Conclusion

Conclusion

This book traces the lineage of environmental justice from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, as I feel it is important that we understand both the historical roots and the current manifestations of environmental inequality and environmental racism in the United States and around the world. Much has changed since the civil rights movement. In fact, since then, the wealth gap in the United States has grown steadily. And in an era of Citizen’s United, where campaign contributions are effectively limitless, it is difficult to know where the monied influence is coming from and who is behind the forces that produce environmental injustice and environmental racism. For example, dark monied interests like the Koch brothers and DeVos family have infiltrated every aspect of government policy that affects their corporate interests from energy to public infrastructure. Betsy DeVos is the current U.S. secretary of education. Today conservative think tanks write more policy than those we elect for public service. And they have gotten what they wanted: tax cuts, control of the judicial system from lower courts to the Supreme Court, excessive influence by foundations, increased militarization and criminalization, and support by the nation’s premier institutions of higher education. These are formidable foes to grassroots efforts trying to participate in the political process, let alone understand the root causes of their uneven hardships.

In addition to providing a critical analysis of the abuse of power by dominant institutions with respect to the perpetration of environmental injustices, we also need a deeper exploration of the conditions under which contemporary race, class, and gendered politics are established, justified, and reproduced in the United States and around the world. Such an effort, the eminent scholar Paul Gilroy (1987) writes, would require scholars concerned with matters of inequality to root these particular findings of disproportionality within the historical processes and encompassing systems in which it is found. Such analysis would reveal not only the changing patterns in racist and sexist ideology and practice but also the manner in which these “fit into the transformation” of state institutions “and political culture at a time of extensive social and economic change.” “The true responsibility for the existence of these deplorable conditions,” Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “lies ultimately with the larger society, and much of the immediate responsibility for removing the injustices can be laid directly at the door of the federal government.”

These new relations—political, economic, and environmental—require us to think more critically about efforts to achieve environmental justice. We have suggested some strategies—theoretical and methodological—in this book, but we have only scratched the surface of possibilities available to us. Freedom and justice are indeed constant struggles, and we need to be vigilant of the emergent [Page 305]threats—new and old—to social and environmental justice, and ecological sustainability, as all of our lives depend on our doing so. I end with an important thought from the inspirational poet and writer Audre Lorde (2007), “[W]e must face with clarity and insight the lessons to be learned from the oversimplification of any struggle for self-awareness and liberation, or we will not rally the force we need to face the multidimensional threats to our survival” (p. 138). I hope this book provides a little of both clarity and insight.

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