by Shannon Elizabeth Bell, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky
The future I hope to see for feminist research is more scholars engaging in activist research aimed at fighting the tremendous number of environmental injustices that are devastating the lives of women and other vulnerable populations around the world.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, in 2009 alone, U.S. industries self-reported releasing 3.37 billion pounds of toxic pollutants into the air, water, and land. Of these toxic substances, approximately 700 million pounds are known or suspected carcinogens (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 2009). Again, these are self-reported numbers; it is impossible to know how many more millions of pounds of released toxins are not reported by these companies.
Polluting—both legally and illegally—is profitable for corporations, far more profitable than implementing pollution-prevention technologies (Faber 2008). Not surprisingly, these companies work hard to retain their ability to pollute. The largest corporate polluters in the United States, including chemical, oil, natural gas, and coal companies, have created a powerful network of think tanks, policy institutes, research centers, foundations, nonprofit organizations, public relations firms, and political action committees that are organized with the purpose of waging war on environmental regulations. This network, which Faber (2008) terms the “polluter-industrial complex,” is “committed to discrediting the environmental movement and to dismantling state programs and policies that promote environmental justice, protect public health, and safeguard the earth” (p. 15).
This polluting corporate power elite is able to wield inordinate influence through employing a number of strategies, such as contributing enormous sums of money to political campaigns and Political Action Committees (Jenkins 2011, Faber 2008); influencing regulatory agency leadership appointments and oversight (Harrison 2011; Faber 2008); acting as informal “advisors” to political leaders (Switzer 1997); hiring researchers and enlisting think tanks to obfuscate and cast doubt on incriminating scientific findings (McCright and Dunlap 2000); reshaping public opinion through astroturf organizations and front groups (Bell and York 2010; Boudet and Bell Forthcoming); and through pouring millions of dollars into lobbying efforts (Jenkins 2011). According to Faber (2008), this final tactic—special interest lobbying—is a particularly powerful mechanism for “colonizing the state.” In 2009 and 2010, special interests spent nearly $7 billion on lobbying (Beckel 2011), and there are approximately 90,000 people engaged in or supporting lobbying activities in Washington, DC alone (Faber 2008; p. 97). Corporate polluters enjoy nearly unfettered access to policy-makers and are woven so deeply into the environmental regulation-making and legislative process that their proposals “are frequently adopted with little modification.” In fact, these corporate lobbyists are often the very individuals who are actually writing the policies and regulations in their entirety (Faber 2008).
Most often, the voices of ordinary citizens are completely excluded from the policy-making process. Furthermore, the people who are the most affected by environmental injustices tend to have the least political power and fewest resources, such as time, money, and education. Thus, their voices are the least-often heard by policy-makers.
Democratizing the state and facilitating citizen involvement is a monumental task. However, we as feminist researchers can contribute to this purpose if we so choose. Our research often positions us in such a way that we could serve as bridges between the people we study and policy-makers, providing an avenue to bring exposure to the concerns of unheard individuals through bringing their stories forward, or even better, by providing opportunities for those individuals to bring their own stories forward. I believe that we as feminist researchers have an opportunity to contribute to increasing the participation of local people, helping counter—in a small but potentially significant way—the voice of the polluter-industrial complex, which will continue to push for roll-backs on environmental regulations, at the expense of disenfranchised communities throughout the country (and world).
—The recipient of two CSWS Graduate Student Research Grants, Shannon Elizabeth Bell graduated from UO in 2010 with a PhD in sociology and a certificate in women’s and gender studies. Her first book, Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice, is due in November from the University of Illinois Press. The manuscript of her second book, “Fighting King Coal: The Barriers to Grassroots Environmental Justice Movement Participation in Central Appalachia,” is currently under review. She is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky.
References
Bell, S.E. and R. York. (2010). Community Economic Identity: The Coal Industry and Ideology Construction in West Virginia. Rural Sociology, 75, 111-143.
Boudet, H.S. and S.E. Bell. Forthcoming. “Risks and Social Movements: Examining the Role of Communication.” Chapter 25 in Hyunyi Cho, Torsten Reimer, and Katherine McComas (Eds.). The SAGE Handbook of Risk Communication. Sage Publications.
Faber, D. (2008). Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice: The Polluter-Industrial Complex in the Age of Globalization. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Jenkins, M. (2011). What’s Gotten Into Us? Staying Healthy in a Toxic World. New York: Random House.
Harrison, J.L. (2011). Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McCright, A.M. and R.E. Dunlap. (2000). Challenging Global Warming as a Social Problem: An Analysis of the Conservative Movement’s Counter-Claims. Social Problems. 47(4):499-522.
Switzer, J.V. (1997). Green Backlash: The History and Politics of Environmental Opposition in the U.S. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.