Environmental Justice
One tension that stood out to me after reading Dorceta Taylor’s “The Evolution of Environmental Justice” and Kyle Whyte’s “Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler Colonialism” is the distance between an environmental‑justice framework rooted in civil‑rights activism and the distinct demands for justice voiced by Indigenous peoples living under ongoing settler colonialism. Taylor traces how predominantly Black and Latinx communities organized against toxic waste, framing environmental harm as yet another layer of racial oppression. Her genealogy locates injustice in unequal exposure and unequal power, pollution lands where political leverage is weakest.
Whyte, by contrast, argues that for many Indigenous nations the central grievance is not simply disproportional pollution but the persistent erasure of relationships with land that make Indigenous life possible. He calls settler colonialism “ecological domination,” a structure that fractures kinship networks among humans, non‑humans, and place. Where Taylor’s movement seeks fairer distribution and inclusive decision‑making, Whyte presses for recognition that the very legal and economic systems offering “participation” are built on dispossession.
This divergence unsettles my own assumptions. I have tended to treat environmental justice as a question of reallocating harms and benefits, clean water here, fewer landfills there. Taylor validates that instinct but also reminds me that reform emerged from hard‑won activism rather than top‑down policy tweaks. Whyte’s critique pushes further, merely moving the hazardous site misses the structural violence that licenses extraction in the first place.
The tension leaves me wondering how policy can address both exposure and dispossession. If governmental remediation funds a new water‑filtration plant on tribal land, does that satisfy justice, or does it mask deeper colonial entanglements? Taylor’s history shows victories are possible; Whyte warns that victories can also reinscribe the system. Holding both insights in view feels necessary, even if it means acknowledging, uncomfortably, that my favored solutions may only scratch the surface.
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