Just space or spatial justice? Difference, discourse, and environmental justice

Abstract

Amidst recent moves to rethink environmental justice, this article cautions against retention of distributive conceptions of injustice. Instead, analysis of production and normalisation of difference is explored as a way to shift the lens of environmental justice scholarship away from distributional explanations of injustice and towards critical engagement with the politics of meaning that structure environmental practice. I argue that such a shift would offer an alternative to the liberal spatial frameworks that articulate understandings of environmental justice and environment society relations, facilitating instead relational conceptions of space and engagement with space as a representational media and medium of power. I also propose that methodologically such a shift would require discursive analysis of practices of difference making. Examples from research into the management of nuclear fuel waste in Canada are used to illustrate the arguments.

Keywords:

• discourse
• difference
• space
• environmental justice
• distribution

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Drs Caroline Desbiens, Ulf Stromayer, and Arn Keeling for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their reviews.

Notes

This distinction runs the risk of essentialising diversity as something natural and prediscursive. Sharma (2006, Chapter 6) is careful, however, to base the category in social practice rather than identity, and convincingly argues that it is also a socially constructed state.

I do not want to seem unjust to Young's excellent and critical arguments. She is clearly interpreting the production of difference as a strategy of rule and is clearly working to challenge and undo practices of difference making. However, I think that Sharma's (2006) critique identifies an important conceptual problem with her use of the category of difference which leads her to conflate difference and diversity. I remain indebted to the work of Young.

The term “Aboriginal peoples” is an umbrella designation that refers to three distinct groupings of indigenous peoples recognised by the Canadian Constitution Act: First Nation, Inuit, and Metis. All three groups have distinct historical, territorial, and political relationships with the crown, and all three include diverse political linguistic, cultural, and geographical groups and nations. Recognising the diversity within and between Aboriginal peoples, I use the term as a shorthand to refer to more than one of the three distinct peoples at the same time, or where necessary to refer to the NWMO's use of the term.