Alternative Notions of Environmental Justice: Examining Sites of Acceptance to Industrial Uranium Production

• In Event: 083 - Section on Environment and Technology Paper Session. Open Topic 1

Abstract

As unconventional energy development impacts increasing numbers of people and communities, alternative notions of environmental justice have emerged within certain communities. Residents in these ‘sites of acceptance,’ as I term them, accept industrialized production systems and the socio-environmental risks those systems pose, like contamination from industrial production. Thus social mobilization within them runs counter to more typical ‘sites of resistance’ covered in environmental justice literature, particularly in communities where poverty and energy development intersect. This divergence highlights striking omissions in knowledge about environmental justice organizations across time and space and potentially divergent notions of justice that mobilize them (Schlosberg 2004). Divergence in social activism related to land use becomes an increasingly vital concern as practices like mining, hydraulic fracturing, and other extraction activities proliferate in the US and globally, often near residential areas. Further, neoliberalism has shaped US and global policy for more than three decades, developing alongside environmental justice mobilization. In this political-economic context, I contend notions of environmental justice and related mobilization shift as citizens normalize neoliberalism’s logics. In the following paper, I use a community-level case study of activism related to renewed uranium production to address the following research questions: What conditions create sites of acceptance? What notions of environmental justice are utilized by community members? After reviewing sociological research on environmental justice, I interrogate how mobilization in Nucla and Naturita, Colorado, creates a ‘site of acceptance’ to renewed uranium production.

Author

• Stephanie Ann Malin, Colorado State University