Authors
JM Bacon, Kari Marie Norgaard
Publication date
2020/7/30
Journal
Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More
Pages
110
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
Chapter 7 Emotions of Environmental Justice 111 Collaborations between academics and activists in the 1980s led to the formulation of theoretical frames of environmental racism and environmental justice that are now at the center of environmental sociology, environmental studies, eco-criticism, food studies, and many related fields. Over the past decades, environmental justice scholars and activists have expanded public understanding of what gets called “the environment.” At the same time, the types of claims for justice expanded from an initial emphasis on proximity to toxic sites, to consideration of more and more dimensions of environmental inequalities (Agyeman, Schlosberg, Craven, & Matthews, 2016; Brulle & Pellow, 2006; Pellow, 2017; Schlosberg, 2013). Yet still today environmental justice work continues almost exclusively to address unequal physical health impacts from environmental degradation (see Brulle & Pellow, 2006; Crowder & Downey, 2010). There is little development within this literature (or the movement of the notion of unequal mental or emotional harms, how the psychological impacts of racism might be part of environmental justice, or symbolic dimensions of how power operates through environmental degradation more generally. Most important, there is little interrogation of what the concept of emotional harm might mean, or about the relationships between emotions, environmental change, other features of social structure, and the production of environmental injustices. There is little engagement with theories of emotions. As sociologists, we contend that emotions lie at the heart of social organization. Emotions are …
Total citations
Scholar articles
JM Bacon, KM Norgaard - Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to …, 2021