Description

This paper session presents critical cross-disciplinary examinations of environmental justice’s dilemmas for sustainability from several geography specialists and experts from other fields. Many portray sustainability as a harmonious nexus of ecology, economy, and equity popularized with a Venn diagram of three overlapping spheres. Others advocate a fashionable triple-bottom line for business. Urban leaders continue to pursue urban greening strategies to improve livability and redress inequities. However, a growing body of geography and other disciplines see more contradiction, dissonance, and discord than progress in many sustainability efforts.

Environmentalism and sustainability experienced a racial reckoning while geographies became more divided by race, class, and pollution. The political power asymmetries driving these patterns are also often obscured in sustainability scholarship. Increasingly, studies document how environmental projects ranging from environmental remediation to green space creation either fail to deliver benefits equitably or result in unintended and negative consequences for the most vulnerable populations. Yet, sustainability scholarship still pays too little attention to the ways sustainability policies and movements interact with socioeconomic, political, and historical processes in the production of more or less equitable spaces.