Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“popular beliefs . . . are themselves material forces” (Gramsci 1971,
165). That is, meaning systems can support or challenge systems of
structural and material control. This is a critical point because, as cul-
tural studies scholars and urban political ecologists have argued, social
movements are struggling over cultural meaning systems as much as they
are fi ghting for improved material conditions and needs (Moore, Kosek,
and Pandian 2003).
In other words, the “natural” environment becomes a symbol of
meaning for human communities. It can become a symbol of our attach-
ment to—or contempt for—nature, and as a political or cultural tool for
mobilizing against people whom hegemonic actors consider inferior and
unimportant. The history of the genocide of Native peoples in the United
States and the continued practices of environmental racism are just two
examples of associating despised human “others” with landscapes and
ecosystems that are also targets of extraction, pollution, or selective valu-
ation. On the other hand, for the same reasons, ecosystems play a cul-
tural role in the mobilization of social movements in favor of protecting
nonhuman nature from risks associated with industrialization. As Moore,
Kosek, and Pandian (2003) argue, nature is a terrain of power, through
which we discursively and materially advance various meanings, agendas,
and politics. Thus transnational EJ movement networks challenge envi-
ronmental inequality by confronting the social forces that produce these
outcomes and by arguing for new relationships of accountability vis-à-vis
state and corporate actors.
Boomerang Effects
Recall that Beck's “risk society” and Guinier and Torres's “miner's
canary” speak to the relational and interdependent character of indus-
trial chemicals and social inequalities through the phenomena of boo-
merangs. Research on transnational social movement networks reveals
that these formations produce their
own
boomerang effects as well. That
is, when local governments refuse to heed calls for change, transnational
activist networks create pressure that “curves around local state indif-
ference and repression to put foreign pressure on local policy elites. Thus
international contacts amplify voices to which domestic governments are
deaf, while the local work of target country activists legitimizes efforts
of activists abroad” (Keck and Sikkink 1998). It is the interaction
between repressive domestic political structures and more fl exible struc-
tures in other nations that produces this boomerang.
