Many environmental social scientists have seen our role as only empirically describing what occurs, from public opinion to social movements and risk perception. What is to be the contribution of environmental social sciences to imagining and building new low-carbon societies? This chapter reviews the “history of futuring” and its relation to environmental sociology. The rise of the concept of just transitions in particular and societal transitions more broadly have driven a new wave of envisioning of post-carbon futures, which has forced a set of more propositional approaches. We sketch eight positions, including the dominant “natural capitalism” and “breakthrough” ecomodernism, queer and anti-colonial transition thinking, and Geels’ multi-level perspective to design for transition. We review a number of red/green approaches: from “degrowth” and solidarity economics to red/green productivism and state-centered approaches, including the Green New Deal. Together, these represent significant new directions for environmental social sciences: not only describing social change, but also leading it. We argue this reconstructive turn in the environmental social sciences is much needed.

Introduction: a “shared vision”?

In late 2007, the world sighed in relief after two grueling weeks of international climate negotiations that resulted in an upbeat-sounding ‘Bali Roadmap.’ The Roadmap identified a series of steps that might be taken to break the North–South impasse and solve the global climate crisis. In particular, a process under an Ad Hoc Working Group for Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) was tasked with breaking the deadlock over who should act in cleaning up the atmosphere, and how. The answer, according to the Roadmap, was that developed and developing countries would move forward with “a shared vision for long-term cooperative action, including a long-term global goal for emissions reductions, to achieve the ultimate objective of the Convention [avoiding dangerous climate change].”

However, as negotiations moved on to Bonn, Accra, and Poznan in 2008, nearly every word of the Bali Action Plan was contested. In the run-up to the 14th Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP14) in Poznan, Poland, in December, 2008, 76 Parties submitted “Ideas and Proposals” to the Working Group. China asserted that developed countries would need to “tak[e] the lead in reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases, while ensuring development rights and spaces for developing countries.” Only with such a mid-term target being clearly determined, they argued, is it meaningful to talk about any long-term goals for emission reductions (UNFCCC, 2008b).

INTRODUCTION

Given the extreme dominance of the oil and chemical industry with the state and federal governments, the ability of these four communities to gain any redress is fairly remarkable. Although not uniformly positive, the outcomes of the four cases detailed here show substantial gains for the environmental justice community in the 1990s. Others could be cited, such as the incinerators in Chester, Pennsylvania, or the refineries in South Los Angeles, but these Louisiana battles were among the most important cases in the nation for the period.

Having been surprised once, industry did not sit idly by. They fought back in several ways against the potential of environmental justice claims to create uncertainty in their planning. This backlash sought to change the game, making future struggles more difficult for communities. In this way, the Shintech struggle, especially, was like the Cuban Revolution: all later struggles will have to deal with its legacy – hardened positions on each side.

This chapter chronicles the backlash against environmental justice victories on the national and local levels in its first two sections. At its end, we survey the prospects for both sides and consider the future implications of the movement. There, we return to the three themes posed at the outset of the book. What is environmental justice? Who are they players, and what tools do they use to get their way? How do people experience environmental injustice?

INTRODUCTION

Coming from a long line of sugar farmers, Dale Hymel is the President of the Council for St. James Parish, lying roughly halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. In spite of his tie to farming, Hymel recognizes that “the majority of people realize that industry in this area is the driving force in the parish. Without industry we would have to go back to where we were before in the thirties and forties with just agriculture and trapping and logging. That doesn't pay a whole lot of money in wages.” The industry Hymel refers to is eighteen chemical plants and manufacturers of all sizes, which employ approximately 1,800 people and contribute significantly to the local tax base.

To keep the parish economy growing, Hymel believes that the parish government should assist all business and industry in developing in any way it can. He said that the government will provide companies with access to office space, phone, and copy machines while they are getting set up in the parish. He also believes that local government representatives should “walk” companies through the permitting process, making them aware of parish ordinances and regulations, and generally make the businesses feel welcome.

Hymel believes that community residents have a minimal role in decision making concerning which industries should be welcomed into the parish. He views the community's role as electing leaders, such as himself, who will, in turn, make the development decisions for the parish.

TWO MOTHERS ON A LANDFILL

Elodia Blanco was born in New Orleans to a Creole Catholic nurse and her husband, a Guatemalan seaman. The family lived two blocks from the Lafitte public housing project until her parents divorced when she was at an early age. The kids would alternate summers, spending one with her father in San Francisco and the next in Guatemala or traveling with him as he worked as a chef on the ships. By age sixteen, Elodia was married, and two years later she had two baby boys. After a disagreement with her husband, she took her boys to California to live with her father and her “Nanny,” his wife. “I knew I had to get out of New Orleans.” They were the only African-Americans in that part of Marin County, where she lived for a decade. After earning her high school equivalence and studying for several years of college around the Bay Area, Elodia remarried her trucker ex husband and they had a daughter. She moved the family back to New Orleans when her mother took ill. Upon her return, Elodia landed a good job in Mayor Dutch Morial's office as a program manager.

There, she learned about a new federally supported housing development called Gordon Plaza, which sounded perfect for their family's needs and fit within their means.

SILENT BATTLEFIELDS IN A FRAGILE LANDSCAPE

Driving along Interstate 10 from east New Orleans to Baton Rouge, the traveler first climbs steeply over the Industrial Canal between the Mississippi River and the Intracoastal Waterway and then drops just as precipitously, rumbling past dingy railroads and industrial land before passing signs for the French Quarter. The Industrial Canal has barges backed up waiting their turn to go through a century-old shipping lock. Today it is the site of a bitter struggle between the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who want to spend twelve years expanding the lock and residents of the neighborhood who fear it would release toxics from contaminated soils, block traffic, and rattle their homes for over a decade. The predominantly African-American neighborhood claims that choosing to expand the lock rather than siting it in wetlands to the south constitutes environmental racism and has sued the Corps and placed a restraining order to prevent the beginning of the project.

Just past the Canal, off to the left of the highway, is the Agriculture Street Landfill neighborhood, where a middle-class black subdivision was built directly on top of the old city dump in the late 1970s with Federal Housing Authority money. Noxious odors, illnesses, and sinking houses alerted neighbors to the risk, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put the site on the Superfund “National Priority List” for cleanup in 1994 after conducting soil tests that uncovered 150 toxins in the dirt.

Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline examines how local movements have succeeded and failed in Louisiana – a state that has been called a “pollution haven”: a place where companies come to exploit natural resources, cheap energy, nonunion labor, tax breaks, and lax environmental enforcement. We believe that the Louisiana cases chronicled in this book are particularly illustrative of processes at work everywhere; and the stakes in these cases were enormous and national. These cases have pushed politicians and policy at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Department of Energy, and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The combatants have brought their battles to these agencies in Washington, D.C., and to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland.

The cause of protecting these tiny Louisiana communities has been taken up by rock stars, celebrities, politicians, international and national environmental organizations, and networks of environmental justice activists and lawyers. Their efforts have been resisted by powerful business lobbying groups in Washington and Baton Rouge, chambers of commerce across the state and nation, probusiness politicians, and highly placed government agency leaders. The cases are illuminating partly because so much of the coordination between business and government in advancing economic development over the complaints of citizens groups is publicly expressed in Louisiana.

“TOXIC IN ALABAMA, NONTOXIC IN LOUISIANA”

Over a period of a week and a half, eighty-one sleek white tanker trucks, with red diamond-shaped warning placards, rolled down the highway from an Exxon oil-drilling site at Big Escambia Creek in Alabama. Crossing the Louisiana line on Interstate 10, their cargo was magically transformed from “hazardous” to “nonhazardous” by the different definitions found in the laws of the two different states. By crossing state lines, the price of disposing of the contents also magically plunged, from $85 a barrel to just $6.50.

This alchemy was possible due to an enormous loophole negotiated by oil companies after frantic days of political maneuvering in Congress leading up to the votes on the 1980 amendments to the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). In the loophole, with the obscure name Rule 29-B under Section 3001(b)(2)(A) of RCRA, the regulation of “oilfield waste” is left to the individual states. Alabama had defined the by-product of oil drilling as hazardous material, whereas Louisiana, the site of decades of oil exploration, elected to label oilfield waste as nonhazardous. EPA secretary Carol Browner put it simply: “Big Oil got a sweetheart deal.”

The trucks, with no markings indicating that they carried Exxon's waste, and no placards on the outside detailing what was in them, turned off Interstate 10 to cross the Mississippi River onto Highway 90, and then turned left onto the tiny Louisiana Highway 24 surrounded by marshy willows, from Houma to the tiny bayou fishing town of LaRose.

RACE AND DEVELOPMENT IN LOUISIANA

In Louisiana, race and economics have always been intricately intertwined. Struggling to occupy and profit from its vast territory along the Mississippi, the French Crown in 1717 granted a monopoly called the Company of the West to a Scot named John Law. His company parceled out land along the river and financial support to those who would develop tobacco and rice farms there. Two years later the first major shipment of enslaved Africans arrived, and over the next decade their population grew sevenfold, going from half the population of white Europeans to over twice their numbers.

Where slaves outnumbered owners by a large margin, repression was intense. Slaves were brutally treated upon their capture, in transit, and upon their arrival in Louisiana, many dying each year from maltreatment and disease. Slave ship captains sailed with orders to bring rice from Africa and slaves with experience in growing it and the dye plant indigo. For these reasons slaves from the Senegambia region of West Africa were prized in Louisiana.

After France ceded control of Louisiana to Spain in 1763, the Spaniards poured energy and resources into its new colony. In the next quarter century, the numbers of slaves grew fourfold. This was the period in which the Acadians (later dubbed the derogatory “Cajun”), French speakers who had been exiled from Canada, began to arrive. During this time, Spain and France went to war, and revolution swept over the British colonies nearby and, more importantly for Louisiana, over France.