Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
borders. In this way, the “miner's canary” can signal a potential or
impending environmental danger that threatens not only members of
vulnerable social groups, but also privileged populations living across
vast geographic and social borders. This occurs as a result of the boo-
merang effects that racial, class, and gender inequalities and social move-
ments produce, challenging social hierarchies that create environmental
inequality and making hegemonic institutions accountable to vulnerable
populations.
The idea of a boomerang effect is productive for theorizing social
movements and environmental justice politics because it is a dynamic
concept. The boomerang reveals that race, gender, and class inequalities
and ecological harm associated with global capitalism are not just oppres-
sive of people of color and ecosystems, but may ultimately be unsustain-
able and hazardous to those who benefi t from that system. These race,
gender, and class inequalities are not just an unfortunate by-product of
an ecologically unsustainable society; they are at its root. Social inequali-
ties are the principal forces driving ecological crises. Thus no one is
exempt from racial, class, gender, and ecological violence, and social
movements can present important and disruptive challenges to these
social forces.
The boomerang is a metaphor. It is also a reminder of the interdepen-
dence among human societies and the unavoidable accountabilities we
have to each other. The power of the boomerang returns us to the core
of the human-environment and human-human interactions and the
reason we should be concerned about the various social dimensions of
ecosystems: when we harm ecosystems we also perpetrate harms against
other human beings, and vice versa (Harvey 1996; Merchant 1980).
When we build relationships of respect and justice within human com-
munities, we tend to refl ect those practices in our relationships to
ecosystems. Transformative, radical restructuring of societies is required
to achieve environmental justice, and creative social movements are an
indispensable foundation of that process (Speth 2008).
This chapter links environmental justice studies, environmental sociol-
ogy, ethnic studies, and social movement theory in new ways, by drawing
on key concepts and metaphors from these fi elds to produce new intel-
lectual space for thinking about environmental politics, transnational
movements, and social hierarchies. I began with the question: How do
social movements challenge environmental inequalities across interna-
tional borders? I argued that transnational EJ movement networks
do this by disrupting the social relations that produce environmental
