Concrete Points : Sustainable Communities: Introduction and Chapter 1

Summary

Author Julian Agyeman’s introduction describes the basic principles of Environmental Justice (EJ) and outlines what he will be addressing in his book Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice. Agyeman introduces three main movements of environmental thought as they relate to social justice. The three are Environmental Justice Paradigm (EJP), the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP), and the Just Sustainability Paradigm (JSP). Agyeman describes the EJP as one that integrates “…class, race, gender, environment and social justice concerns.” The NEP takes a very different take as it “…sets an environmental stewardship and sustainability agenda…”, but “…has little to say about equity or justice.” Agyeman places these two schools of thought on the opposite ends of the social justice spectrum and introduces JSP as falling somewhere between the two “…acting as a bridge spanning the continuum…”. He goes on to give a bit of the differences but points to Chapters 3 & 4 where he outlines JSP in theory (Chap. 3) and in practice (Chap. 4). Agyeman concludes his introduction by setting the goals for his book, which basically involves explaining and justifying the JSP, and outlining the layout of the chapters as a means to do so.

Chapter 1 provides a history of Environmental Justice, and then slowly builds throughout the chapter towards the description of a scientific means for measuring EJ in towns and cities using the metropolitan Boston area as an example.

Critique

Equity vs. Cost/Benefit:
My major critique of Agyeman is in the underpinnings of his basic premise used when creating a community scoreboard-like tool for delivering environmental justice. Agyeman makes an enormous assumption that I am unwilling to make. Agyeman believes that equity should serve as the primary driver for determining how to prioritize environmental efforts. According to Agyeman, if town A has 200 points, and town B has 150 points town A is more deserving or in need of positive environmental action. The underpinning idea being; work to create a situation of social equality… this will be environmentally just. Critiquing this approach is difficult because of people’s want for equality and their passion in the pursuit of that equality. However, consider the situation where a particular environmental remediation in town B could be done at 1/3rd the cost and produce two times the result? A greater number of people could experience a greater benefit for fewer dollars (assume state dollars in this example). The direct pursuit of equity forgoes this cost – benefit approach and chooses to ignore, what some will call a greater good in favor of the creation of local equity among towns.

Over-categorization:
Agyeman’s description of the three basic EJ perspectives is well thought out and delivered clearly. The only concern that I had was that I found it unlikely that the wide variety of organizations cited categorize themselves tightly into the three groups as cleanly as Agyeman does. I do not criticize Agyeman’s use of categorization, but the absoluteness of his placements I found to be a little convenient for the sake of a clean argument.