“eco” (an entry just on this prefix, its etymology, uses, and abuses)
eco-terrorism
endangerment
extinction

Could I start working on “eco”?

What a helpful project this is, and what a democratic, dialogic process you have chosen to build these concepts while building community!

So, what’s next?

We would like now to encourage everyone involved in this project to think about specific keywords in the study of environment and culture for which they would like to take responsibility. If you’d like to volunteer to begin working on a particular keyword, just say so right here. If we have multiple claimants for individual keywords, that’s fine; we may ultimately decide that certain words deserve more than one treatment, or we may encourage collaboration in the researching and writing of entries for our anticipated volume.

Either way, tell us what keywords you’d like to take responsibility for, and together we’ll begin to shape the next stage of this project.

Questions? Comments? Add those here too. Thanks!

“Environmental Justice as a Way of Seeing”
Christopher Sellers
Stony Brook University
October 16, 2008
Panel on Keywords

“Environment Justice” first emerged as a rallying cry during the 1980’s in the U.S. The initial coinage came among groups mobilizing to resist the siting of hazardous waste sites. They thereby sought to recast the rhetoric of environmentalism in the moral terms of the civil rights movement. It was thus premised on an earlier, historic reworking of the word “environment,” to encompass much of what earlier generations had known in terms of “nature” and/or “public health.” Since the eighties, as the meanings of “environmental justice” have multiplied, it has offered an increasingly sweeping critique of all that “environment” has come to mean. Environmental justice, most broadly, has become not just a subset of environmental issues but a way of seeing. Environmental justice advocates and scholarship insist that attention to nature or environment cannot afford to remain blind to issues of power, and to differentials of color, class or gender. Instead, environmental awareness and intervention should go hand in hand with a close scrutiny of just whose nature or environment is at stake.

Among the host of new scholarly approaches spawned by this movement in the environmental humanities and social sciences are those in my own field of environmental history. Now as someone originally trained in American Studies, who has followed the flowering of ecocriticism appreciatively, but from a distance, I know that most of my fellow panel members and probably the audience have followed different trajectories into this meeting hall. Please bear with me as I elaborate my argument on the basis of this field, the one which I know best.
As with so many other movement-related academic innovations, the history scholarship most closely identified with “environmental justice” pertains to those topics, places and groups of people that propelled the movement itself. We have learned much about paradigmatic struggles out of which the movement arose to gain organization, momentum, and influence during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, from Love Canal to Warren County, North Carolina. Other scholarship has sought out companionate struggles around this same time, in Houston or the Louisiana Delta or New York, or in other times, notably the Progressive Era. Also more or less directly inspired by the movement are a host of historical studies of environmental problems it has made familiar. Hazardous waste, but also garbage, other forms of industrial pollution, as well as workplace hazards, all have become more accepted, as viable topics within the field.

Similarly, in the wake of this movement, environmental historians have become more interested in the environments and experiences of those racial minorities and working class communities out of which calls for “environmental justice” first emerged. We now have significant scholarship on African American environmental history, also what I hope are growing ranks of scholars studying on the role of labor and work in environmental history. The field has also suspended, if not entirely abandoned, those earlier doubts that study of less evidently natural environments can be environmental. Before Katrina, but ever more emphatically afterward, the conceptual underpinnings of environmental justice drew and guided a burgeoning environmental history of the city. We have also learned much more about the racial and labor conflicts associated with the most rural of places, from farms to wilderness parks.
Many if not most environmental historians now identify or sympathize with the “environmental justice” advocates. That movement’s impact on the field has ramified especially in new fusionist scholarship of the past decade, at the intersection of social and environmental history. Of course, these trends coalesced out of more than influence from the environmental justice movement; the politics of scholarship and jobs within the history profession also proved friendly. In particular, an on-going fusion of the methods of social and environmental history has bolstered the foothold of environmental history in the American history academy, by piquing the interest of erstwhile purely “social” historians in environmental topics and questions. Trends in environmental history more or less associated with environmental justice have led to an ever more fundamental reformulation of the field’s grounds and purposes. More so than I understand is the case in the agendas of many environmental groups and agencies, questions of justice are, for many environmental historians, not just after-thoughts or add-ons. Instead, they have become fundamental to the field, every bit as important as an historicizing attention to nature itself.

Not that notes of justice went missing from earlier visions of environmental historians. Even during the foundation-laying of the 1980’s, when path-breaking works solidified environmental history’s status as a viable and important approach to history, questions of justice lurked in what we found capitalist farming did to the Midwest, or how colonial settlers’ land usages displaced those of native Americans. Often, the moralism driving such histories centered around the destruction not just of nature but of human groups who lived off it. But into the nineties, our programmatic statements nevertheless tended to pivot around “nature” as the field’s organizing, central loadstar. We aimed to study “the role and place of nature” in human history, or to “write nature” into it. Such mission statements worked well on at least two fronts, to argue the necessity of the new field to non-environmental historians, and to make plain an allegiance, however loose, to environmentalist politics. They nevertheless left under-articulated just what assumptions we snuck in about the human side of that nature we chose to study. Were we to concentrate on those times and peoples whose surroundings we found most recognizable as “nature”—forests or farms rather than cities or factories? Or were we to be more geographically even-handed, as this relatively novel coinage “environment” seemed to imply? Did we take the “role and place” of nature shared throughout a given society, as many of our early founding works would have it? or was that role and place far more uneven, reflective of social conflicts and division?

It is ironic that environmental history as a field convened around this societal wholism just as the environmental justice movement was itself coalescing, and as American society was launching into an historic phase of yawning income and other inequalities. Environmental historians have, in recent years, issued programmatic statements that offer correctives. They call upon their colleagues to attend not just to nature’s “role and place” in human history, but to the power, inequalities, and conflicts that have proven part and parcel of that “role and place.” Where I think my field still has a good deal further to go, and where your study of the intersections of environment and culture can help us, is in reflecting more on the importance of those concepts and categories on which we, as well as our historical subjects, draw. First and foremost, we need to get warier about the seductions of that word “nature.” That it points to some reality independent of humans and their culture, I don’t meant to deny. What I’d like us to keep more steadily in mind is that it remains, also, a cultural category. As such, its boundary-drawing, between where nature is and where it is not, comes loaded with dubious legacies.

As one way into these, let me raise a question about the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” nature. As originally elaborated by nineteenth century German philosophers, and revived much more recently by William Cronon in Nature’s Metropolis (1991), it names a difference between the natural and the built, or human-made. Such a dichotomy may still be useful for distinguishing between windows to the past opened by natural versus social sciences. But it runs against the grain of what today’s fusions of social and environmental history keep finding. From colonial encounters to those around forests and farms, a general theme in the environmental history of more natural places seems to be that one group’s “primary nature” turns out to be another’s “second nature.” Identification and usage of a “nature” as “primary” often comes easiest to the powerful—colonizers or state officials or industrialists. They thereby wind up stirring conflicts with those, frequently less powerful, who see it as “second” and domesticated—indigenous peoples, or locals, or workers. By the same token, if primary nature is difficult to discern in urban or industrial settings, those positioned to see and manipulate these places as “second nature” are inclined to miss the natural, biological elements within. Not least among these are the human bodies of their inhabitants, whose lives and livelihoods may be threatened.

Perhaps at this point, to get a clearer bead on the ecological and human violence that projections of “nature” have brought, we need another notion of just what it is whose “role and place” we are writing into human history. Maybe it is more like what some in science studies have recently taken to calling “nature-culture.” A substrate which does yield to a description as “nature,” it can alternately be seen as inhabited or domesticated or built, depending upon the lens through which you look. These days, in an era of global impacts like warming, what human perception of “natural” places is not a matter of expectation and effect, of not noticing the actual imprints of human activity there?

If there is one lesson in this direction I would like to see in environmental history and other related humanities, it is that we, whether scholars or activists or citizens, need to work on ways of keeping both the socio-cultural and the natural in mind. It is not easy. For all sorts of reasons, those glasses that enable us to see nature often tend to tug our eyes away from the glasses themselves, not to mention the social injustices with which they may be connected. Similarly, lenses singling out the plight of our society’s oppressed tend to miss how the human relationship with nature may also be at stake. But let us examine the historical and contemporary record. When environmental activists, officials–and academic humanists—focus only on “nature”, without as searching an eye to cultural implications or inequalities, what “environmental” repercussions do they tend to neglect? Similarly, when studies or advocacy of the underprivileged ignore “nature” or “environmental” problems, what “justice” issues do they pass over? As a way of seeing, environmental justice insists on the necessity, the moral imperative, of recognizing and exploring both.

food justice
globalization
deterritorialization
reterritorialization
ecomedia
ecocinema
Agriculture and/or urban agriculture
farm
food security
food desert
food sovereignty
food-system
organic
garden
park
urban landscape
ecological indigeneity
ecological Indian

ecological indigeneity
ecological Indian

I’m working on the cross-cultural representations of indigenous ecological wisdom in the face of environment crisis in the U.S. and China. Amidst the age of global environmental crisis, I believe that it is no coincidence that popular images of indigeneity have been consistently linked to ecological wisdom in two of the largest world consumers of natural resources. Within the U.S., much scholarly work has been done on the uses and dangers of idealizing the concept of the Ecological Indian, such as the most recent scholarly publication of Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian in 2007. Simultaneously, the proliferation of popular cultural icons including Disney’s ecologically savvy Pocahontas bespeaks the ongoing public intrigue about this concept. At the core of this Ecological Indian image is the ethics of environmental sustainability. Such ethics has been construed as traditional practices that are essential to indigenous community building and belonging.
Recently, China also saw the phenomenal success of stories about minority groups’ past ecological wisdom and passing conservation ethics, which has become an important issue in the global indigenous discourse. In that case, I believe that the work that has already been done in American Cultural Studies on ecological indigeneity and on ecological Indian would be useful in the near future to approach ecological indegeneity which is complexly related to the issues of sustainability within indigenous communities and issues of land.