Doing Justice in Environmental Justice: When Force Decides

Environmental Justice scholarship interprets the judicial apparatus as involved in both the production of environmental harm and the transformation of social relations. On the one hand, laws, or their limits, cause environmental injustice, and on the other hand, legal reforms are seen as a vehicle for providing future environmental justice. Conversely, critical forms of EJ scholarship challenge the role of the state as a vehicle for justice and affirm the state as a complicit actor in creating injustice everywhere. Less evident in any EJ scholarship, however, is the theorization of force (in law and resistance) in struggles for justice. Using the cases of the Flint Water Crisis and the damming of the Upper Magdalena Watershed,We argue that force is a central feature of environmental (in)justice. In the former case, the force of law was central to the poisoning of a majority-Black city, and in the latter case, the force of resistance was central to the fight for local river control and rights. Force is a central mechanism that structures and tilts environmental conflicts everywhere, and a failure to recognize this fact, we argue, renders environmental justice scholarship ill-equipped to cultivate a theory and praxis for environmental justice change.