One - Community, development and popular struggles for environmental justice

Summary

Introduction

‘The environment’ comprises many aspects of the world: the complex ecosystems and biological and chemical cycles on which all life on the planet depends; the resources exploited by human societies throughout history in structures of production and consumption to meet needs and desires; the spaces in which both production and its waste stream are located and in which human non-productive, reproductive, creative and recreational activity occurs; and the physical structures of habitation that shape our horizons and our personalities. In the conditions of late capitalism, the environment is a site for capital accumulation, a source of raw materials, a place to locate productive industry, a space to be traversed in the distribution of commodities to markets and a sink for the depositing of the wastes of production and consumption. Increasingly, capital finds new ways to commodify the environment itself, as ‘second nature’. Alongside this, environments are gendered and racialised as nature and social structures are shaped and reshaped to favour the interests of powerful social groups. These activities, of powerful classes and groups extending their interests, are often referred to as ‘development’.

The social structuring of environments and their dispossession in the interests of capital are made possible in regimes of colonialism. Recent scholarship has emphasised the significance of different modes of colonialism and their impacts on resource dispossession and construction. It is perhaps significant that many of the chapters in this collection are located in settler-colonial societies in different stages of ‘development’ – Canada, Palestine, South Africa – as well as in postcolonial Ireland, India and Colombia. Significant for our purposes are the different social relations of accumulation in these modes of colonisation – in the former resource dispossession follows a logic of population expulsion, whereas in the latter it is accompanied by proletarianisation and exploitation of labour power.

At the same time, environments are structured through gender regimes. In different contexts, the gendered division of labour has tended to allocate women's (free, unpaid) labour to the means of reproduction, including for community environmental maintenance and responsibility for different environments from those of men – at times bringing women and men into conflict over environmental spaces. Men have often been allocated to extractive and manufacturing labour, leading to gendered constructions of environmental risk. As well as privileging men in a patriarchal gender order, these processes of gendering the environment have also served the purposes of capital accumulation.