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Welcome to Issue 41:4 (September 2009) of Antipode
Exact numbers are elusive, but it is estimated that New York City generates 12,000 tons of garbage – enough to fill the Empire State building – each day. Another major city on our planet, Delhi, generates marginally less garbage: 7,000 tons per day. Much of Delhi’s waste, as that of other cities, ends up in incinerators or landfills. While environmental controversies continue to swirl around the use of incinerators, landfills pose severe problems of their own. Leaching from landfills can contaminate groundwater. More dangerously, landfills produce large amounts of methane (CH4), a combustible gas with potent global warming potential (GWP), a measure of how much a given mass of greenhouse gas is likely to contribute to global warming over a stipulated time interval. The most common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), with a GWP value of 1, is the numeráire: the GWP values of all other greenhouse gases (GHGs) are indexed relative to that of CO2. Thus, methane has a GWP of 72 over a 20-year interval and 25 over a 100-year interval. In short, GHG emissions from landfills – primarily methane and carbon dioxide – are major sources of anthropogenic global warming.
Enter waste pickers, waste recyclers, and small scrap dealers, who together comprise the informal recycling sector in cities of the global South. An estimated 1% of the population of cities like Delhi finds work in this sector; hence Delhi has a minimum of 150,000 informal sector recyclers. This small army of waste collectors recycles anywhere from 15% to 60% of Delhi’s garbage, depending on season and area – thereby easing the load on landfills and reducing their GHG emissions. By this calculus, the world’s informal sector recyclers provide a critical but unremunerated service to urban areas. But how important is this environmental service? According to a report just released by Chintan, a Delhi-based NGO that conducts research and advocacy on urban poverty and environmental justice issues, the informal waste recycling sector in Delhi accounts for an estimated net reduction in greenhouse gases (GHGs) of 962,133 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (TCO2e) per year. These savings, it notes, are the same as removing 175,000 passenger vehicles from the roads annually or providing electricity to 130,000 homes for one year (based on US averages).
More startling? The emission abatements achieved by Delhi’s informal sector recyclers exceed by a factor of 3 the combined slated reductions in greenhouse gases by the city’s capital-intensive waste projects registered for carbon credits with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. It is difficult to find a more vivid example of the CDM’s structural flaws, or, more tendentiously, of the anti-poor bias of international climate change negotiators, who have little to no appreciation of the substantial ecological subsidy provided to the planet by the daily labors of informal recyclers. For these urban poor the body is an ‘accumulation strategy’; but for those of us who benefit from their subsidy, it is also (to bend David Harvey’s famous dictum) an ‘abatement strategy’.
Meanwhile, expectations are running low as countries gear up for the upcoming Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, which is meant to install a new climate agreement before the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012. The Obama administration has been steadily backtracking on its environmental commitments, perhaps calculating that any firm or forceful timetable for reduction in GHGs by the United States might prove politically treacherous at the 2010 midterm polls in the current economic climate. Indeed, a poll of 1,500 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, released in the second half of October, shows that Americans have grown increasingly skeptical of anthropogenic climate change. The numbers who say there is strong scientific evidence that the Earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades has declined from 71 percent in April 2008 to 57 percent today. The number of people who see the situation as a serious problem also has declined – even as the US continues to emit more GHGs, absolutely and per head, than any other country. When Kyoto was agreed, the US committed to reducing its emissions by 6%. But in March 2001 President George W. Bush pulled the US out of the Kyoto agreement, claiming that it was a drag on economic activity. By 2002, US CO2 emissions were 15% above 1990 levels.
These two stories illustrate the complex, multi-scalar issues of ‘environmental justice’ that bind us, no matter where we live and work. We are all summoned to attention and responsibility because – wittingly or not, to a lesser or greater degree – we all participate in the production of geographic inequalities.
It is entirely fitting, therefore, that our current issue of Antipode is a special issue titled, Spaces of Environmental Justice. Edited by Ryan Holifield, Michael Porter and Gordon Walker, the issue gathers eight papers that intervene in connected but different ways in contemporary debates around environmental justice and its variegated geographies from the vantage point of ‘critical theory’. Pushing beyond conventional Marxist frameworks of analysis, the papers explore the analytic leverage and political implications of actor-network theory (Walker / Holifield / Bickerstaff and Agyeman / Sze et al.), critical social theories of race and racism (Kurtz / Buckingham and Kulcur), gendered geographies of justice (Buckingham and Kulcur), parity-fostering participatory research (Tschakert), critical studies of tourism (Meletis and Campbell), and scalar politics (Sze et al.). These plural incisions into questions of environmental justice intersect in unexpected ways at three crossroads, involving matters of participation, distribution, and recognition.
As the editors note in their introduction, the eight papers that comprise the special issue operate as two porous sets: the first (Walker / Holifield / Buckingham and Kulcur / and Kurtz), in a more consistently theoretical mode, underscores the forces that generate, stabilize, or even naturalize spaces of inequality and injustice; whereas the second (Tschakert / Meletis and Campbell / Bickerstaff and Agyeman / and Sze et al.) applies critical conceptualizations of environmental justice to new social and geographical contexts, in the process extending our understanding of how environmental inequalities are produced in particular places and at multiple scales.
These eight stimulating essays should spur debate among readers around urgent (and vexing) questions of environmental justice that connect us all. Read on…
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