Articulating environment, territory and place: The struggle for environmental justice and its lessons for geographical epistemology and theory

Abstract

In the last four decades, the distance between ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geographers has contributed to the prolongation and even worsening of various prejudices: among them, we can mention the lack of appreciation by ‘human’ geographers of the concept of environment (almost always mistakenly reduced to the idea of a ‘natural environment,’ in a clear contradiction with the holistic and integrative potential of the concept), as well as disinterest or skepticism about the construction of ‘hybrid’ epistemic objects that combine knowledge from the social and natural sciences. In addition to this, the ability of geographers to participate in various public debates - from the global climate change and its socio-spatial impacts to the social production of environmental disasters - and to gain recognition and visibility as relevant scientific actors on these issues has been severely restricted. This is because, in the 1970s and 1980s, the overwhelming majority of geographers who influenced the ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ turn of the discipline (which was essentially a Marxist turn, since left-libertarian contributions were largely neglected and marginalised) mistakenly believed that to achieve depth and density in terms of critical analysis of society, it would be convenient or necessary to turn one’s back on knowledge of geoecological processes and factors, as if these were ultimately unimportant.

Starting in the United States in the 1980s, and later also present in Latin America and other parts of the world, debates, conflicts, and activism over environmental justice have tacitly challenged geographers to rethink the intradisciplinary fragmentation with which most of them seem to live comfortably (or showing only rhetorical discomfort from time to time, without practical consequences). Within a framework of resistance and emancipatory praxis, the actors committed to the struggle against environmental injustice articulate, in their daily lives, the ideas of environment (the socio-natural context in which they live), territory (the spatial projection of power relations) and place (the fabric of socio-spatial identities); but it is precisely this fundamental articulation that, unfortunately, as it is implied in the preceding paragraph, geographers have generally been unable to appreciate properly. Moreover, those social actors have often been forced by concrete circumstances not only to combine vernacular (so-called ‘local’) knowledge with scientific knowledge, but also, with regard to the latter, to realise the need to gather information on issues related to geochemical, ecotoxicological, geotechnical, etc. processes, in order to be better informed (and therefore politically more effective) about things such as health risks associated with environmental contaminants, landslides and other disasters, and so on.

What the struggle for environmental justice strongly exemplifies, in a nutshell, is the need for geographers to understand the importance of building and valuing ‘hybrid’ epistemic objects to deal with complex problems. Unless they understand this point, it is likely that not only their scientific relevance, but especially their social relevance, will remain unnecessarily limited (or will even diminish), especially given the enormous magnitude, broad scope and high political visibility of contemporary environmental challenges.