Season 1 Ep. 8 - Why We Need Environmental Justice

PART 1

Charlotte Tate
From the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, this is New Frontiers. I’m Charlotte Tate, associate director of the Rohatyn Center. New Frontiers podcasts highlight research undertaken by Middlebury scholars and others, on matters of international and global concern.  Everything is fair game—from big tech, environmental conservation and global security—to religion, culture, and changing work patterns.

In this episode Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center—and political scientist Kemi Fuentes-George, discuss the environmental justice movement: some of its economic, political, social, and racial dimensions; how it’s manifest here in the United States and abroad; and what achieving environmental justice for marginalized populations might actually entail.  

Mark Williams
Environmental degradation is an unfortunate reality of our times, and it’s often seen as a byproduct of industrialization, resource exploitation, and production practices. Americans became more sensitized to environmental degradation in the 1970s. And as our understanding grew, so did our awareness that the costs of environmental damage weren’t born equally. Some Americans bear a lot more of the costs than do others. Why do more Black and Latino Americans live closer to or even within the midst of toxic waste sites than White Americans? What role do race and colonialism play in creating situations of environmental injustice? And what, if anything, can be done to promote greater environmental justice for all?

Here to discuss some of these things with me today is Kemi Fuentes-George, Associate Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. Kemi is a faculty fellow at the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs, where he oversees the Center’s Program on Security and Global Affairs. He’s written extensively about international environmental policy, environmental conservation, biodiversity, the green economy and environmental justice, including in journals like “Global Environmental Politics,” a variety of book chapters, and in his own book “Between Preservation and Exploitation,” which was published by the MIT Press. Today, I’ll talk with him about some of his most recent scholarship including a 2021 study on comparative environmental justice that was published in the “Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics,” as well as one of his new research projects on “why the colonialism of old still impedes indigenous participation in environmental management.” Kemi Fuentes-George, welcome to New Frontiers.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Mark Williams
I’m glad you’re here. Now, a lot of your research has been about environmental justice in a comparative perspective. So let’s start with some definitions and instead of starting with what you focus on, which is environmental justice, let’s begin with its inverse. What should we understand by the idea of environmental injustice? How would you define that?

Kemi Fuentes-George
All right. So environmental injustice is a little bit easier to define than environmental justice as we’ll see in a second. But the basic idea is that, as a result of human activity we generate environmental impacts, whether this is land degradation or air pollution, or water pollution, or what have you. And environmental injustice occurs when the negative results of these impacts primarily accrue to populations who are marginalized or otherwise vulnerable, and the benefits of these processes accrue to populations that are already privileged. And you have a situation which marginalized and vulnerable populations are systematically shut out or disenfranchised from participating in the political system to help address how these goods and benefits are distributed.

Mark Williams
So, if I’m hearing you correctly, the bads of environmental degradation are concentrated among specific groups. Those groups themselves lack access to our input into discussions and policy making about environmental management.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right? Exactly. And then the definition of these groups is going to vary from country to country and in cases within countries. So in some cases, these groups are primarily identified by racial difference. So in the United States, you had mentioned Black and Latino populations, for instance. In some cases, these groups will be identified primarily by economic difference. So in Appalachia, for instance, some of the major victims of coal mountaintop removal are low income White communities. And there are of course, Black people who live in Appalachia but that is a predominantly White area. In some cases, these would be gendered communities. So there’s a very complex story by this woman called Yvonne Braun, who’s done work in Lesotho studying how the construction of dams and the damming in the Lesotho Highlands have had gendered impacts on women and girls who’ve been exposed to sexual assault, loss of land tenure as a result of how restitution, resettlement processes around dams have been carried out. And of course, there are ways in which these all intersect. Who is defined as a vulnerable population varies by context but there’s always a sense of vulnerability and privilege.

Mark Williams
Okay. Well, you’ve partially answered a question that I was going to ask next. I wanted to know if you could give us some good prominent examples of what environmental injustice is, examples that would illustrate the definition. And I was going to ask whether the best examples were found in the United States, or whether the patterns of injustice were replicated beyond U.S. borders as well.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, I mean, the sad thing for humanity, and I guess the good thing for my research, is that environmental injustice is everywhere. And in some cases, the processes are primarily local, and in some cases, the processes are global. So, when we think of, or when I think of local cases of environmental injustice, for instance, I could think of, I mean, in the United States where this language kind of originated, places like Cancer Alley, which is in St. James Parish in Louisiana. In St. James Parish, there’s this zone that was zoned as residential/industrial in 2014. And by zoning—this is a majority Black parish by the way, 85 percent Black—and in this zone, by having it classified this way, petrochemical companies were able to start building just entire highway lengths of petrochemical plants for refining and oil production in this parish. If you look at images of St. James Parish and Cancer Alley, you’ll see just highways with just rows and rows of petrochemical plants, you know, belching smog into the atmosphere,

Mark Williams
And people are living there?

Kemi Fuentes-George
And people are living there. And so you have all of this, you know, local air pollution, local water pollution concentrated in these majority Black neighborhoods, and correspondingly, rates of cancer that are two or three times the rate that would be found in White neighborhoods of comparable social economic status but, you know, without the petrochemical plants. And of course, we as consumers, we benefit from petrochemical companies. We use plastics, we use oil, you know, we benefit from refined oil. Our ability to consume at the rate that we consume is facilitated by the fact that petrochemical companies are not paying the real cost for their production. Right? The cost is born by these low-income Black communities. When we think of global cases, a good case study to look at would be the city of Agbogbloshie, which is in Ghana, and it’s now known as the world’s digital dumping ground. So, this is a port city in which Ghana receives shipments of electronic materials among other things, as a port city. And a lot of these electronic materials are classified as recyclable or consumer goods but end up being, in many cases, dumped electronic goods or e-waste. And so there have been studies since 2006 by organizations like the Basel Action Network that have tracked how goods that are taken to places in the United States or in Germany for recycling old computers, old cell phones, old cathode ray tubes, like really old televisions and so on, are taken to places where consumers believe they’re going to be recycled and then are taken on containerships illicitly, sometimes clandestinely, and taken over to Ghana and essentially just dumped in massive open air pits in which they can leach heavy metals like lead and mercury or persistent organic pollutants like PFAS or PFOA into the ground, into the air, into the water supply. And in which local children often will take these electronics and set them on fire in order to extract the gold and silver and platinum that’s inside of them, thus further exposing themselves to toxic chemicals in the fire.

Mark Williams
I was going to say, it doesn’t sound very healthy.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Oh, no, it’s terrible. It’s terrible. Right. So these are communities in Ghana that are low income, that are very heavily marginalized, that are desperate. They’re not the ones buying Macs or PlayStations or flat screen TVs, right. We in the industrialized world are the ones who are using these things and then shipping them off to be hopefully recycled, but in reality, oftentimes at a scale that we don’t really know, just disposed of and becoming environmental hazards and toxins for people who are on the other side of the digital divide.

Mark Williams
Could you tell me if, you know this arrangement with Ghana, this is something undertaken by the Ghanaian government as opposed to whatever the local authority might be, where the dumping grounds are?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah. So it’s a little bit complex. So the way in which waste shipment works in principle is there’s this international agreement called the Basel Convention. And the way that the signators to the Basel Convention, which include Ghana, the way that they’re supposed to operate is that an importer country has to receive prior informed consent from an exporter country. So if an exporter country, you know, there’s some goods originating there that are going to be traded on the international market, which includes waste to another country, you have to label them, explain to the importer what the possible hazards are, define which goods are waste, and which goods are recyclable, which goods are consumer goods. Verify that the importer company has the ability to process or dispose or treat of this waste. And in principle, what that should do is allow free trade and allow poorer countries to get electronic goods cheaper. We in the United States, we’re used to having the latest cutting-edge technology, but you could imagine a good argument for people who would otherwise have no access to technology, that they might benefit from having things that are slightly out of date that we’ve gone past, for instance. Right. The problem with the Basel Convention, and I think you just kind of hit on it, is that this is an agreement between governments, right. So if the Ghanaian government, for instance, decides that it wants to import e-waste or electronic goods from another country or another company but without having really much interest in ensuring that it’s disposed of properly or taking care of disposal or recycling it or checking it. There’s not really much that marginalized people inside those countries can do, especially when—this is not so much the case in Ghana but in other countries in Africa that are recipient countries like Sierra Leone—this is especially exacerbated when you have an authoritarian or autocratic country. In which case the government can completely wash its hands of taking care of e-waste and waste goods, because the people who are bearing the cost are so vulnerable and so far removed that their wishes could be ignored entirely.

Mark Williams
Thanks. Okay, well, let’s flip it over. We now know what environmental injustice means. What about environmental justice? What should we understand by that concept?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, so this is actually kind of difficult to describe for a variety of reasons. So in 2016 there was this guy from the American Enterprise Institute and the Federalist Society called Roger Clegg, and he was testifying in front of congress on environmental racism and environmental injustices. And he had this argument where he said, “We really should stop thinking about environmental injustice.” Because as I mentioned in the beginning, environmental injustice occurs when you have harms accruing to one population and goods and benefits accruing to a privileged population. And so, in this testimony, Clegg said the problem with these environmental justice advocates is that what they’re arguing for is that pollution should be racially balanced and politically correct, right. So I want to emphasize by saying the point of environmental justice is we don’t have environmental justice when you have a bad environmental situation that’s equally shared. So, if you could imagine some hypothetical scenario in which you have a mixed-race city or district where everyone is equally exposed to the cancer causing chemicals, I don’t think anyone would call that   environmental justice. So environmental justice should have at least some component of a sustainable and well managed environment in which harms are not primarily accrued to a vulnerable population. Where it gets tricky though, is defining who are the actors that can make justiciable claims with regards to the environment. One of the big debates is whether or not things that are alive but are not human deserve environmental rights and environmental justice protection. So, trees for instance, right? Trees are, you know, alive. There’s some who would make an argument that trees have a right life, that you could violate the rights of trees or beavers or any other kind of living organism by engaging in wanton destruction of the environment. And that as a result, what you need to have in order to have real environmental justice is some kind of mechanism by which the rights of living, but non-human things can be protected in a legal system. And so this idea that trees could be appointed, or any other living non-human thing could be appointed, a  guardian or representative dates back, at least in the United States, to legal arguments of the scholar Christopher Stone, who advanced this very idea, and it may sound strange but it’s really not that far-fetched. I mean, corporations, for instance, are entities that have representatives that can represent their interests in a court of law. And corporations are, you know, they’re made up of people. But in reality it’s a legal fiction, right? It’s a legal actor, not a like a living actor in the way a tree or a bison would be. There are some however, who would say that this idea of extending rights to non-human things doesn’t make sense. And so there’s a philosopher called Richard Hiskes who argues that in order for a justice or rights claim to be meaningful, there has to be some sense of reciprocity or the possibility of reciprocity between the claimant and the claimee. And so his argument is that rights and justice claims can only take place between human beings because human beings have the capacity for reciprocity and living in a society, in ways that like a human and an otter do not.    

Mark Williams
Well, it sounds like there’s still an open debate there, and I’m wondering where you come down? How would you present your own view on environmental justice in a fairly succinct way? What does it mean to you?

Kemi Fuentes-George
For me, environmental justice would require a very real accounting of the costs that our rate of consumption are imposing on marginalized people. First of all something like Cancer Alley, to me, should not exist. There should not be such a concentration of environmentally toxic products and processes so close to, well, anybody, but certainly not towards marginalized populations. But that doesn’t mean that I think that environmental justice would occur if you take those same petrochemical companies and just put them all over different places of the United States. I think part of the problem is that we’ve gotten so used to consuming at the rate that we’re consuming, that we assume that environmental justice or that environmental solution would maintain our rate of consumption and just disperse the harms elsewhere. And I believe that environmental justice could only be possible if we radically curb how much of these toxic, you know, goods whether there’s heavy metals or petrochemical products we consume overall.

Mark Williams
Okay. Great. In the study that you published with the Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics you say something I’d like to quote and then get your response. You say “the language and rhetoric of environmental justice has origins that are largely American” and I’m wondering how is that, so, and could you elaborate a little bit about what you mean by that?

Kemi Fuentes-George
So the processes of environmental injustice date back basically to colonialism.   But the language specifically of the words environmental justice and environmental racism came out of the 1980s in the American South, when Black and Latino communities became, I don’t want to say aware because I’m sure they must have known about it, but they began gathering data, demonstrating to outside viewers that they were the victims of targeted environmental toxins and hazards. So things like dumping, you know, again the siting of chemical plants or industrial plants and so on, right? And in 1987, the United Church of Christ and local advocacy groups created a study in which they presented this information to the U.S. Congress and to the public at large, in which they said, in essence, a new civil rights battle for Black communities in the United States was going to be on the frontier of environmental justice and environmental racism. This language became globalized throughout the late 1980s and late 1990s, when in response to domestic pressure companies in the United States, industrial companies, electronics companies, found it harder to dispose of waste domestically, and therefore began shipping waste abroad, leading to, as I mentioned earlier situations like Agbogbloshie or dumping up waste in Haiti. Gonaives, Haiti was kind of one of the big instances of international environmental injustice. Now in the United States coalitions of activists, Black activists in particular, became aware of what was taking place in Haiti, and then linked up with some activists in Haiti in the 1980s to try to get industrial ash that was being dumped on the beach, taken away, and then disposed of properly. And so through that global connection, the language of environmental racism and environmental justice began spreading in other countries around the world. And then that language, over time, also became adapted to kind of frame what was taking place in different contexts, like in conservation issues, in water issues, in dam management issues, and so on.

Mark Williams
Outside of the United States.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Exactly. But at the same time, like when I was doing my research in Jamaica and Mexico, I found several instances of what I consider to be environmental injustice, but the people didn’t use this terminology. They would talk about things being unfair or things being a threat to their culture, or a threat to their way of life. And there was a sense that they were victims of a government that was not responsive to their wishes, and that was doing work among rural people, marginalized rural people in Jamaica and in Mexico. But they didn’t use the words environmental racism and environmental justice. And I think that’s primarily a terminological thing. I’m not sure to what extent that language is necessary for the kind of coalition building that is needed to push back on these processes.

Mark Williams
Whether it is a benefit or whether it is a hindrance to employ that type of language and describing this phenomenon?

Kemi Fuentes-George
I guess my concern is that to these communities, I wouldn’t want it to seem like the Americanization of their struggles, right? To bring in this terminology that did not originate in Jamaica or Mexico, what have you. I mean, if they adopted it themselves, I think that’s fine. But it’s funny because these processes are global and local at the same time. Rates of consumption, oil extraction, digital dumping. These are things that are now tied into the global economy but that are also mediated so much by local, political and social realities.

Mark Williams
Now, one of the things that I like about your research is that it doesn’t just identify the cause of environmental injustice and stop, more or less with that gloomy conclusion. You also argue that there is a pathway out of this type of situation. Basically, you suggest that the key to environmental justice is through proper environmental management and conservation. And when I say it like that, it sounds relatively easy. But let me play devil’s advocate a little bit here. Is it really easy, or are there certain conditions that really have to hold before conservation can produce genuine environmental justice?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, it’s actually super hard. I think one of the things to pay attention to, right, is that I had kind of suggested earlier that environmental injustice takes space when you have marginalized populations who are disenfranchised from the political system, right? But having marginalized populations participate has to be taken into consideration with these broader kind of structural issues. And so, going back to Appalachia, for instance, some of the people who are most resistant to stopping mountaintop removal and coal mining in Appalachia are low income Appalachian residents. And they tend to do things like vote for people who are going to quote-unquote bring back coal.  There’s a lot of support for Trump, for instance, on that very basis, despite the fact that they’re the ones facing the loss of the watersheds, air pollution, water pollution, what have you. And so there’s a sense that if you have marginalized populations, whether White Appalachians, or Indians in the Ecuador in Amazon, or, you know, Maroons in Jamaica. If you have them participate and vote or support politicians who have a certain perspective on environmental management, if they continue to exist in a socioeconomic situation that creates tremendous pressure on them, that they see their only options are either have a job with terrible pollution or have no job and live in extreme poverty but in a clean environment, then it’s kind of a difficult choice for them to make. And so addressing environmental injustice can only be done, I think, with addressing other kinds of structural issues—social welfare, social safety net, child care, medical care, access to food—all these other structural issues that are not immediately and obviously environmental but that would nevertheless enable people to participate in a way that that doesn’t feel quite as dire and precarious as having, here are your two options: starve or, you know, live in this hell hole but you can pay the rent.

Mark Williams
And the way that you’re describing it underscores just how complex it actually is.   Environmental management is not something that exists in one dimension. It is intersected by multiple other dimensions and can be affected for good or ill by what’s going on in those other dimensions.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right. Exactly. Exactly. And again, going back to an earlier point I made about consumption. We do have to pay attention to the fact that—I’m aware of this right now, right, I’m looking at my MacBook Pro right now—I am part of this consumer society that’s gotten so used to this rate of consumption without really being cognizant about what it means for where the costs of these consumption are being born.

Mark Williams
The costs seem to be in significant ways externalized away from the beneficiaries.  And concentrated in those who are less beneficiary.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right, exactly. And then if they’re done that way, you don’t need to pay any attention to them, right? You don’t need to pay attention to, you know, the cost of cleanup. If we’re not cognizant of these issues, then it becomes economically easy to remain at our current level of consumption. I mean, I think about oil production and oil extraction all the time. And exporter countries like Nigeria, for instance, where during colonialism, when the British found oil in the Niger Delta and began exporting it on the global market until Nigeria became independent in 1960 and basically continue this process. You know, you have this method of oil extraction that is environmentally very damaging. You have gas flares, you have regular oil spills, and then you have a level of violence against people within the area who are understandably upset at all of this supported by the state and supported by corporations. The murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the leader of the Ogoni people in like early 1990s I don’t remember the exact year, was carried out because he was in opposition to the environmental devastation that was taking place in the Niger Delta. And so when I think about the calculation of the Nigerian government and Shell that it’s cheaper to use violence against the local population and just spill oil everywhere and flare gas and destroy the local environment because that keeps their cost of production lower, it raises a question like, how much would oil cost if they had taken the oil out and not murdered people or thrown them off their land and made sure that the gas was being managed correctly and all of this? It would probably be a lot more expensive.

Mark Williams
If all the externalities were properly priced, what would the cost of gasoline actually be?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, exactly. And maybe we’d have more public transportation and maybe we would’ve had electric cars before. Now I don’t know.

Mark Williams
Coming up, part 2—where Kemi and I turn our attention to the linkages between environmental injustice, and such forces as colonialism and racism—as well as the challenges of achieving effective environmental management.



 

PART 2

Mark Williams
Hi. I’m Mark Williams—director of the Rohatyn Center for Global Affairs at Middlebury College, and host of the “New Frontiers” podcast.  If you’re just joining us, this is part 2 of my conversation with political scientist Kemi Fuentes-George.  In this episode, we’ll continue our discussion about how colonialism and racism have helped generate environmental injustice—and some of the challenges we face in achieving effective environmental management.

If you like this conversation, check out some of the other episodes of the “New Frontiers” podcasts—available wherever you get your podcasts.  

Mark Williams
Again, you may have partially answered a question that I wanted to ask you. I’ll go ahead and ask it and see whether or not more remains to be said. Some of the work that you’ve been doing focuses on the impact that colonialism has had on the way that resources are exploited and how environmental degradation takes place, and how environmental injustices get created and perpetuated. Can you briefly elaborate on some of those points about colonialism and its impact?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, it’s a lot.  All right. So one of which is—I kind of mentioned this just now with the Nigerian case—one of the ways in which colonialism has affected environmental injustice globally is that it’s shaped the primary means of economic revenue in developing countries. Nigeria would be one example. Another great example would be Jamaica. So Jamaica is one of the top three producers of bauxite, which is used to make what Americans say aluminum, where they should be pronounced aluminum. So it’s Australia, China, and then Jamaica. So we’re a massive producer of bauxite. And bauxite was discovered while we were under British colonial rule in the 1940s and 1950s. And has since been one of our top earners of foreign revenue. I think it’s like 10 percent of GDP, roughly equivalent to tourism, which is another major earner. And so bauxite mining started and was facilitated in the countryside of Jamaica by the fact that we had a British colonial government, the people who lived in the countryside of Jamaica were either low income farmers without secure land tenure or like large land owners, right? Who were descendants or inheritors of plantations, slavery plantations. So when the British government began expanding the extraction of bauxite in Jamaica, which requires entirely removing the ground cover over a bauxite deposit so you destroy all the biodiversity, all the trees, all the vegetation and so on. You mine out the bauxite minerals, which uses a lot of caustic chemicals and toxic chemicals. And then you leave these massive red mud leaks, okay? Which dry and then this toxic dust goes into the atmosphere; lands on people’s clothes, their houses, their skin; creates respiratory illnesses; just like really devastating. That was made possible by the fact that this was a colonial system in which a colonial government wanted to manufacture these goods for the international market for aviation and airplanes in particular. And that process has remained virtually unchanged since Jamaica became independent in 1962. In fact, when I was doing research on this process for my book, one of the people in one of the rural regions where bauxite deposits were found, said that the problem with bauxite is that first it was colonialism under the British, and now it’s colonialism under the Black man in Kingston. It’s the same basic idea. Another way in which we see colonialism affecting environmental injustice.

Mark Williams
Can I stop you before you proceed to another example? You’re a native of Jamaica, you grew up there. I know that you’ve studied this as part of your research, but growing up, at what point did you become cognizant of some of the things that you later began to study?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, to be honest, and I feel kind of bad saying this, but not until, probably like not until I started doing this research, honestly, like 2006 or 2007.

Mark Williams
Well after you reached maturity.

Kemi Fuentes-George
And a large part of that was something that I find very interesting is that in the United States, this idea of Black identities has historically been very kind of binary. You’re Black or you’re White. And then if you’re mixed Black and White, well, you’re Black, you know what I mean? Like Iced Tea—dude is Black, right? Mariah Carey Black, you know what I mean? But in Jamaica it’s a little bit different. So even though I’m coded as Black here, in Jamaica I’m coded as brown, my family was like middle income. I found out interestingly, that one of my relatives was actually a slave owner, which is that’s wild. But yeah, so my family, you know, my grandfather on my mother’s side was pretty light skinned. And so I grew up with some social privilege. Not as much as like an actual White person in Jamaica but a lot more than like low income inner city people. Like really Black people in the inner city, and certainly not much connection with people in the countryside, the Maroons and the Black, rural dwellers and so on. So I had the luxury or privilege, I guess, of just kind of growing up and not really being aware of how much the legacy of colonialism was still shaping Jamaica while I was in it. And after I left and then started studying it and seeing this issue in the United States and in other countries, then I could go back to Jamaica and be like “Oh my God. Like what, what have I missed, you know, all these 20 something years.”

Mark Williams
Growing up, were you aware or did you see evidence of some of the environmental damage that you later began to study?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah, I mean, there’s another thing is that just like in the United States, a lot of these environmental hazards were externalized really well.  So one of the issues that we face in Kingston, which is kind of where I’m based out of, is garbage dumping.  And so in the Kingston metropolitan area, a lot of the garbage goes to dumps, which are in inner city neighborhoods. And one of the most famous ones is the Riverton dump. And again, this was all established during colonialism, like where Black people lived, for port labor and downtown labor and so on, it was very different from like where upper income Brown and White people live which is where I live now. And so the waste would go down to Riverton and the dump—these are dumps that are not lined, they’re not covered, they’re poorly managed. It’s just like an open air dump where you have televisions and food and scraps and medical waste and diapers and just like everything. And people will, in these areas, will go through, they’ll sort through the dump, they’ll look for food, they’ll look for clothes, they’ll look for things that they can use. There’s rats, there’s disease vectors. And sometimes because they have batteries like, lithium-ion batteries, which will catch fire. So then the dump will start burning, and then you’ll have air pollution and all these things. And what I thought was interesting was that we never spoke about it in Upper Saint Andrew in Barbican until the dump caught on fire and then the smoke came to our neighborhoods. So if there’s no fire, like nobody talks about Riverton, it’s just, ah, you know, kind of there in the background. But as soon as the smoke happens, it’s like, oh my goodness, we have to do something about this terrible situation.

Mark Williams
So basically it’s out of sight, out of mind until it begins to invade your turf.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah. And, you know, because of that, I guess I   kind of understand how easy it is for some people to not see injustice. Because I mean I lived it, a lot of my family lived it, right, a lot of my friends it and continue to live it in some ways.

Mark Williams
Yes. Well, moving on, environmental injustice often is conceived of as a byproduct of industrialization, of development, of resource exploitation and so forth. But your research, I think, makes it clear that issues of race are also an important subtext. And this has made me wonder whether or not the inverse of that might be true. How does race fit into achieving effective environmental management?

Kemi Fuentes-George
So there’s two examples of this that I hope kind of demonstrate how it could be positive. One of which is racial identity can be a very good transboundary global or international mobilization tool. And so going back to….

Mark Williams
In favor of environmental management perhaps?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Exactly, right? Where you can get like resources, whether financial or cognitive—things like research or a greater political voice, or what have you—in defense of some kind of issue. And I think going back, I’d mentioned Haiti for instance, right? So 1987 this toxic ash is dumped in Haiti and it was initially marked as fertilizer, right? This was industrial ash that came from Philadelphia. Okay. I guess cheaper to dump it in Haiti than to treat it in the United States. So it’s like, I want to say like 10,000 tons or some ridiculous number. And so, you know, the Haitians, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, like small, like half island country, found this ash and then they were like, what do we do about this? And so they tried to petition the Haitian government, and the Haitian government said,
well, there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re just this small little country. But they made an appeal to the United States and then the news got out about it and picked up by Black American activists in the United States. So remember, this is coming out of the 1980s environmental racism movement in the American South. So even though this was a totally different country, this narrative of toxic colonialism and toxic pollution accruing to Black people resonated with people in the United States. And so they participated in this transborder campaign. They got ash from Haiti and then they mailed it to the municipal government of Philadelphia. They wrote letters about it, they publicized, they sent people to help study the waste and they brought it to a international audience. And it took a while, I think it was not until the 1990s when the waste got cleaned up and taken by some company in New York. It certainly took a long time, but with this kind of transboundary mobilization and identity politics it certainly helped the people in Haiti to do things that would’ve been very difficult for them to do by themselves. Another example of this kind of the role that identity plays, I think is very visible in indigenous politics. There’s this guy Clayton Thomas Mueller, he’s a Mathias Colomb Cree from Canada, and he has participated in climate change advocacy with indigenous people from all different countries in the Western hemisphere. Like even going as far as working with La Via  Campesina in Mexico at the climate change UNFCCC Cop in Cancun in I think it was 2012. And so again, very different country, but this idea of, as a First Nations person, as an indigenous person, we have a shared fight in this battle for environmental sustainability. It’s a great way to mobilize resources across borders.

Mark Williams
Very interesting. Well, let me our focus just a bit. Your recent work is a project that examines some of the post-colonial barriers to indigenous participation in environmental management. You bring up the concept of stories, narratives as things that can actually shape environmentalism. And I’d like to probe this idea a little bit more deeply. Why do stories matter and what do they have to do with environmental governance?

Kemi Fuentes-George
I came across this when I was trying to understand from conservation scientists what an ecosystem was  . And this had to do with one of the issues I was looking at, which was this protected area called Cockpit Country in Jamaica. And this same kind of process I saw take place in in Egypt and in Mexico. But the short version is there was this idea that in Jamaica they want to protect an endangered place called the Cockpit Country from bauxite mining. And then I said, “Okay, great. I know the Cockpit Country is somewhere in the western part of the island in this place called Trelawny, but what exactly is the area?” And so I spoke to the scientists and they said, “Well, you know, the Cockpit Country is defined by, you know, this species of plant, which you find here because it’s unique to this area, and you can find traces of the plant in this site and this site and this site. And then there’s this hydrological feature which also defines Cockpit Country. So Cockpit Country is this.” And then they had this one ecological map. I was also speaking with Maroons who lived in Cockpit Country. And so Maroons were or are descendants of runaway slaves and Taino or indigenous people in Jamaica who had been living in the area more or less since colonialism and wars against the British. And so I was speaking to them about Cockpit Country and they said, “Well, you know, Cockpit Country is where we fought the wars against the British and there’s these colonial sites and we have burial grounds of some of our heroes and you know, this archeological site and the environment is a part of Cockpit Country, but it’s not the whole story of Cockpit Country.” And even though the scientists and the Maroons—I don’t want to say like the Maroons were not scientists; there were scientists who were Maroons—but even though these two different populations agree that Cockpit Country should be saved, they didn’t have the same ideas about where the boundaries of Cockpit Country were. And they didn’t have the same ideas about what saving Cockpit Country meant. And this was because they were telling different stories about, “Well what is it?” Is Cockpit Country, a historical site of colonial resistance? Or is it this environmental feature defined by this very specific ecological species that they wanted to talk about. And so the different kind of stories that are told are going to have different effects on what policies and approaches are considered appropriate and which are not.

Mark Williams
Is this also a reason why it matters whose voice gets heard? Who might be included in the environmental management discussions and who might be excluded from them? They’re likely to tell different stories?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, it’s a little bit more than just whose voices gets heard, but how we understand what’s being said. And one of the concerns that indigenous people have is that when they do get to go to conventions like the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP, or Conference of the Parties, one of the problems they have is what they can talk about with regard to the environment are things like carbon credits and carbon sinks and conservation in these very kind of limited ways that fit with this neoliberal sense of what the environment is. And nobody listens to them when they talk about the earth as sacred or these sacred sites or the earth as a living ancestor or mother nature. So even though they participate, the kinds of stories they can tell are constrained in a way that that effectively limits their participation in shaping what governance looks like.

Mark Williams
Kemi, I think that conventional wisdom holds that good environmental management and conservation actually require having strong, robust, trustworthy science. Otherwise you’re just going to wind up guessing about issues of cause and effect or abatement and best conservation practices. But your work seems a bit skeptical about the role that scientists play in promoting or achieving environmental justice. Can you explain why? Are you saying it’s counterproductive to rely on science to achieve environmental justice?

Kemi Fuentes-George
I wouldn’t say it’s counterproductive because I definitely think that you need to have good science in order to get good environmental management. The concern I have with using science is that we manage an area with a technocratic scientific approach and ignore potential cultural values, there’s a way in which we could exacerbate issues of environmental injustice. The other issue is that scientists, even though they might not want to admit it, are fallible. They’re not omniscient, which is fine. But the issue is that when we’re speaking about conservation and management of large ecosystems, especially global ecosystems, there are going to be gaps of uncertainty in scientific data in which scientists, and I’ve seen this play out, end up using models or assumptions about likely events that are built around certain beliefs or biases or frameworks. And it would be a danger to accept these as kind of an ahistoric permanent, unbiased truth. So this sounds a little bit abstract, so I’ll give an example. Or maybe two, if you have time. So one of which is, has to do with geoengineering and this process called ocean iron fertilization. And so what that is taking iron ore as dust and dumping it in the ocean and creating a plankton bloom, and then this plankton bloom will absorb, in theory, absorb carbon dioxide because it’s a plant.  So absorb carbon dioxide and then sink to the ocean, and basically function as a fast growing carbon sink. So the theories behind ocean iron fertilization were developed in 1990, by this scientist called John Martin, who was an oceanographer and became adopted, because that was about the time that the UNFCCC—the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, so kind of the umbrella convention under which the Kyoto Protocol, and now the Paris Agreement are based. So the UNFCCC was being designed and in 1992, right? Or started 1988 to 1992. And so there was a lot of excitement around this idea of, oh, we’ve, you found a solution to climate change. And John Martin himself said in a Doctor Strangelove accent, “With ocean iron fertilization, I will bring about the next ice age.” And so over the next decade or so, there was research done by Woods Hole, by *MBARI by corporations like Green Sea Ventures to find out how exactly to create a large scale ocean iron fertilization process to generate carbon credits and then sell it on the international market in the climate change regime. And very soon scientists who were studying this process kind of split off into two different camps. And they were all dealing with a problem of uncertainty. And so there was uncertainty about whether or not the plankton would actually sink to the bottom fast enough. Whether they would generate the necessary blooms. There was uncertainty about what would this mean for the ocean’s ecosystem. Would you create underwater eutrophication or the loss of oxygen underwater? There was kind of a moral uncertainty. Like if you told people that you could throw a bunch of iron in the ocean and it was suck carbon out of the air, would people say, “Okay, great I can pollute as much as I want.” There was all of this uncertainty and one group of scientists looked at the uncertainty and they said, there are too many ethical problems around this. We don’t have the answers to this. And so therefore we think that ocean iron fertilization should not be used as a carbon solution and should definitely not be sold as a carbon credit mechanism because it will incentivize as bad behavior. Then yet another group of scientists who said, well, we have this uncertainty, but we know that climate change is terrible. And so we have to do everything we can in order to deal with climate change, including using OIF or ocean iron fertilization as much as possible until, we have better information. The scientists who were more cautious managed to ally with indigenous people including but not exclusively in Canada, and Green Peace, and I can’t remember the other organization, but put pressure on the London convention and the Convention on Biological Diversity to pass resolutions between 2008 and 2012 to bar the use of ocean iron fertilization as a carbon mechanism. So it’s currently banned on the international law. But if the pro OIF scientists had won out, we would’ve had a mechanism that was scientifically justified, I suppose, but that may have led to a variety of moral or practical problems. And  that was one example among many of scientists having uncertainty and creating an argument, incorporating that uncertainty and coming to two different possible conclusions. And that tends to be a hallmark of science when it comes to policy making.  

Mark Williams
So you’re not saying that a reliance on science is not needed for environmental management. You’re saying something a bit different, something more nuanced?

Kemi Fuentes-George
Yes. Yes, exactly. That science is good, but it’s not infallible. That scientists have uncertainty and doubt and lack of information like everybody else. And that this uncertainty and doubt is going to be mediated by the scientists’ perspectives, their life experiences, their positionality, right. And that could lead to very different scientific arguments for why we should or shouldn’t do something.

Mark Williams
Okay. Well, thank you. I think if I could sum up a lot of our discussion about your research, it’s this, your work illustrates that classism, colonialism, racism, and gendered power all intersect in ways that can drive environmental degradation. These are powerful forces and this makes the fate of our environment seem pretty grim. So I’m curious, are there any instances of success or progress in promoting environmental management and justice that make you more optimistic about our environmental future?

Kemi Fuentes-George
I always try to talk about these things with my students because the very first time I taught environmental politics, I wanted to impress upon them the seriousness of the situation. And so at the end of the semester, all their eyes were dead and their souls were shattered. And so I decided, you know what? I’m going to also talk about the successes. One that I studied is the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park in Jamaica. And so it’s very similar to the Cockpit Country case on the western part of the island, although this on the eastern part of the island, in that it was an area that was threatened for over-exportation, in this case logging. It was a site of Maroon history another site of battles against the British and slavery. And between 1990 to 2015, the Jamaican government with advocacy from the forest department and Maroons and Jamaicans in the diaspora abroad created a management area registered under the World Heritage Convention that protects the site as a culturally and ecologically important zone. So it’s a management protocol with international support that includes the cultural wishes and the interests of these local marginalized populations and conservation scientists.

Mark Williams
And so it was both inclusive and it had strong international support.

Kemi Fuentes-George
Right, right. Exactly.

Mark Williams
And there are probably many more examples similar to that.

Kemi Fuentes-George
So another one that I studied called the Parque Nacional de Xcalak. And it’s a protected area in the very southern part of Mexico near the Belize border in the state of Quintana Roo. And so this was a coastal area, this beach fishing area, that was inhabited primarily by indigenous and Mestizo people that was possibly targeted for tourist development. Kind of like what you see in Cancun and the Riviera Maya. And so the local people when they heard about this, these are local fishing people, they wanted to conserve the zone because they didn’t want tourists to come down, strip the vegetation, destroy the mangroves, kick them off the land. And so they advocated the government to create a national park managed by local fishermen and local people to respect their ability to fish, but also to prevent it from over exploitation again with international support. And so these are all examples and there are many such examples. Not as much as I would like, but there are some that point to the possibility of environmentally just management.

Mark Williams
This has been a really wide ranging and truly fascinating conversation. I’m really glad that you stopped by. We’ve been talking with political scientists, Kemi Fuentes-George, about his research on conservation, environmental management, and environmental justice. Kemi, it’s been such a pleasure visiting with you. Thanks so much for spending time with us today on New Frontiers.

Kemi Fuentes-George
It’s been great. Thank you.

Jonah Benjamin Roberts (Middlebury ’23)
A native of Jamaica, Professor Kemi Fuentes-George now resides in East Middlebury, where—along with his wife, children, and gaggle of chickens and ducks—he enjoys living the Vermont life. Outside of the classroom, he’s likely to be seen cycling around campus, at the Athletic Center tuning up his jiu jitsu skills or jamming on the trumpet with fellow bandmates in the local Vermont group Las Almendras.   

Mark Williams
 This episode of New Frontiers was produced by Margaret DeFoor and me, Mark Williams. Our theme music is by Ketsa. If you like the show, leave us a rating or review on Spotify, Amazon, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This can help others to find us too. We’ll be back with another episode of New Frontiers. Thanks a lot.

*MBARI stands for the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.