain indifferent to the public health abuses inflicted on the community by lead poisoning (Pulido 2016, 2). Although morally reprehensible, under the global capitalist system it pays for business to shift pollution onto poor communities and countries. And this is precisely the goal of neoliberals dominating global power structures.

Given the willingness of neoliberal governments in the global South to trade-off environmental protection in favor of capital investment and accumulation, the growing mobility of capital (in all forms) is facilitating the export of ecological problems from the advanced capitalist countries to the global South and sub-peripheral states. This export of ecological hazard from the United States and other Northern countries to the less-developed countries takes place as the following: (1) in the money circuit of global capital, in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) in domestically owned hazardous industries, as well as destructive investment schemes to gain access to new oil fields, forests, agricultural lands, mining deposits, and other natural resources; (2) in the productive circuit of global capital, with the relocation of polluting and environmentally hazardous production processes and polluting facilities owned by transnational capital to the global South; (3) in the commodity circuit of global capital, as witnessed in the marketing of more profitable but also more dangerous foods, drugs, pesticides, technologies, and other consumer/capital goods; and (4) in the “waste circuit” of global capital, with the dumping in the global South of toxic wastes, pollution, discarded consumer products, trash, and other commodified and non-commodified forms of “anti-wealth” produced by Northern industry. In effect, international capital is appropriating ecological carrying capacity for the core by transferring (“distancing”) externalities to the global South (Frey 2003). As in the United States, it is the poorest and most politically repressed people in the South that bear the greatest brunt of the global ecological crisis.

In the age of reactionary neoliberalism susceptibility to the “negative externalities” of global capital is ever more deeply related to social positionality, that is, to where a person or group of people are situated in multiple power structures centered on class, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and more (Walker 2012). The various social positions or “identities” held in these power structures intersect to create different social “axes” of advantage and disadvantage. A poor working-class African-American woman in the United States encounters multiple disadvantages in comparison to the control capacity exercised by a white, middle-class woman (or male) in Sweden. A poor woman that is part of the Ogoni ethnic minority living in the Niger Delta of Nigeria is even more disadvantaged.

In the United States communities that lack control capacity over political-economic power structures are typically made up of racial and ethnic minorities, as well as the white working class (Schnaiberg 1994). For instance, rural white women and their families in Appalachia are especially harmed by extractive energy schemes such as coal mining (Bell 2013). For those members of the socially and spatially segregated “underclass,” powerlessness is even more pervasive. America’s undocumented immigrants, Chicano farmers, indigenous peoples, and other dispossessed people of color are the ones being selectively victimized to the greatest extent by environmental health abuses (Johnston 1994). As part of the country’s subaltern experiencing multiple forms of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural oppression, they are effectively devalued in American society (Pulido 1996). The resulting environmental injustices take the form of noxious industrial pollutants and hazardous waste sites being situated in poor African-American communities in the rural South (Bullard 1994; Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker 2017), or of undocumented Mexican workers laboring in the pesticide-soaked agricultural fields of California, Texas, and Florida (Berkey 2017). In short, the concentration of environmental and health hazards among the subaltern is creating ecological sacrifice zones—areas where it is simply dangerous to breathe the air or take a drink of water (Lerner 2010). As such, ecological sacrifice zones serve as locations where capital can substantially lower or ignore the costs of compliance with environmental regulations.

In this light, environmental injustices are rooted in power structures and models of capital accumulation that confer social class advantages and racial/gender privileges (Sicotte 2016, 13). And when analyzing environmental inequality, we should be aware that there are multiple political-economic forces at work that give the injustice a particular context and form (Holifield 2001). In the United States and the world economy racism is a “constituent logic” of capitalism and, as stated by Pulido, “creates a variegated landscape that cultures and capital can exploit to create enhanced power and profits” (Pulido 2016, 7; see also Ranganathan 2016). As we shall see, environmental racism facilitates capital accumulation in a variety of critically important ways, and is central to the reactionary neoliberal project. As a result, poorer people of color face a “quadruple exposure effect” to environmental health hazards.

This first takes the form of higher rates of “on the job” exposure to dangerous substances used in the production process inside the factory; and the second consists in greater exposure to toxic pollutants in the community outside the factory (Morello-Froch 1997). Faulty cleanup efforts implemented by the government or the waste treatment industry often magnify these problems (Lavelle and Coyle 1992; O’Neil 2005). Poorer communities, women, and people of color also face greater dislocation, health problems, and loss of livelihood as a result of energy and natural resource extraction (Martinez-Alier 2002; Bell 2013). The final piece to the quadruple exposure effect comes in the form of greater exposure to toxic chemicals in the household, commercial foods, and a variety of consumer products. As demonstrated in the case of Flint, Michigan, neoliberal policy cost-cutting measures continue to be a leading health threat to children, particularly poor children and children of color living in older, dilapidated housing with lead pipes (Pulido 2016). Black children are now five times more likely than white children to have lead poisoning. Taken together, it is clear that racial capitalism is causing people of color to experience a disparate exposure to environmental hazards where they “work, live, and play” (Alston 1990).

Below I will quickly sketch out five processes by which reactionary neoliberal capitalism is likely to exacerbate environmental injustices in the United States: (1) by further promoting the mobility of ecologically hazardous industries into communities of color and white working-class neighborhoods; (2) by restricting the ability of the subaltern to move out of dangerous areas for safer neighborhoods; (3) by facilitating the dislocation of the subaltern from ecologically revitalized communities; (4) by limiting the ability of workers of color to leave dangerous jobs for safer occupations; and (5) by facilitating the appropriation of land and resources by global capital in a manner detrimental to the subaltern and popular class formations. Although my focus here is on the United States, it should be remembered that environmental injustices are being displaced in a very similar manner onto disempowered communities in neoliberal nations across the globe.

Promoting the Mobility of Ecologically Hazardous Capital to Move into Disempowered Communities

Following the path of least resistance often leads capital and the state to target white working-class communities and oppressed communities of color for the siting of hazardous industrial facilities and waste sites. That “disempowered” communities are to serve as such a pollution haven is often blatantly advertised. As early as 1984 a commissioned report by Cerrell Associates for the California Waste Management Board, for instance, openly recommended that industry and the state locate waste incinerators (or “waste-to-energy facilities”) in neighborhoods of “lower socioeconomic” status:

Members of middle or higher-socioeconomic strata (a composite index of level of education, occupational prestige, and income) are more likely to organize into effective groups to express their political interests and views. All socioeconomic groupings tend to resent the nearby siting of major [polluting] facilities, but the middle and upper-socioeconomic strata possess better resources to affectuate their opposition. Middle and higher-socioeconomic strata neighborhoods should not fall at least within the one-mile and five-mile radii of the proposed site. (California Waste Management Board 1984, 42–43)

The Cerrell Associates report also makes note of research indicating that communities made up of residents that are low-income, Catholic, Republican and/or conservative in political affiliation, of a low educational level, mostly senior citizens, and/or located the South and Midwest of the United States, tend to exercise less control capacity over the siting of major polluting facilities.

California now has the highest concentration of racial/ethnic minorities living near incinerators and other commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs). In Greater Los Angeles, for instance, some 1.2 million people live in close proximity (less than two miles) to seventeen such facilities, and 91 percent of them (1.1 million) are people of color (Bullard et al. 2007, 58–60). Of course, the question remains: which came first, the city’s [Los Angeles’s] most polluted neighborhoods or minority residents? Studies sponsored by the California Policy Research Center looked at the character of an area before a TSDF siting and the demographic and other shifts that occurred in the years after a siting. The findings indicate that since the 1970s the neighborhoods targeted to house toxic storage and disposal facilities have more minority, poor, and blue-collar populations than areas that did not receive TSDFs (Pastor, Sadd, and Hipp 2001).

California is not alone when it comes to concentrating environmental problems in racially segregated communities. Neoliberal policy and traditional environmental laws require capital to contain pollution sources for more proper treatment and disposal. Once the pollution is “trapped,” treatment and disposal are paid for by the manufacturing industry. The waste, now commodified, becomes mobile, crossing local, state, and even national borders in search of areas where it will be dealt with cheaply. All across the United States working-class neighborhoods and poor communities of color have been repeatedly targeted by capital and the state for the siting of hazardous facilities. Under the leadership of former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator William Ruckelshaus the waste management company Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI) earned enormous profits (more than $1.6 billion in 1986 alone) through an industry-wide modus operandi that kept costs down and profits high by locating the more dangerous facilities in neighborhoods of color within such cities as Birmingham, San Antonio, and Houston. Practices of environmental racism by BFI, Chemical Waste Management, and other titans of waste became rampant in the 1980s–1990s and fueled the growth of the EJ movement. The process continues today, accelerating in connection with Trump’s assault on the EPA and their EJ programs. For the first time in history, people of color now comprise the majority of the population (56 percent) living near the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities. African Americans are also 79 percent more likely than whites to live in neighborhoods where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger (Bullard et al. 2007).

Neighborhoods undergoing rapid ethnic, racial, and class-based transitions (or “churning”) are often the most vulnerable. Towns experiencing “white flight” to the suburbs and a corresponding demographic shift toward newly arrived Latino or Asian immigrants, for instance, often lack the tight community networks, political connections, and social capital necessary to mobilize residents to oppose ecologically hazardous facilities. Communities composed in a fragmented manner by peoples of different racial, ethnic, religious, national-origin identities, class backgrounds, and languages can also be more vulnerable to the “divide and conquer” strategies of capital. That said, many poor but homogenous communities of color have strong civic institutions (such as the Church) that build social solidarity and support long histories of struggle on behalf of civil rights. As such, and in contrast to the assumptions of the Cerrell Report, they can pose formidable opposition to corporate polluters (Rinquist 1997). Only those economically depressed communities that are burdened by poverty, high unemployment, and a marginal tax base will feel compelled to accept hazardous facilities. Such a trade-off is sometimes made in view of the attendant potential for job creation, enhanced tax revenues and the provision of social services, and other economic benefits. In contrast, communities with a strong economic base and a high degree of control capacity over the decision-making processes of local government officials and business leaders are better able to block the introduction of environmental hazards (Gould 1991).

It is important to focus on the systemic political-economic drivers of capital mobility by dirty industry into disempowered communities over the more narrow, legalistic definitions that emphasize corporate “intentions” to discriminate. It is not necessarily anyone’s intention to inflict harm upon working-class whites or people of color when siting hazardous operations. The primary goal of capital is instead to seek out the cheap land, favorable zoning laws, less regulation, good infrastructure, and a community less likely to offer opposition (Wolverton 2012). However, it is the legacy of systemic racism and class exploitation that creates such self-reinforcing social conditions in any given community. For instance, ethnic and racial minorities in the community may have been discriminated against by the banks, reducing home ownership; educational segregation may have left the community’s residents undereducated, producing not just “white flight” but “class flight,” as well and leaving those remaining behind much less equipped to challenge a hazardous siting; economic discrimination may have forced residents into low-wage service jobs, requiring many to work multiple jobs and thus reducing overall civic involvement that forms the basis of any public efforts to resist a toxic hazard; economic deprivation further makes the promise of a handful of (dangerous) new jobs in the community difficult to resist; racist voter redistricting and gerrymandering (the redrawing of political district boundaries to favor a Party in power) may have robbed the community of political power; and racist law enforcement and prosecution might have incarcerated a whole generation of people who would otherwise have the energy and drive to oppose such predations on their homes and families. These structural and systemic political-economic conditions of racial capitalism make it logical for polluting industry to locate operations in poor communities of color and to do so without being overtly racist.

Restricting the Mobility of the Subaltern Out of Ecologically Hazardous Communities

Reactionary neoliberalism is likely to deepen environmental injustices by initiating measures that further prevent the mobility of the subaltern out of environmentally contaminated communities. The Trump coalition of wealthy white citizens tend to exercise greater control over community planning processes, including the “exclusionary zoning” of dirty industries and other locally unwanted land uses (LULUs). Wealthier citizens can also better afford to out-migrate (white flight) and purchase access to nicer neighborhoods, better schools and housing, ecological amenities, and a cleaner environment (South and Crowder 1997), suggesting that lower-income households and people of color are more likely to be “left behind” in areas with hazardous facilities (Banzhaf 2008). As stated by Sicotte (2016, 39),

[the] affluent can mobilize their economic power to secure environmental privilege for themselves, which can include tasking other communities with disposing of their waste; restricting the access of others to “natural” or beautiful spaces; buffering such spaces from development or industrialization; and enjoying the convenience of living in centrally located places from which the less affluent have been priced out.

Wealthy whites can also employ various tactics for excluding people of color and poorer whites from escaping hazardous communities by moving into their neighborhoods. The ability of poor people of color and ethnic minorities to migrate to “greener” pastures is limited by their lower incomes, zoning and urban planning policies, regressive taxation, and discriminatory housing and mortgage lending (redlining) practices (Taylor 2014; Sicotte 2016, 39). Dating back to the National Housing Act of 1924, there is a disturbing historical pattern of mortgage lending in the United States that serves to reproduce highly segregated patterns of residential location by race/ethnicity (Oliver and Shapiro 1995; Taylor 2014). Just a handful of towns in Massachusetts, for instance, account for the majority of loans given to African Americans and Latinos. Just four communities typically receive more than half of all home-purchase loans given to African Americans, while five other communities receive more than half of all home-purchase loans for Latinos (Campen 2004). All of these communities except one are ranked among the 30 most environmentally overburdened communities in Massachusetts (Faber and Krieg 2005). In addition, African Americans and Latinos at all income levels are more than twice as likely to be rejected for a home-purchase mortgage loan than are white applicants at the same income levels. Recent studies show that white Americans are increasingly choosing to self-segregate into racially isolated ethnoburbs, insulating themselves from the social and environmental injustices plaguing communities of color (Kye 2014).

Racial and ethnic segregation in the United States is a product of the manner in which real estate developers, bankers, industrialists, and other sectors of capital work in coalition with government officials (at all levels) to form policy and planning structures which promote community development conducive to these business interests, i.e. local growth machines (Logan and Molotch 1987). It pays these interests to displace environmental health problems onto these communities where most residents lack health care insurance, have lower incomes and own less valuable property, and are more easily replaced in the labor market if they become sick or die. Again, in the case of the organized economic abandonment of Flint, Michigan, neoliberal policymakers implement additional austerity measures that further worsen the environmental and public health problems in these communities. In Flint this involved changing the source of drinking water for the city to the highly polluted Flint River, which was so corrosive that it caused lead to leak en masse from the pipes into the public water system (Pulido 2016; Ranganathan 2016). Such externalities displaced upon the working poor are less likely to impose costs on capital and the larger economic system than if such harm was inflicted on the professional classes in whom significant investments of social capital are made. The siting of ecologically hazardous industrial facilities in communities of color, as well as “minority move-ins” to already heavily polluted areas, are both governed by the same systemic logic of capitalist accumulation (Been and Gupta 1997). Such acts of environmental racism are perfectly rational from the perspective of capital and neoliberal policy planners overseeing organized abandonment.

Dislocating the Subaltern from Ecologically Revitalized Communities

Under the Trump administration, and with the implementation of reactionary neoliberal urban redevelopment schemes, we are likely to witness an accelerated dislocation of people of color and working-class whites from economically and ecologically revitalized neighborhoods and communities (Faber and Kimelberg 2014). Neoliberal urban sustainability initiatives and community redevelopment projects that create open space or otherwise aim to improve the environmental profile of a neighborhood can trigger increases in real estate prices, rents, and property taxes, leading to the economic displacement of the existing residents who had endured the deleterious effects of pollution and ecological degradation (Banzhaf and McCormick 2012). At the same time, the cleanup and revitalization of neighborhoods can result in what Marcuse (1986) termed “exclusionary displacement,” rendering the sustainable city inaccessible for future residents of limited economic means. Housing price increases hit the poor—the vast majority of whom are renters—especially hard. It is typically only landlords and homeowners who stand to capture the property value gains associated with gentrification (Banzhaf and McCormick 2012).

Environmental gentrification (Sieg et al. 2004) is quickly becoming the major issue impacting low-income residents and people of color in cities across the United States. The elimination of environmental disamenities (such as toxic waste sites) and the creation of environmental amenities (such as parks) can exact a large economic toll on vulnerable residents (Gamper-Rabindran and Timmins 2011; Curran and Hamilton 2012). Black and Latino populations often decrease significantly after the revitalization of land contaminated with toxic chemicals (Essoka 2010). Similarly, as Gould and Lewis (2012) revealed, the restoration of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in the 1990s led to a significant increase in new construction around the park and a corresponding decrease in the racial and socioeconomic diversity of those areas. In many cases the displaced residents migrate to more environmentally distressed parts of the city where housing costs are lower (Banzhaf and McCormick 2012, 39–41).

It is clear that a failure to adequately address the social justice dimensions of urban sustainability initiatives can contribute to environmental gentrification (Pearsall 2012). Such a failure is typically grounded in “asymmetrical power relations … [that] continually influence how and what kinds of ‘environmental’ issues are addressed” (Tretter 2013, 308). The threats posed by gentrification are now presenting the EJ movement with a pernicious paradox (Checker 2011). Are successful EJ struggles by the working class and people of color to make their urban environments greener likely to yield unintended consequences in the form of the eventual displacement and relocation of these same residents into other polluted communities, where rents and housing prices are cheaper? Must lower-income residents “reject environmental amenities in their neighborhood in order to resist gentrification that tends to follow … ” (Checker 2011, 211)?

Neoliberal urban revitalization and green development schemes are only going to exacerbate social dislocations of this sort. Banzhaf and McCormick (2012, 39-41) conclude that although there are exceptions, “the evidence seems clear that in most cases improvements in local environmental conditions do trigger increases in property prices.” For example, the cleanup of Superfund and other brownfield sites—and in some cases, even the anticipation of future remediation—results in rising land values, housing values and/or rents (Gamper-Rabindran and Timmins 2013; Pearsall 2012). The “greening” of urban space brings new retail stores, restaurants, and amenities explicitly targeted toward middle- and upper-class residents. This remaking of the commercial and social aspects of neighborhoods can serve to alienate or marginalize lower-income residents, and especially the homeless (Dooling 2012), not only because participation is cost-prohibitive to those with limited means, but also because it serves to reinforce racial and class-based symbolic and social boundaries within the community (Lamont and Molnar 2002). The task before the EJ movement is to tear down these boundaries and develop a new politics of urban sustainability that unites struggles around affordable housing, green jobs at a living wage, civil and migrant rights, ecological revitalization, and economic development into a larger body politics that serves the interest of low-income residents and people of color.

Restricting the Mobility of the Subaltern Out of Ecologically Hazardous Occupations

Similar to mainstream environmental policy, worker health and safety programs can add to the costs of capital and restrict or prevent the use of more profitable (and more hazardous) chemical substances, materials, and production processes. Industries under stronger competitive pressures from low-cost operations overseas are especially eager to avoid “internalizing” costs on such “unproductive expenditures” as worker health and safety, and will instead displace (or “externalize”) these costs onto their labor force in the form of dangerous working conditions and exposure to health hazards (Morgenson 2005). According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), work-related injuries, illnesses and stress, and the resultant workers’ disengagement are estimated to cost the United States economy more than $2.2 trillion per year (WEF 2017). Some 150 workers die every day from hazardous working conditions (AFL-CIO 2017).

Not all workers face the same level of health threats on the job. Highly skilled workers are more essential to many businesses and are not so easily replaced if they become injured or sick, and are therefore provided greater protection by industry and unions. As a result, unskilled and semi-skilled blue-collar workers involved in manufacturing, construction, logging, and agriculture face greater occupational hazards on the job. Workers in these industries are more “expendable,” as they are more easily replaced by other people if an injury or death occurs. In fact, economic damages awarded in tort law are in large part based on wage loss. A restaurant worker earning a low hourly wage is simply “worth” far less than a highly experienced and well-paid company manager. Since the usual penalty for inflicting environmental and/or occupational disease is the “restitution” of the injured through the payment of compensatory fines rather than criminal penalties or confiscatory fines, the costs almost never approach the economic advantages that accrue to companies that perpetrate injury and death upon workers. In other words, it can be cheaper to use unsafe technology, poisonous chemicals, and dangerous production processes that kill or maim unskilled workers and pay the fine than to make the workplace safe (Eligman and Bohme 2005).

As with pollution and other ecological hazards, capital’s imposition of occupational health and safety dangers upon labor is often met with resistance from workers. The path of least resistance for capital is to select the most disempowered members of society for the most dangerous occupations. The evidence points to the fact that poorer people of color and immigrant workers are once again being tracked into the most hazardous types of jobs, and that these jobs are becoming ever more hazardous once they become racially segmented (AFL-CIO 2017). Occupational exposure to cancer-causing substances, pesticides and toxic chemicals, and dangerous working conditions are especially prevalent for people of color. In California, for instance, Hispanic men have a two-and-a-half times greater risk of occupational disease and injury than white men (Robinson 1989).

Despite the implementation of affirmative action programs and other accomplishments by the civil rights movement over the past three decades, the racial segmentation of labor persists. The continued implementation of informal “job closure” practices by business (and some unions) restricts occupational mobility for racial and ethnic minorities into safer and better-paying jobs (Wright 1992). Business owners and managers regularly rank people of differing racial and ethnic backgrounds for specific job categories. White workers are typically placed the head of the line for the most desirable jobs, especially those offering better working conditions, higher pay, and opportunities for advancement. People of color and ethnic minorities are typically placed at the end of the line (Kerbo 2011).

The racial segmentation of labor by this method is functional for capital in that the “racialization” of certain occupations depresses wages/benefits, divides labor against itself and inhibits unionization, as well as provides a large pool of unemployed/underemployed workers that industry can draw from in periods of rapid economic expansion. Just as importantly, the racial segmentation of labor inhibits the ability of workers of color to escape dangerous jobs for safer occupations, in the same way as racial segregation of communities inhibits the ability of residents of color to escape ecologically dangerous neighborhoods for safer areas. To provide a labor force for the dirty industry, semi-skilled blue-collar workers may be channeled to live in row homes near industrial zones; while unskilled, underemployed members of the “underclass” are pushed into distressed inner-city neighborhoods and serve as a reserve army of cheap labor for nearby dirty industries. Not coincidentally, African Americans, Latinos, and the working poor face much greater risks for living in much closer proximity (location risk) to the most accident-prone facilities (operations risk) in the United States (Elliott et al. 2004; Orum et al. 2014).

Knowing that occupational mobility is limited, capital can place greater demands upon workers of color, and also slash costs relating to occupational health and safety programs. Occupational dangers are even more profound for those unskilled or semi-skilled immigrants and undocumented workers that lack the formal legal protections afforded by U.S. citizenship (Anderson, Hunting, and Welch 2000). Mexican-born workers are about 80 percent more likely to die on the job than U.S.-born workers (compared to 30 percent in the mid-1990s). Often in the country “illegally,” and reluctant to complain about poor working conditions for fear of deportation or being fired, they are nearly twice as likely as the rest of the migrant population to die at work. Mexicans also make up the largest segment of migrant farmworkers. Tens of thousands of farmworkers in the United States suffer from pesticide poisoning each year (Berkey 2017). Struggling to protect farmworkers and their communities from these poisons in the Trump era will be no small task, but it is now a key component of the struggle for EJ in the United States.

Facilitating Global Capital’s Appropriation of Nature Belonging to the Popular Classes

Under the new ecological imperialism brought about by neoliberal globalization, the prosperity of transnational capital is becoming increasingly predicated on the racialized appropriation of surplus environmental space from the global South (Foster and Clark 2018). By expanding its ecological footprint and other forms of unequal ecological exchange, global capital accumulation depends upon the confiscation of biomass production from the global South (Hornborg 2011). In other words, the expansion of wealth on behalf of the United States, China, and the core European Union states under globalization fundamentally involves the use of greater quantities of undervalued natural resources from other territories occupied by the global subaltern, as well as the increased displacement of environmental harm (such as pollution) to those territories, and it is creating an unparalleled ecological crisis of global dimensions (Jorgenson and Clark 2012).

In contrast, economic growth in the global South has been led by exports of energy, raw materials, and consumer goods to the North. This turn toward export-oriented industrialization is being driven by (FDIs) and foreign lending provided by the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, and is intended to facilitate the appropriation and development of domestic business facilities, energy supplies, and natural resources by transnational investors. Thus, global free trade is creating a new international division of labor in which, on one hand, the South favors exports of cheap raw materials, energy, technology components, and consumer goods to the United States, and on the other, the United States favors capital goods and services for export within the North and to the South. In short, while the global South produces wealth in the commodity form, the United States produces wealth in the “capital form” (O’Connor 2000, 162).

Under processes of unequal ecological exchange the massive quantities of physical wealth now entering the United States (in the form of energy, raw materials, foodstuffs, and durable consumer goods) are greatly undervalued in the world economy. With international trade largely under the control of Northern-based transnational corporations, the concrete and potential natural wealth found in United States imports of energy and raw materials are in much greater proportion than the monetary (abstract) wealth that is exported back to the global South. Through exploitative world trade relations, the United States appropriates the bio-capacity of the global South. This process also includes the damage done to the economies of the global South resulting from United States exports of pollution, hazardous waste, greenhouse gases, and other ecological hazards (Warlenius 2016). Moreover, the ecological debt arising from excessive use of the South’s environmental space by transnational capital is accelerating in the new millennium, even as the economic debt owed by many in the global South countries to U.S. banks continues to grow (Martinez-Alier 2007). The South’s economic debt and the North’s ecological debt are symptomatic of the “unfair” trade-off brought about by neoliberal globalization, a facet that can only worsen under Trump’s “America First” political philosophy.

Defined in terms of global North versus global South, corporate-led globalization is seen as magnifying externally- and internally based environmental injustices to the advantage of transnational capital. In much of the developing world access to natural resources is being restricted by the transformation of commonly held lands into capitalist private property, that is, by the “commodification of nature” (Goldman 1998). Those peoples in the global South who draw their livelihood directly from the land, water, forests, coastal mangroves, and other ecosystems are becoming displaced in order to supply cheap raw materials for local dominant classes and foreign capital. Laboring in service of this new global order, but receiving few of its benefits, the popular majorities of the developing world—the poor peasants, workers, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples who make up the subsistence sector—struggle to survive by moving onto ecologically fragile lands or by migrating to the shantytowns of the cities by the million to search for employment. Often left with little means to improve the quality of their lives, the world’s poor (especially women) are being forced to over-exploit their own limited natural resource base in order to survive (Shiva 2005). In much of the Third World, these survival strategies by the popular classes in response to their growing impoverishment result in the widespread degradation and ecological collapse of the environment. As a result, globalization-inspired development models are becoming increasingly unviable in the global South, giving birth to popular-based movements for social and ecological justice, i.e. to an environmentalism of the poor (Martinez-Alier 2002).

Conclusion

The threats posed to the profits of major corporate polluters by the environmental and EJ movement are invoking a profound political backlash. Spearheaded by agribusiness, oil and gas, mining, timber, petrochemical, and manufacturing industries, these corporate polluters are channeling enormous sums of money into anti-environmental organizations, public relations firms, foundations, think tanks, research centers, and policy institutes, as well as the elections campaigns of “pro-business” candidates in both major political parties. Motivated by the real and potential costs of environmental protection, the goal of this “polluter-industrial complex” is the establishment of reactionary neoliberal regulatory reform towards the wholesale dismantling of the environmental protection state (Faber 2008). Trump and his appointees are implementing draconian cuts to the EPA’s budget, weakening or preventing the enforcement of existing regulations, and delegating programs to financially strapped local and state governments lacking the capacity to assume the task. As a result, the ability of the EJ, climate change, and ecology movements to win even limited reforms has been effectively blocked at the federal level.

The news is not all bad, however. More than ever, people are fighting for their basic right to a clean and healthy environment at the local and state levels. In poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods of small towns and inner cities, depressed Native American reservations, and Asian-American communities all across the country, people who have traditionally been relegated to the periphery of the environmental movement under the progressive neoliberal regime are increasingly challenging the ruination of their land, water, air, and community health by corporate polluters and indifferent governmental agencies (Martinez-Alier et al. 2016). Acting in coalition with the rise of new forms of community-based, working-class environmentalism, anti-toxics activism, climate change advocacy, just transition and the clean production movement, the EJ movement is slowly but surely developing networks and long-term strategies for arresting the ecological crisis (Holifield, Chakraborty, and Walker 2017). As such, the continued growth and prosperity of these EJ organizations and networks are essential to constructing a more inclusive, democratic, and transformative environmental politics capable of addressing the political-economic roots of environmental and climate injustice. The task facing the Left and the readers of CNS is to help advance this agenda and build a truly counter-hegemonic ecology movement.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, Laura Pulido, and Christina Schlegel for their comments and input. I remain responsible for all shortcomings.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.