Global Ties: Cross-Boundary Environmental Justice Campaigns

• In Event: “Productive Crossings”: Transnational Activism in a Shrinking World

Abstract

Longstanding and robust environmental justice activism in the U.S. South has benefited greatly from transnational contacts. As industrial enterprises and military installations based in the American South have extended the reach of production and pollution around the world, activists have made their struggles global as well. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, the Highlander Research and Education Center became active in the Bhopal campaign, linking Indian activists seeking redress for the deadly 1984 Union Carbide methyl isocyanate explosion with West Virginia residents who experienced an explosion at the company’s plant in Nitro. In the 1990s, Greenpeace collaborated with Louisiana environmental justice activists and attorneys to block the Japanese firm Shintech’s attempts to site a polyvinyl chloride plant in Convent, Louisiana. PCB manufacture globally has long yielded global efforts to ban the chemicals and, in the early 2000s, additional cross-boundary contacts between activists, researchers, and filmmakers in the U.S., South Africa, and France raised the PCB problem anew. “The global transport of pollutants through air and oceans made the world seem smaller,” one PCB researcher said. Now, rising temperatures have increased the volatility of PCBs and other chemicals once trapped in Arctic ice, resulting in widespread dissemination on land and sea and renewing the need for cross-boundary efforts. The extent to which these efforts mobilized litigation, state actors, and international ties made a crucial difference in human health and environmental outcomes.

Author

• Ellen Griffith Spears, University of Alabama