The lifeboat ethics proposed by Hardin (1968, 1993) wherein the environmental degradation imposed by, or imposed on, the poor is avoided by keeping them ...
Proceedings of the 8'h Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment
Moving Toward Sustainability through Environmental Justice Markus Nils Peterson Markus John Peterson Tarla Rai Peterson This mixed method case study among border residents of Cameron and Hilda/go Counties, TX, examines a community familiar with explosive population growth, transnational disputes over common pool natural resources, and environmental degradation. We identify residents' environmental values, household characteristics, participation in environmental decision making, and perspectives on the appropriate relationship between political structure, economic development and environmental preservation. Our goal is to discover and demonstrate how relationships between environmental values, education, ethnicity, income, cultural attitudes toward public participation, and proximity of households to environmentally degraded and/or pristine areas influences environmental decision making. This understanding should suggest pathways toward sustainability that integrate biodiversity conservation with civic engagement, and are grounded in enhanced environmental justice.
At the risk ofbeing charged with essentialism, we ground this essay in the belief that the tradition of identifying human society and the natural environment as mutually exclusive is THE most fundamental challenge facing decision makers, indeed any stakeholders, who seek sustainability (Leopold 1949, World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Busch 1996, Latour 2004). Human society cannot achieve sustainability without understanding the integrative relationship between material processes and socio-political practices, and then applying that understanding in the policy arena. Such an understanding, let alone application, is impossible when nature itself divides human communities. Sustainability can only develop when humans begin to understand nature as a fundamental material for crafting Aldo Leopold's ( 1949) expanding community of ethical responsibility rather than a socio-economic wedge. Our goal with this project is to move toward such an understanding and application, particularly as it relates to environmental justice (EJ), which is typically thought of as political practice, and environmental preservation, which is typically thought of as material process. Environmental injustice blocks attempts toward sustainability by rendering the materiality of nature a wedge between social elites and the disenfranchised. The conservation problems associated with environmental injustice are acute on borders between developed and developing nations, because locals and immigrants are prone to differential treatment, differential access to political systems, and differential conceptions ofEJ. This context has growing implications in a globalizing world, because communication, transportation, and associated technologies facilitate existence of borderlands between nations without physical contiguity. We are conducting a mixed method case study among border residents of Cameron and Hildalgo Counties, TX, where immigration is driving environmental decision-making initiatives, while EJ and the exclusivity of "community" are being shaped by environmental decision-making processes. This community is familiar with explosive population growth, transnational disputes over common pool natural resources, and environmental degradation. For decades, it has faced a divide between those who would implement Hardin's (1968) life boat ethics by keeping out, or at least isolating, poor immigrants from Mexico, and those who are struggling to build a more inclusive and sustainable community (Peterson 1997). The project draws on archival research, personally administered surveys and interviews, spatial data, and ethnographic fieldwork to identify environmental values, household characteristics, participation in environmental decision making, and perspectives on the appropriate relationship between political
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structure, economic development and environmental preservation. We identify and explore cultural practices involved in judgments that lead Cameron County residents to value the environment in certain ways, to opt in or out of participation in environmentally related public processes, and to morally ground their values for the environment (Peterson et al. 2002). Our goal is to discover and demonstrate how the relationship between environmental values, education, ethnicity, income, cultural attitudes toward public participation, and proximity of households to environmentally degraded and/or pristine areas influences environmental decision making. This understanding will suggest a path toward sustainability that integrates biodiversity conservation with civic engagement, and is grounded in enhanced EJ. What is Environmental Justice (And who gets to decide)? Critics of the EJ movement claim it has no basis in scientific fact, but rather is a mask for efforts of minorities and other disenfranchised groups to gain political power (Bowen and Wells 2002). While poor and minority communities often are located in or near environmentally degraded areas (General Accounting Office 1983, Commission for Racial Justice 1987, Bryant and Mohai I 992, Mennis 2002), few if any studies have demonstrated a causal relationship between decisions to locate a polluting facility and either the income or ethnicity of local residents. Such claims ironically reveal the critics' fragile epistemological ground. The EPA's definition ofEJ mandates "fair treatment" and "meaningful involvement" of all potentially impacted groups (http://www.epa.gov/compliance/environmentaljustice/). According to this perspective, if minorities and those from lower income brackets are struggling to gain political power in the environmental decision making community, they are not meaningfully involved. Moreover, the EPA version ofEJ defines "fair" as equal (i.e., no group receives a disproportionate share of negative environmental consequences). Few rational people would argue all socio-economic groups bear an equal share of negative environmental impacts. Our review ofEJ research, particularly as it applies to sustainability within democratic political contexts suggests to us two important questions: (I) What exactly does it mean, and (2) Who gets to decide?
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To have meaning in liberal democracies, where both equality and liberty are valued (Mouffe, 2000), EJ must constitute more than fairness, defined as equal treatment. Walzer (1983) described 3 potential definitions of distributive justice: free exchange (i.e., market distributes social goods), need (e.g., income, status, etc. distributes social goods), and dessert (i.e., merit system distributes social goods). None of these versions of justice are adequate in all circumstances or cultures, and each version has different implications for EJ. For instance, if all people received an equal environmental quality level for a given investment of time or money free exchange justice would exist. This version of EJ would preclude disparities rooted in ethnicity, but not income .. It would be "just" for all poor humans to live in cardboard shacks, with open sewers, in the shadow of landfills filled with toxic waste from plants producing electrical power for wealthy humans. In contrast, EJ rooted in the need version of justice, would mandate expending exceptional efforts for those living in degraded environments. EJ rooted in the merit system might require me to earn the right to protection from exposure to radiation from nuclear waste by contributing to the president's campaign fund. Further, equal treatment is problematic within a liberal democratic context because protection of individual freedom maintains differences in decisions that influence exposure to environmental hazards (e.g., I may choose to live near or far from a power plant) and differences in the ability to act on those decisions (i.e., income). Deciding what EJ means in people's lives is only the beginning. Besides developing a meaningful description for EJ, we need to question who participates in that process of discovery and definition. Although justice can be distributed, hence defined, in multiple ways (Walzer 1983), excluding some people from the very community that distributes justice is unjust by any definition. The lifeboat ethics proposed by Hardin (1968, 1993) wherein the environmental degradation imposed by, or imposed on, the poor is avoided by keeping them out of the boat, perpetuates the dangerous illusion that sustainability can be achieved without developing an inclusive community. Beating back those who attempt to clamber into the
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lifeboat not only masks environmental injustice; it perpetuates a fragmented and dysfunctional community. Within such divided communities environmental degradation is always an externality for someone. While critics have failed to trivialize the material significance of the EJ movement, they have suggested an inordinate research focus on the results of environmental injustice as compared the processes that create it. Environmental justice studies have tended to focus on the spatial relationship between pollution sources and disenfranchised people (General Accounting Office 1983, Commission for Racial Justice 1987, Bryant and Mohai 1992, Mennis 2002). Although some studies are beginning to identify the everyday cultural politics leading to environmental injustices, such as zoning (Maantay 2002), they have yet to delve into the exclusion of disenfranchised voices from the environmental decision making process itself. To address environmental degradation associated with environmental injustice we must identify factors related to political participation by those living in degraded environments, understand how different sociocultural groups define EJ, and discover how the material that constitutes our bodies and habitats interacts with these political practices. A communication study among those living in borderlands offers possibilities for exploring how minorities and the poor are excluded from environmental decision making processes, as well as what results from the exclusion. Research Methods
We have capitalized on the benefits of methodological heterodoxy (Newman and Benz 1998, Tashakorie and Teddlie 1998, Strauss and Corbin 1997) by combining open and closed ended questions within personally administered questionnaires, living within the social situation, taking field notes, and conducting archival analysis. This approach allows us to utilize the advantages of grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1997) and identify currently unimagined reasons for environmental decision making participation and conceptions ofEJ. The survey/interview asks questions about environmental values, household characteristics, attitude toward development, perspective on EJ, participation in environmental decision making, and beliefs about democratic practice. This project relates directly to a universe of communities straddling international borders between more and less developed nations (e.g., US/Mexico, Costa Rica/Nicaragua, South Korea/North Korea). The "borders" can be physically separated (e.g., Singapore/Indonesia), but distance, cost, or enforcement of immigration restrictions can effectively close any "border" thereby excluding communities from the universe. Further, communities must share a common pool resource (Ostrom 1990) that influences environmental quality. Because such resources and their impacts often travel great distances (e.g., tuna, wildebeest, airsheds, soil erosion, and watersheds) this scope condition does not mandate physical adjacency of communities. Within this universe we are focusing on the population consisting of residents of Cameron and Hidalgo Counties, Texas. This location allows us to follow the Mexican/U.S. border to its southernmost tip in Texas. To achieve study objectives we are applying three partially overlapping sampling frames within this population: (1) the general population, (2) physical border residents, and (3) EJ activists. We have obtained a sample from frame one from county tax roles. Because many informants in the second sampling frame live off the grid, we are designing a sampling approach that avoids potential sampling errors associated with the use of telephone or tax records. We are targeting residents along the Military Highway (the southmost transportation corridor along the U.S. border), including those living in colonias, through Cameron and Hildalgo counties. Within this framework, we are attempting to personally interview someone in every third household. For our third sampling frame, we are using key informants from prior studies in the county, and a literature review of public records (e.g., minutes from zoning and other community planning meetings), local newspapers, radio shows, and newscasts to generate a comprehensive list of activists involved with EJ issues. With the exception of those with P.O. boxes, we are attempting to visit each informant at least once during 4 time intervals, morning and evening on a weekday and on a weekend day, before resorting to phone contact As needed, Spanish translations of the survey are being administered. We employed bilingual translators to conduct a forward (English to Spanish) and backward (Spanish to English) translation process to improve comparability between English and Spanish surveys (Marin and Marin 1991 ). Each translator worked individually first, and then the translators consulted with each other and the authors to resolve discrepancies.
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We promote design validity by utilizing prolonged on-site engagement, peer debriefing, triangulation, and member checking (Newman and Benz 1998). Time in the field builds credibility, because we are able to develop an intimate knowledge of the people, region, and context within a study area (Creswell2003). Practical constraints (e.g., funding) often make spending the requisite time periods in the field difficult. We have included researchers who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley as advisors to provide additional contextual insight. We will use peer debriefing (Cresswell2003) to address potential biases of"native" researchers, and identify biases in interviewing approaches. Peer debriefing will support consistency within the study and resonance with people outside the social context. We will achieve triangulation by combining individual interview notes, field notes taken while living within the social situation and summaries of historical accounts. Our member checking takes two forms: including clarification questions in the interview and asking informants to critique conclusions from past and current analyses of the situation. Methodological Issues Raised During Data Collection Today I want to discuss 2 methodological issues this project has emphasized: why use multiple methods and why collect data personally. ·
Why use multiple methods? We all think of multiple methods as a way to increase validity. Those of us who prefer to use qualitative, interpretive, and critical approaches to research often jump on this bandwagon as a way to legitimize our numberless results. For example, if newspaper articles, television news reports, transcripts of public meetings, and informant directed interviews all support the same claim, we congratulate ourselves on the validity of that claim. For this project, the primary value of multiple methods was different. The ethnographic aspect of our research led to a complete redesign of sampling frame, as well as our data collection methods. Our first sampling plan was confined to Cameron County, which exemplifies the population we are most concerned with (people inhabiting borders between developed and developing countries where environmental degradation is blatant, and where common pool resources are directly related to that degradation). After considering several options for obtaining a random sample from county residents, we had settled on property tax roles. We determined to devise a separate sampling frame for colonia residents. We also proposed a third sampling frame, made up of local EJ activists. Our plans were called into question as soon as we limped toward the border. We discovered immediately that society was divided along legal/illegal lines. As we neared our destination, the car broke down, and we ended up at a local Ford dealership. While we waited inside to discover the extortionate price the dealership was going to charge us (he had estimated somewhere around $500.), Shannon kept watch on our car, which was out of sight from the main doorway. A young man carrying a small tool box slipped out of the shadows around the lot, and began doing something under our car's hood. Curious, we walked outside, and asked what he was doing. He showed us he had fixed the problem, explaining in Border Spanglish. We were delighted, and offered to write him a check for his services. He replied that he could not cash a check, but would be grateful for cash. We managed to dig out $40, which he accepted with alacrity, and then disappeared just as someone charged out of the service bay. We hopped in our car and drove away. It did not take long to realize that the political boundaries of Cameron County were not the most appropriate for our study. We discovered Military Road, which provides a transportation corridor through both Hidalgo and Cameron Counties. Besides living on the border between Mexico and the United States, these residents live on the border of the Wildlife Corridor U.S. environmental agencies have been working to develop for the past 20 years. We also discovered that the largest colonias are in Hidalgo County. So, we changed our sampling frame to include both Hidalgo and Cameron Counties, with a focus on the households along Military Road. As we got to know people along Military Road, we soon realized that colonia residents are not the only people who are missed on the tax roles. In these neighborhoods, many properties provide habitation for multiple households. Utilities are shared by means of electric cords run from one mobile home to another, and some have no indoor plumbing. Nils found that many of those who could not read the English survey, could not read it in Spanish either. Rather than read it themselves, they preferred to listen to his awkward
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pronunciation, nodding encouragingly whenever he got something right. We are very happy we had taken the time to change our questions from the "agree/disagree" format, because we were afraid they would have agreed with everything. Every now and then we stumbled upon a wealthy neighborhood, often built around elaborately landscaped oxbow lakes. Our acceptance rate for the survey remained high, but there was less opportunity for extended conversations. Without the ethnographic component of this project, we might have used a completely inappropriate sampling frame. By sampling a random group of Cameron County residents, we would have had no problem publishing our results, but they would have been worse than irrelevant. We would have ignored Hidalgo County. The Wildlife Refuge Managers who want to know how to work with new residents moving into the valley would have learned what long-time residents had to say, but would have missed out on responses from most new residents. Environmental Justice advocates (and critics) would have learned what residents of established neighborhoods had to say about justice, political participation, and the environment. Why collect data personally?
Personally administered questionnaires are expensive, requiring extensive researcher time and funding for travel. Many argue that, especially for a standardized questionnaire, this is not cost effective. Instead, researchers tend to administer questionnaires by mail or by telephone. In addition to lower response rates, these collections methods suffer from lack of sufficient researcher oversight. We noticed that everyone answered one of the statements on our questionnaire in the same way. In English, the statement is: Communities should control the disposal of factory wastes, or Factories should control the disposal of their wastes." Respondents are asked to mark I of seven blocks, ranging from strong preference to one, through neutral preference, to strong preference to the other. Nils became suspicious that people were interpreting this question differently than we had intended it, and asked one person to expand on her answer. The respondent, who (along with everyone else) had marked the strongest possible preference for factories controlling the disposal of their own wastes, explained, "if you make the mess, it's your job to clean it up." We now ask for clarification of this response on every survey administered. Thus far, every respondent has offered the same explanation when asked about this question. This is a commonly asked question on surveys of public preferences regarding natural resource management. The general intent is to discover whether the individual rights of property owners and producers or the protection of the community is more important to people. That is not how our respondents have interpreted the statement. We would not have discovered this problem had we hired someone to administer the questionnaire via telephone, or if we had administered it as a mail-out. Because we administered the surveys personally, we noticed the unexpected unanimity among respondents, and were able to query them, discovering an alternative interpretation of this statement. Conclusions
This case study will provide information regarding the extent and conceptions of environmental injustice within Cameron and Hidalgo Counties, Texas. Further, we may provide natural resources managers and planners a salient approach for defining EJ in liberal democracies. By combining knowledge oflocal ecology and socio-political dynamics, this study will increase understanding of how environmental values, education, ethnicity, and income relate proximity of households to environmentally degraded and environmentally pristine areas, and how this relationship influences environmental decision making within these border communities. Achieving this goal has important implications for conservation in contemporary democracies. When liberty excludes equality (hyper-liberty) some members of the community will suffer environmental injustice, likewise when equality excludes liberty (hypo-liberty) others will suffer environmental injustice. A community as a whole will only experience EJ when its members experience both liberty and equality. In dynamic systems (including both human social systems and Earth's ecosystem), however, maintenance ofboth equality and liberty requires a venue for productive conflict between the two dimensions of democracy, as shifting environmental and social constraints change the landscape within which EJ is defined. Accordingly we address what factors promote broad and diverse community engagement in environmental decision making. This study will provide border communities
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throughout the world a contextually rich approach for grounding environmental policy in EJ, to facilitate their negotiation of the symbolic and material challenges associated with sustainable development.
References Bowen, W. M., M. V. Wells. 2002. The politics and reality of environmental justice: A history and considerations for public administrators and policy makers. Public Administration Review 62:688-698. Bryant, B., and P. Mohai eds. 1992. Race and the Incidence of environmental hazards: a time for discourse. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Busch, L. 1996. Bringing nature back in: Principles for a new social science of nature. Centennial Review 40:491-501. Commission for Racial Justice. 1987. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A national report on the racial and socio-economic characteristics of communities with hazardous waste sites. New York: The United Church of Christ. Creswell, John W. 2003. Research Design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage. General Accounting Office. 1983. Siting ofhazardous waste landfills and their correlation with racial and economic status of surrounding communities. Washington D.C. Hardin, G. 1968. Tragedy of commons. Science 162:1243-1248. Hardin, G. 1993. Living Within Limits: ecology, economics, and population taboos. New York, New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, B. 2004. Politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. Porter C, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Leopold, A. 1949. A sand county almanac and sketches here and there. London, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. Maantay, J. 2002. Zoning law, health, and environmenta1justice: What's the connection? Journal ofLaw Medicine & Ethics 30:572-593. Marin, Gerardo., and Barbara V. Marin. 1991. Research with Hispanic populations. Newbury Park: Sage. Mennis, J. 2002. Using geographic information systems to create and analyze statistical surfaces of population and risk for environmental justice analysis. Social Science Quarterly 83:281-297. Mouffe, Chantal. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso. Newman, Isadore., and Caroline R. Benz. 1998. Qualitative-quantitative research methodology: exploring the interactive continuum. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press. Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. New York: Cambridge University Press. Peterson, M. N., T. R. Peterson, M. J. Peterson, R. R. Lopez, N.J. Silvy. 2002. Cultural conflict and the endangered Florida Key deer. Journal of Wildlife Management 66:947-968. Peterson, T.R. 1997. Sharing the Earth: the rhetoric of sustainable development. Columbia, South Carolina, USA: University of South Carolina Press. Strauss, Anselm., and Juliet Corbin. 1997. Grounded theory in practice. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Tashakkori, Abbas., and Charles Teddlie. 1998. Mixed Methodology: combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Walzer, M. 1983. Spheres of justice: a defense of pluralism and equality. New York: Basic Books. World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our common future. Oxford University Press, New York, New York, USA.
Wilderness, Advocacy, and the Media Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial Conference on · Communication and Environment Hosted by the University of Georgia Jekyll Island, Georgia June 24-27, 2005
Conference Directors: Kevin DeLuca William Griswold Lisa Slawter Volkening Dylan Wolfe
Proceedings Editors: Lisa Slawter Volkening Dylan Wolfe Emily Plec William Griswold Kevin DeLuca
