Abstract
Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power collects ten essays by well-known and emerging scholars in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies, essays that draw attention to a variety of connections between environmental sustainability and social justice. Many of the contributors hail from the humanities (literature, philosophy, Native American studies) and the humanistic social sciences (mainly sociology), although their ranks also include several ecologists and individuals involved in community organizing and leadership. Although a few of the chapters are programmatic in nature, the majority examine cases of environmental contestation or institutional development in settings that range from the U.S. territory and crucial military outpost of Guahan (Guam) to the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods of North Philadelphia. Collectively, these chapters are loosely bound by a perspective that editor Julie Sze labels “situated sustainabilities,” which among other things “implies an awareness of the multiple ways in which sustainability is marshaled and deployed in social and political life” (p. 13).
The value of Sze’s “situated sustainabilities” perspective lies in its exhortation to move beyond what contributor Traci Brynne Voyles describes as “hegemonic environmental discourses . . . [that] universalize sustainability and sustainable solutions to our current environmental problems” (p. 200). The chapters illustrate this multifaceted approach in fascinating ways. For example, a chapter by Kyle Whyte, Chris Caldwell, and Marie Schaefer documents the way that environmental planning efforts sponsored by the Sustainable Development Institute at the College of the Menominee Nation connect community climate adaptation with the continuation of Indigenous ecological and social relationships. Leading environmental justice scholar Giovanna Di Chiro and community organizer Laura Rigell provide a richly detailed account of a campus-community sustainability partnership that labored productively to form common understandings of sustainability across boundaries of race, class, and gender. Examining California’s effort to create an international carbon offset program under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) framework, Tracy Perkins and Aaron Soto-Karlin insightfully reveal ways that social and institutional conditions created different and oppositional understandings of the effort’s environmental impacts in state planning offices, low-income urban communities, and rural areas in Chiapas, Mexico. These chapters, and several others, present sustainability as a mutable constellation of concerns and practices that appear in different configurations across local settings.
The chapters also pay close attention to interactions of sustainability initiatives with historically constructed systems of domination and social differentiation. In one concise and powerful essay, for example, Miriam Greenberg charts the co-optation of urban sustainability projects in San Francisco by real estate and business interests, which has resulted in the displacement of earlier initiatives that emphasized the provision of services or jobs to local residents rather than the elevation of urban property values. Similarly, chapters about environmental justice activism in Guahan (Guam) and New York City highlight ways that campaigns against racism and colonial domination may also be sites where new understandings of sustainability are forged. In one of these chapters, Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze frame the issue thus: “conventional notions of sustainability are implicated within histories of race and racism . . . [but] other frameworks and social movements offer an alternative basis from which to develop a more inclusive sustainability praxis” (p. 251).
In addition to presenting the themes of situated sustainabilities and the critical analysis of social power, Sze discusses the dominance of the natural sciences in the sustainability field and asserts the imperative of “encouraging interdisciplinary and justice-oriented sustainability collaborations” (p. 8). In relation to this latter goal, however, the book is arguably less successful. The volume includes two chapters written by scholars from ecology and environmental engineering, but these contributions have the appearance of being part of a different conversation than the one that animates most of the book’s other entries. The themes of power, social difference, and contestation are mostly absent from these chapters, as is attention to the ways in which meanings of sustainability are actively worked out in particular social settings. At the end of the book, one is left with the impression that there exist two parallel conversations about sustainability: one that occurs among natural scientists and engineers, and one that occurs among scholars and practitioners influenced by humanistic questions. This is revelatory of the epistemic challenges created by disciplinary divisions, regardless of the good will of all parties involved.
This book will be of interest to environmental sociologists, particularly those who focus on environmental justice activism and critical sustainability studies. Additionally, the empirical details about sustainability campaigns that appear in many of the book’s case studies may be useful to scholars and practitioners involved in community organizing to achieve sustainability goals. As David Pellow notes in the book’s afterword, “situated sustainabilities are often made possible by situated solidarities . . . [and] each chapter in this book offers up clear and persuasive examples of this and presents new questions and insights that build the foundation for such practices” (pp. 274–75). As an environmental sociologist who teaches undergraduate students in a liberal arts setting, I am also looking forward to including one or more chapters from this book in my courses about environmental justice and environmental activism. The vivid details, clear writing, and provocative arguments that appear throughout the book are well suited to sparking classroom discussion about these important concerns.