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9 Environmental justice in industrially contaminated sites: From the development of a national surveillance system to the birth of an international network Roberto Pasetto and Ivano Iavarone Sites highly contaminated by a variety of hazardous agents are found in almost all countries as contaminants are routinely or accidentally released into the environment either by active industrial sources or as toxic waste from current or past industrial activities. From a public health point of view, contaminated sites can be defined as, “Areas hosting or having hosted
This book examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. Debates over science, facts, and values have always been pivotal within environmental justice struggles. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuses of science, while at the same time engaging in community-led citizen science. However, post-truth politics has threatened science itself. This book makes the case for the importance of science, knowledge, and data that are produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. The international, interdisciplinary contributions range from grassroots environmental justice struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, to questions about “knowledge justice,” citizenship, participation, and data in citizen science surrounding toxicity. The book features inspiring studies of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research; different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice; political strategies for seeking environmental justice; and ways of expanding the concepts and forms of engagement of citizen science around the world. While the book will be of critical interest to specialists in social and environmental sciences, it will also be accessible to graduate and postgraduate audiences. More broadly, the book will appeal to members of the public interested in social justice issues, as well as community members who are thinking about participating in citizen science and activism. Toxic Truths includes distinguished contributing authors in the field of environmental justice, alongside cutting-edge research from emerging scholars and community activists.
deepening at both global and local levels. As we write this book, Trump is defunding environmental protection and has pulled the USA from the Paris climate agreement; Brexit is threatening to derail environmental regulation in the UK; and Bolsonaro is opening up vast tracts of Amazonian rainforest – the world’s largest carbon sink – to permanent exploitation. What does this mean for the role of science in environmental controversies? Environmental justice is about making claims about the environment (Bullard 1990; Walker 2012; Schlosberg 2013). Around the world today
08/06/2020 15:32 100 Environmental justice and participatory citizen science your garden and enjoy the sunshine, but the smell of decomposing flesh mingles with smell of hog feces, causing you to gag and retreat into your home. You feel angry and depressed. You think about selling your house, but the proximity and smell of the hog operation causes your property value to drop. The barbeques you once loved are impossible due to swarms of flies, and your children can’t play outside because it’s too hard to breathe. Your own asthma worsens. You call everyone you
policy making, spurred legislation, raised public awareness, attracted media coverage, and spawned social movement activity. Dealing with toxic trespass brings to light disputes between laypeople and professionals, citizens and governments, and among professionals, because the consequences of exposure are often poorly understood and because environmentally induced diseases are among the most prominent types of “contested illnesses” (Brown 2007). Toxic trespass often disproportionately impacts environmental justice (EJ) communities, because polluting facilities are
,000 premature deaths per year or the loss of 8,1 months of life expectancy for every European citizen (EEA 2016) homogenizes the effects within the population, and thus conceals actually existing spatial differentiations, citizen movements in Antwerp succeeded in pointing to these differentiations and thereby mobilized a significant part of the citizenry around a call for environmental justice. Or, to put it in political terms, whereas the European Environmental Agency (EEA) has framed the problem in a way that risks leading to a situation in which no group feels particularly
contested measure toward São Paulo’s beautification authorized by Dória: the cover-up of areas inhabited by the homeless community below São Paulo’s viaducts. This action, according to the mayor, was meant to protect them from the weather. However, reports from within his government suggest that this was actually done to hide them from the rest of São Paulo’s urban space. We can, then, speculate on how the idea of visual pollution can be exploited and how it can impact on important issues such as the environmental justice of São Paulo’s population. The number of homeless
right-wing political demagoguery, bent on “inflaming anger and resentment” (Hoffman 2018, 449) and willing to invent and disseminate new “facts” as needed for coercion and confusion in the name of proto-authoritarian political gamesmanship. This so-called populism is not the same as public participation in the creation of science, which involves “arrangements that facilitate the active involvement of DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 59 08/06/2020 15:32 60 Environmental justice and participatory citizen science o utsiders” (Marres 2018b, 454) toward a
(Peeples 2011; Davies 2013; Barnett 2015; Rosenfeld et al. 2018), the chapter contends that engaging with participatory visualization and documentation can provide vital contextualization for debates grappling with the toxic injustices and environmental politics of e-waste labor. I explore how and why visual techniques in participatory action research matter in global environmental justice studies in general and postcolonial e-waste studies in Ghana in particular. This participatory e-waste visualization project accounts for the critical role of researcher
toxic contamination linked to a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts. Reverend Young and other citizen activists conducted their own community health study in Woburn in partnership with public health scientists. Woburn became a model for “popular epidemiology” in which “laypeople detect and act on environmental hazards and diseases,” often with conflicts between lay and professional ways of knowing (Brown 1992, 268). DAVIES & MAH 9781526137029 PRINT.indd 29 08/06/2020 15:32 30 Environmental justice and participatory citizen science From its