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24 - Expanding Critical and Radical Approaches to Environmental Justice

from Part V - Social Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2020

By
David N. Pellow
Edited by
Katharine Legun ,
Julie C. Keller ,
Michael Carolan  and
Michael M. Bell
Katharine Legun
Affiliation:
Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands
Julie C. Keller
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island
Michael Carolan
Affiliation:
Colorado State University
Michael M. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary

While the field of environmental justice studies has produced robust theoretical and methodological advances and tools for exploring the intersections among ecological harms and social inequalities, there are numerous limitations within that body of literature. Critical environmental justice is a framework proposed to address some of those gaps, and is applied in this chapter to the case of the Israel-Palestinian conflict to illuminate some ways through which scholars can 1) expand the range of social categories considered in EJ studies, 2) employ and pursue a multiscalar analysis of EJ conflicts, 3) interrogate the logic of dominance and hierarchy that pervade much of EJ scholarship and politics, and 4) introduce the idea of indispensability—a form of ethical political ecology—to address narratives and practices of expendability that underlie many EJ conflicts.

Keywords

environmental justiceIsraelPalestinescalespeciesindispensabilityZionism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Sociology , pp. 399 - 415
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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