The Cultural Politics of Environmental Justice Activism

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository The Cultural Politics of Environmental Justice Activism: Race-and Environment-Making in the Contemporary Post-Civil Rights Period Kimberly Renee Allen A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Anthropology. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by, Chair, Dorothy Holland Arturo Escobar Karla Slocum Charles Price Kia Caldwell © 2009 Kimberly Renee Allen ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT KIMBERLY RENEE ALLEN: The Cultural Politics of Environmental Justice Activism: Race-and Environment-Making in the Contemporary Post-Civil Rights Period (Under the direction of Dorothy Holland, Arturo Escobar, Karla Slocum, Charles Price, and Kia Caldwell) This dissertation treats the environmental arena as a new terrain of racial struggle in the contemporary post-civil rights period. Increasing numbers of Americans are organizing in defense of the health and well being of their communities in the name of environmental justice as they contribute to its formation as a social movement. In the United States, particularly in the southeastern region, the focus of the environmental justice movement is ‘environmental racism’. Coined by activists, environmental racism refers to racism in environmental decision-making. Collectively, environmental justice proponents have refashioned environmental discourses to reflect changing awareness of how air, water and soil are subject to institutionalized racial discrimination. Using material generated principally from ethnographic participant observation and interviews, this dissertation describes how meanings of ‘environment’ and race-based identities in the contemporary period are being shaped in the environmental justice movement as it is in dialogue with the “mainstream” environmental movement, but not, surprisingly, one of the best known civil rights organizations. This dissertation points out how race forms in particular sites—in this case, the environmental justice movement. It argues against deterministic theories that claim social position, namely race, accounts for why blacks and other people of color maintain an iii environmental justice perspective. Instead, it advances a social practice approach to explain why for example, some African Americans act from an environmental justice perspective while others tend toward a view common in the general American public— environmentally concerned, but inactive. At the collective level environmental justice groups are primary sites where black Americans develop environmental concern, action and environmental identities. At the personal level of self-making, environmental justice proponents, both black and white, attempt to make sense of their relationship to the environment as they actively figure themselves in relation to collectively produced racialized environmental concerns, actions and identities. The ongoing, changing environmental justice movement is a medium in which personal affect, racial meaning and understanding, and action toward the environment develops for growing numbers of Americans. iv For Allen’s Children’s Children and All Others Who Fight Justice v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I thank Dottie Holland for believing in me! I owe Professor Dorothy Holland a debt that I can never repay. From the first day she spotted me meandering about the halls of Alumni Building pondering graduate programs, to late night phone calls to help relieve my anxiety, through intellectual slumps and bumps, all the way to the bittersweet end; she saw potential in me and never gave up on me. She has been incredibly patient and giving beyond compare. She is a wise and loving ancestor; she is a blessing. Allen and I thank her for it all. Professor Holland’s theoretical contributions in the areas of identity and agency and history and person are the bedrock of this dissertation. I am especially indebted to Holland and her colleagues: Drs. William Lachicotte, Jr., Jean Lave, Debra Skinner and Carole Cain for the groundwork they laid by expanding Social Practice Theory to various figured worlds. I further extend that debt to my contemporaries whom Holland has likewise inspired: Drs. Vinci Daro, Erik Reavely and soon-to-be Drs. Gretchen Fox and Dana Powell. For your encouragement, support and even your words when mine escaped me—thank you! To the members of my wonderfully supportive writing group— Vinci Daro, Lili Lai, and Ana Araujo—thank you! Despite the many and varied contributions of all these wonderful people, I take full responsibility for all the shortcomings of this dissertation. Next, I owe another debt that I can I never repay. Thank you Gary Grant and members of the Concerned Citizens of Tillery. You are among the most gracious and vi fiery people in the world. Rest assured God is on your side. I am grateful to the many other participants in my study, among them are the member groups and individual members of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, the Sierra Club, and the NAACP. I thank them for being patient with me as I learned to see things from their point-of-view. The research for this dissertation would not have been possible without their hospitality and goodwill. Although I take full responsibility for all the shortcomings of this dissertation, I am grateful for their insights that without a doubt enriched this work. I am also grateful to the many funders whose desperately needed dollars made my research not only possible, but the most fun I have ever had. These include, but are not limited to: the National Science Foundation; the Aspen Institute; the Anthropology Department, and The Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am also thankful to my dissertation committee members. In the midst of it all they made time to read my work and provide counsel. Thank you especially to Ms. Suphronia Cheek, the bedrock of the anthropology department at UNC. For so many years she has been helpful, and always has an encouraging word; she is an angel. Finally, thank you Mr. Allen Kwabena Buansi and thank you Mr. Patrick Bouvier Johnson. In spite of it all, you were patient and supportive. You gave me the confidence to make good and finish this dissertation. The two are among my greatest teachers. I thank everyone who has offered me an encouraging word or an opportunity to contribute to the expansion of one of the most dynamic social movements of our day. Because of you I have a better understanding of the meaning of ‘scholar activist’ and an appreciation of the fight for environmental justice. I will never forget you. vii PREFACE During 1994-95 I was an avid hiker and helped clear hiking trails after storms along the Blue Ridge Parkway in western Virginia, and although I thoroughly enjoyed myself, I longed for the familiar company of other black people. To my dismay, none joined with us to clear trails. Other than my son Allen, I rarely saw another black person on any of my weekly hikes; I was disappointed and curious. If not as hikers or trail clearers, in what ways did African Americans express their concern for or enjoy nature? During my hiking days I equated the environment with nature. For me, nature was rivers and hiking trails; wilderness, open spaces and endangered species constituted the environment. I understood e nvironmental actions to be conservation and preservation activities such as recycling, bird watching, hiking, canoeing, clearing trails, and fish restocking. Because I had not observed African Americans engaged in these activities, I concluded that they were not concerned about the environment and that they were not environmentalists. But then I began to wonder whether I was wrong. If African Americans were concerned about the environment, how did they act on this concern? What actions, beliefs, and identities did they attribute to the environment? My initial reason for pursuing graduate study was to determine what I then called an African American environmental ethos. I wanted to find out what meanings African Americans associated with the earth or ‘the land’. As former enslaved agricultural workers, I felt certain that African Americans held nature/environment in some regard; my job was to viii uncover it. I was really curious about why more of them were not ‘environmentalists’; that is, members of environmental organizations like the Sierra Club. Before enrolling in graduate school I was a project assistant on a research team headed by Professors Dorothy Holland and Willet Kempton. Their project, entitled “The Environmental Movement as a Context for Behavioral Change,” attempted to explain why more people were not environmentally active although they expressed concern for the environment. Only when I began reading literature on the environmental movement did I find the black people that had eluded me on the trails. My reading revealed that black people did care about the environment and did act on their concerns for the environment. But rather than hike, buy ‘eco-friendly’ products, or campaign to ‘save the whales’; the Blacks I encountered in my readings were fighting North Carolina state officials that were intent on locating a landfill containing toxic-laced soil in their neighborhood. The black people I found were in Tennessee fighting the Federal Highway Commission against the disparate impact of a highway bypass in their community. They were acting

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