Solidarity as environmental justice in brownfields remediation

Abstract

What do individuals owe to affected communities in the name of environmental justice? Principal accounts of environmental justice have made inroads in developing a pluralistic and activist-led approach. Yet precisely because of their strengths, such accounts face three problems – indeterminacy, epistemology, and structure/agency – that hinder activism and widespread engagement and threaten to leave ‘every neighborhood for itself.’ The current article examines an effort at brownfields remediation in Louisville, Kentucky, asking where environmental justice lies and how individuals ought to be engaged. Activist-led environmental justice cannot guide action, so the article defends a principle of solidarity as equity. Such solidarity requires individual engagement and, in the Louisville case, opposition to the proposed brownfields remediation plan.

Keywords:

• Brownfields
• environmental justice
• solidarity
• methane
• David Schlosberg
• Kristin Shrader-Frechette
• Louisville, KY

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Lauren Heberle for reading and discussion of a prior draft and particularly for helping with the details of the case study, and to an anonymous referee for comments on a prior draft. I am also grateful to Peggy Kohn, Avigail Ferdman, and all the participants in the workshop on Public Goods, Solidarity, and Social Justice at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto, in May 2016.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Lauren Heberle for helping with this case analysis.

2. For an overview, see McKenzie (2016).

3. Indeed, such bio-digesters are a significant part of the US strategy for meeting its Paris targets.

4. Downs (2015). The FoodPort idea was later scrapped altogether.

5. I leave aside the specifics of premise (4). I think that premise is problematic, but my argument here implies that the Responsibility Argument fails to require EJ activism even if we grant (4).

6. Solidarity as I understand it is a form of what Waheed Hussain (this volume) would call affirmation, but solidarity may be unilateral affirmation rather than mutual affirmation, and nor does it presuppose an antecedently shared common good. If A is in solidarity with B, then A unilaterally affirms B , and although B must somehow accept that affirmation (by, e.g. acknowledging A), B does not necessarily reciprocate it.

7. I have made this case at greater length in Kolers (2016), though the account here is more unified.