Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Myriad environmental problems are incurred by society's organisation around
industrial capitalism. In the process of transforming fi rst nature into second nature,
materials which may have been harmless in an ecosystem become potential hazards
to health and environment. Sodium chloride, for instance, is mined from naturally
occurring salt domes and used to manufacture chlorine, a hazardous material which
is in turn used to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a feedstock for plastic produc-
tion that ranks among the top fi ve hazardous materials monitored by the US Envi-
ronmental Protection Agency. The demand for PVC, then, and its production as
enabled by science in the service of capitalism, are central to the problem of envi-
ronmental inequality (Pellow, 2000).
EJ research is largely motivated by concerns about the consequences of industrial-
environmental hazards for human health, yet most EJ researchers are not health
geographers. While a holistic concept of environment shaped EJ research early on,
operational concepts of health remained focused on specifi c health concerns raised
by exposure to industrial toxins - such as respiratory illnesses in the case of airborne
contaminants, and cancers and reproductive problems in the case of water-borne
toxins. As the EJ movement matured and vulnerable communities voiced their con-
cerns about environmental justice, a more holistic and integrative view of health
emerged. It became recognised that:
[m]ore often than not, issues of environmental justice comprise a complex web of
public health, environmental, economic and social concerns. Given the multiple stress-
ors that impact low-income, people of color, and tribal communities, such groups do
not have the luxury of addressing one issue at a time. They require holistic, integrative
and unifying strategies that address social, economic and health improvement simul-
taneously (Lee 2001: 141).
Currently, as EJ concerns percolate widely around the globe and through many
academic disciplines, more expertise in health research (often outside of geography)
is being brought to bear on EJ issues. Cross-cutting research examines how one type
of environmental stressor can infl uence susceptibility to another type. For example,
Gee and Payne-Sturges (2004) make the case that psychosocial stresses, such as
experienced by marginalised groups, can weaken immune systems, and thus, make
people more susceptible to environmental toxins. Although often not explicitly
stated, the inherently geographical concepts of space and place, site and situation,
underlie the newest EJ research, which suggests that residential segregation and
isolation result in combined stressors from built, social and natural environments
that are manifested in limited services, fewer community resources and greater likeli-
hood of exposure to pollutants.
Signifi cantly, EJ scholars have not focused much attention on how ecological
processes shape environmental inequalities, yet EJ scholarship increasingly informs
geographic scholarship on urban political ecology (Swyngedouw and Heynen, 2003;
Njeru, 2005; Heynen et al., 2006). Indeed, the agendas of urban political ecology
and EJ research may be converging, aided in part by the political ecology of disease
framework within medical geography.
Political Ecology and Health
Within geography and related disciplines, political ecology has infl uenced work on
the human-environment-health nexus both directly as it has taken on disease etiol-
