Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality
Peter Newell

Race, Class and the Global Politics of
Environmental Inequality

•
Peter Newell

It would be highly surprising if the world of global environmental politics ex-
isted above, or somehow transgressed, the global politics of exclusion and in-
equality which characterize all other global social relations. It is my contention
indeed that they do not, despite the lack of attention within the study of global
environmental politics to these fundamental issues. The challenge, however, is
to suggest ways in which environmental inequality reinforces and, at the same
time reºects, other forms of hierarchy and exploitation along lines of class, race
and gender. In the context of this paper, my aim is to suggest connections be-
tween these worlds, borne out by diverse literatures including those on environ-
mental racism, social ecology, historical materialism and feminist political ecol-
ogy that are relevant to the global politics of the environment. Given the scale of
this ambitious task, my analysis at this point cannot move much beyond identi-
fying and suggesting connections in such a way as to facilitate further applied
and theoretically informed modes of enquiry.

It is increasingly unhelpful to view global environmental politics, either in
terms of the ecological change processes which it seeks to manage (issue-based
analysis) or the institutions that are constructed (regime analysis) in terms of
generic categories of North and South, as Marian Miller’s work made clear.
When the focus moves from reading politics from geography in this way to fo-
cus on intra and transnational social and economic divisions, looking for exam-
ple at “Souths in the North” and “Norths in the South,”1 we have an entry point
for assessing the importance of race and class to inequality in global environ-
mental politics. This shift obliges us to relate inequalities within societies to
economic injustices between them. From an historical materialist perspective,
as Wood argues, the class polarizations of capitalism that have been associated
with the North-South divide increasingly also produce “the impoverishment of
so-called ‘under-classes’ within advanced capitalist countries.”2 Indeed, working
class communities are regarded as convenient depositories of the social and en-
vironmental hazards of industrial activity because those communities, as

1. Gaventa 1999.
2. Wood 2002, 25.

Global Environmental Politics 5:3, August 2005
© 2005 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Peter Newell

• 71

Bullard and Wright suggest, have a “third world view of development—that is,
any development is better than no development at all.”3

Given these patterns, it becomes more helpful to look at those social
groups that generate most and beneªt most from wasteful and destructive pat-
terns of resource exploitation as well as those groups that suffer the worst conse-
quences of global environmental change and the social injustices that it serves
to compound. This provides us with a clearer sense of who resists progressive
policy change and why, and who suffers most and is in need of the greatest pro-
tection. Analysis of this sort can provide a useful point of departure for con-
structing counter-hegemonic coalitions around social movement or policy-
based interventions that are better placed to protect the rights of poorer and
more vulnerable groups.

I advance essentially three key claims in the course of the paper. First, that
we can understand important aspects of global structures in global environmen-
tal politics through their localized effects which render them visible. From here,
it is easier to discern the coalitions of power that produce and beneªt from pre-
vailing distributions of risk and proªt. Such an approach helps us to compre-
hend more fully the connections between macro decision-making and local
level consequences. Second, race and class are key mediating structures in global
environmental politics. They are relevant to understanding causation (the distri-
bution of beneªt from environmental destruction), process (which social
groups make these key decisions and through what decision-making structures)
and distribution (of hazard and harm). Third, a key implication of such an ap-
proach is that we have to take a more critical look at the role of the state and,
relatedly, the role of law in global environmental politics, in the production and
reproduction of environmental injustice.

In order to develop an analysis of this sort, I draw on elements of the fol-
lowing literatures. Firstly, a diverse set of literatures, albeit ones which go by
other names, looking at issues of environmental conºict4 as well as struggles
around corporate accountability to poorer communities.5 This work takes as
given the limits of traditional remedies provided by states and international in-
stitutions on environmental and social issues, acknowledging the complicity of
states in acts of environmental degradation which impact most severely on the
poor and the marginalized. The explicit aim of these works is to explore what
afºicted communities can do to defend themselves, through resistance and
“weapons of the weak,” as well as more engaged strategies of litigation and
global alliance-building. While attention is drawn to the sorts of state-capital al-
liance that are responsible for environmental inequalities, either through blind-
ness to the concerns of poorer groups or active exclusion of their voices within
decision-making processes that privilege the interests of organized capital, sys-

3. Bullard and Wright 1990, 390.
4. Collinson 1994.
5. Madeley 1999; and Garvey and Newell 2004.

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72 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

tematic attention to racial and class dimensions is often lacking. Activist ori-
ented work, which draws attention to the plight of indigenous peoples and the
discrimination they suffer in hosting mining and oil projects for example, posits
these connections more directly6.

Second, I draw on emerging literatures within development studies that
relate global decision-making processes to their local consequences. These em-
phasize elite control of the framings of problems, lack of access for poorer
groups, and the ways in which policy interventions often serve broader com-
mercial imperatives.7 Not only does such work reveal the role of transnational
capitalist elites in managing environmental agendas in ways which facilitate fur-
ther capital accumulation, it also demonstrates how policy choices that may
beneªt poorer groups are often constrained through these means; a kind of pol-
icy lock-in that we have come to associate with other areas of policy in a context
of neo-liberalism.8 In relation to biotechnology, I have argued in earlier work
that in a context of global pressure to accommodate trade concerns, there is a
real danger that countries will lose the right to determine for themselves
whether, and in what ways, biotechnology may assist their development.9 Work
from social movement traditions applied to the issue of conservation also
shows how global elite framings of problems often translate into unworkable
and socially unjust outcomes at the local level, particularly for marginalized
groups.10

In terms of constructing global connections between patterns of organized
inequality, these studies provide a more global perspective on environmental
inequality and its world-wide manifestations than the literature on environ-
mental racism for example. The limitation of using the environmental racism
literature as a basis for scaling up to a global framework of analysis is that, as
Szasz and Meuser note, the horizons of the environmental inequality literature
are largely contemporary and American.11 Even work from outside this region,
from South Africa for example, suggests the importance of studying the interface
between race and environment in context speciªc settings.12 While acknowledg-
ing this, work which draws from the social ecology tradition suggests the possi-
bility and importance of locating processes of environmental degradation
within broader social structures of power, hierarchy and exploitation in
ways that go beyond mapping the local consequences of global institutional
activity.13

Taken together, given their regional diversity, these literatures serve to
show that as Szasz and Meuser put it: “environmental inequality is a global phe-

6. Evans et al. 2002; and Collinsen 1994.
7. Keeley and Scoones 2003; and Newell 2003a.
8. Gill 1995.
9. Newell 2003b.
10. Flitner 1998.
11. Szasz and Meuser 1997, 111.
12. Ruiters 2002.
13. Athanasiou 1996; Bellamy-Foster 2002; Bookchin 1991; and Saurin 1996.

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Peter Newell

• 73

nomenon routinely generated by the normal workings of international political
economy.”14 They suggest that transformations of nature produce human and
social impacts that “will fall unevenly, along existing divisions of wealth/
poverty, power/powerlessness; the transformations of nature will tend to occur
in a way that reproduces and exacerbates existing social inequalities. In effect,
environmental inequality is one facet or moment of social inequality.”15 These
authors advocate globalizing their approach by drawing on the extensive work
on under-development within the global economy in order to assemble a
framework in which work on environmental injustice could be situated. The
overall result would be to “depict environmental inequalities as a necessary and
inevitable facet of social inequalities, embedded in the very fabric of modern
societies.”16

A third set of literature includes some work within global environmental
politics that has begun to forge these global connections, though not systemati-
cally across each of the dimensions I refer to here. For example, there has been
some work on the global toxic waste trade, which seeks to connect global nego-
tiations around the waste trade with local consequences and broader questions
of social justice.17 As Ford notes “The struggle against toxic waste is not a discrete
issue, but one that is fundamentally embedded in the global political economy
and one that emphasizes unequal social relations of power throwing up ques-
tions of race, class and gender.”18 This type of analysis usefully suggests ways in
which patterns of pollution distribution that have been observed within coun-
tries, often mirroring and permitted by social inequalities therein, are also pres-
ent globally. It suggests that such patterns are not accidental but derive from
conscious choices and state strategies. Though there is much confusion regard-
ing evidence of pollution havens in the global economy, Pellow and Park sug-
gest in the case of the electronics industry: “the more laissez-faire the controls
on hazardous substances, the more attractive the nation as a site for manufac-
turing.”19 A look within the sector suggests that those that bear the social and
environmental costs of such a competition strategy are immigrant and female
workers providing the “nimble ªngers” for rapid, often home-based, construc-
tion of circuits and in an environment where exposure to highly toxic chemicals
is unregulated. Pellow and Park quote an employer saying “There’s just three
things I look for in entry-level hiring. Small, foreign and female.”20

If not in intent, then in consequence, the new international division of
pollution feeds on entrenched patterns of social inequality etched along racial,
class and gender lines, as well as constructing new patterns of environmental in-

14. Szasz and Meuser 1997, 111–112.
15. Szasz and Mesuer 1997, 111–112.
16. Szasz and Meuser 1997, 113.
17. Clapp 1994; and Ford 2005.
18. Ford 2005, 314.
19. Pellow and Park 2002, 177.
20. Pellow and Park 2002, 88.

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74 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

equality in its wake. Despite the claims of the former World Bank Chief Econo-
mist Lawrence Summers that parts of the world, notably Africa, are “under-
polluted,” it is misleading to understand the global allocation of environmental
hazard in geographical terms. The key issue raised by Summer’s comment is the
value of life and whose rights are privileged in discussions about societal alloca-
tions of risk and beneªt from industrial activity. Rather like their counterparts in
the North, Third World elites tend not to live near toxic waste sites, nuclear facil-
ities or industrial belts producing hazardous chemicals. Social and racial hierar-
chies that exist within, but extend beyond the state provide an analytically more
satisfying point of departure for understanding the politics of allocating the
risks and beneªts of environmental degradation. The following sections of
the paper develop these ideas through a focus ªrstly on race and secondly on
class, drawing connections between the two and other social structures such as
gender.

Race

Whereas racism is rarely invoked in the explicit sense it was in colonial times, as
a mechanism for justifying extraction, violence and segregation, there is con-
temporary evidence of continued racism in the consequences of environmental
action and inaction, intervention and neglect. These are structural outcomes in
so far as access, entitlements and life expectancy continue to be strongly shaped
by people’s racial identities. Most pertinently, the racial dimension of environ-
mental inequality surfaces around the question of who has rights to environ-
mental protection and who bears the burden of waste and pollution.

The French government received global condemnation for its program of
nuclear testing in the Paciªc (Mururoa atoll) in 1995,21 but arguably the neo-
colonial arrogance it manifested runs deeper than many would care to admit.
The recent controversy surrounding genetically modiªed (GM) food aid
brought many of these issues to the surface once more.22 The US government ac-
cused countries such as Zambia of committing crimes against humanity by re-
fusing to accept GM food aid when its people were starving. The assumption
seemed to be that the hungry lose their rights to exercise choice and, in this con-
text, that starving people should be willing to trial a controversial, some would
say under-tested, technology. Food aid maize from the US containing geneti-
cally modiªed organisms (GMOs) was reportedly sent to Bolivia in 2002, disre-
garding the fact the country had a moratorium in place on the import of GM
crops. The GMOs found in the Bolivian aid contained StarLink corn that was
not approved in the US for human consumption, though it was approved for
animal feed. What was revealing was the fact that when traces of StarLink were

21. Haynes 1999.
22. Clapp 2004.

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Peter Newell

• 75

found in the US food supply, it was immediately removed from the US market,
yet no such effort was made to remove maize sent to Bolivia as food aid.23 The
export of GM food aid to Africa, where many governments were similarly op-
posed to accepting GM crops, led The Ecologist to summarize the situation on its
front cover in the following stark terms: “Eat shit or die? America gives Africa a
choice.”24

The social organization of environmental hazard and the political distri-
bution of risk also manifest strong racial dimensions. The environmental rac-
ism literature provides convincing evidence of disproportionate exposure of
poorer communities of color to the most hazardous forms of environmental
pollution. It was in the aftermath of the Warren County protests that the con-
cept of “environmental racism” was ªrst advanced by the civil rights activist, Dr.
Benjamin Chavis. According to Chavis, environmental racism refers to:

Racial discrimination in environmental policy making and the unequal en-
forcement of the environmental laws and regulations. It is the deliberate tar-
geting of people-of-color communities for toxic waste facilities and the
ofªcial sanctioning of a life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants
in people-of-color communities.25

This literature looks at the links between choices that are made about the
location of hazardous production processes and the racial and social proªle of
communities where those processes are to be based.26 It suggests that minority
and/or low income communities are disproportionately overburdened with
hazardous waste sites, incinerators, petrochemical plants, lead contamination,
dirty air and contaminated drinking water. Figure 1 provides a sample of the
many studies that have reached such conclusions.

Underscoring the importance of conscious intent rather than random pro-
cess, work on environmental racism also shows that communities of color are
often targeted by ªrms processing potentially hazardous materials because they
anticipate a more compliant workforce that can be paid lower wages and where
they expect political resistance to be less forthcoming.27 A 1984 report for the
California Waste Management Board suggested that residents least likely to op-
pose waste developments would be “rural communities, poor communities,
communities whose residents have low educational levels . . . and whose resi-
dents were employed in resource-extractive jobs.”28 The Cerrell report, a strategy
manual for industries needing to set up polluting facilities such as incinerators,
whose aim was to “assist in selecting a site that offers the least potential of gen-
erating public opposition” reached similar conclusions. Its recommendations

23. Clapp 2004.
24. The Ecologist 2003.
25. Quoted in Sandweiss 1998, 36.
26. Cole and Foster 2001; Pellow and Park 2002; and Allen 2003.
27. Cole and Foster 2001; and Pellow and Park 2002.
28. Cole and Foster 2001, 3.

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76 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

Figure 1
Key Reports on Environmental Racism

• A 1983 General Accounting Ofªce study revealed that three out of four off site,
commercial hazardous waste landªlls in the southeast US are located within pre-
dominately African American communities, even though African Americans
make up just one ªfth of the region’s population.a

• A 1987 study by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice—the
ªrst national study to correlate waste facilities and demographic characteristics—
found that race was the most signiªcant factor in determining where waste facili-
ties are located. Among other ªndings, the study revealed that three out of ªve
African Americans and Hispanic Americans live in communities with uncon-
trolled toxic waste sites, and that 15 million African Americans live in communi-
ties with at least one site.b

• A 1992 study by the National Law Journal uncovered signiªcant disparities in the
way the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enforces its laws: “There is a
racial divide in the way the US government cleans up toxic waste sites and pun-
ishes polluters. White communities see faster action, better results and stiffer
penalties than communities where Blacks, Hispanics and other minorities live.
This unequal protection often occurs whether the community is wealthy or
poor.”c

• In a review of studies of environmental hazards over almost thirty years, White
reports that “racial disparities were found in 87 per cent of studies and income
disparities were found in 74 per cent. Disparities were found to exist in a variety
of areas (i.e. exposure to toxins and solid waste, siting of hazardous facilities, and
occupational health), in all regions of the country, and in both urban and rural
communities.”d

a. United States General Accounting Ofªce 1983.
b. Commission for Racial Justice 1987.
c. National Law Journal (NLJ) 1992, 1.
d. White 1998, 63.

were: 1) avoid middle and higher income neighborhoods 2) target communi-
ties that are less well educated 3) target conservative or traditional communities
preferably with fewer than 25,000 residents 4) target rural or elderly communi-
ties 5) target areas whose residents are employed in resource extractive jobs like
mining, timber or agriculture. Even if the developments are unwelcome, impov-
erished communities generally lack the ªnancial and technical resources neces-
sary to resist environmentally hazardous facilities. They also have less access to
traditional remedies to ameliorate those burdens under environmental and civil
rights laws than do their wealthier neighbors.29 The consequence of these prac-
tices is much higher levels of exposure to toxics and subsequently higher levels
of illnesses among minority communities, as illustrated by the cases outlined in

29. Babcock 1995, 9.

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Peter Newell

• 77

Figure 1. The effect of course is to magnify existing patterns of poverty and dep-
rivation.

The fact that poverty and race, as opposed to broader North-South dynam-
ics, are more helpful in explaining the siting of hazardous industry is further
borne out by the literature on Native Americans and environmental justice.30
Angel argues, “Hoping to take advantage of the devastating chronic unemploy-
ment, pervasive poverty and sovereign status of Indian Nations, the waste dis-
posal industry and the US government have embarked on an all out effort to site
incinerators, landªlls, nuclear waste storage facilities and similar polluting in-
dustries on Tribal land.”31 The pattern observed in North America resonates
with the experience of indigenous peoples in parts of the developing world.
Such groups often inhabit the frontline of areas opened up for global invest-
ment in activities such as mining and are often in conºict with the state over
land rights and the distribution of revenues derived from resources on their
lands.32

In many ways, the patterns of exploitation we ªnd within countries mirror
the forms assumed by global relations of the colonial era. In parts of Latin
America a form of “colonialism within” is practiced when elites of white Euro-
pean or mestizo decent either forcibly remove indigenous Indians from their
lands or extract resources coercively for global export. Invoking rationales em-
ployed by former colonizers, such controversial practices continue to be vali-
dated through reference to the need to modernize backward peoples and their
“unproductive” livelihoods.33 The incentives given to large livestock-raising and
timber companies in the Amazon Brazil, for instance, reºect the view that rub-
ber extraction and nut harvesting by traditional populations are “backward”
economic activities that fail to utilize the area sufªciently.34 In India, colonial
legislation continues to be invoked by the state to justify controversial develop-
ments. The Land Acquisition Act, which allows the state to claim land in the
name of projects in the (ill-deªned) national interest, has been repeatedly used
to remove people from their land to make way for industrial development. The
impact has been particularly grave on tribal communities inhabiting remote but
resource-rich areas of interest to mining and other heavy industrial interests.35 It
is perhaps unsurprising then that at the level of popular protest it is peasants,
the rural poor, tribal and indigenous peoples that are at the forefront of cam-
paigns to contest controversial developments which threaten to undermine the
resource base upon which they depend.

Beyond these more localized manifestations of the centrality of race to re-
source conºicts and politics, and the bilateral actions of powerful governments

30. Cole 1992; and Colquette and Robertson 1991.
31. Angel 1991, 1.
32. Evans et al. 2002; and Madeley 1999.
33. Diegues 1998.
34. Diegues 1998, 58.
35. PRIA 2004.

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78 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

towards weaker states, is there evidence of racialized environmental politics
within what we traditionally assume to be the realm of global environmental
politics?

It would be relatively straightforward to argue that the high barriers to
meaningful participation in global environmental negotiations, in terms of re-
quired legal and scientiªc expertise and the costs of attending frequent rounds
of negotiations, serve to screen poorer groups out of global debates. Though ef-
forts have been made to involve indigenous peoples’ groups in the biodiversity
negotiations for example, the environmental justice movement, that has been
the most vocal advocate of coherent positions on the racial and class dimen-
sions of environmental politics, has not, on the whole, engaged with global pro-
cesses. These are perceived to be far removed from the realities of local conºicts
over planning decisions and to reºect the priorities of powerful governments,
better resourced NGOs and a globally organized scientiªc community. Where
this has happened, around the climate change issue for example, representation
has been conªned to NGO side events rather than principal decision-making
arenas.36 Though working class movements are absent from these formal arenas,
trade unions have been present on occasion, though often forming alliances
with industry groups opposing environmental action on a platform of protect-
ing job losses in sectors such as coal mining and the car industry, threatened by
action on climate change, for example. In general, however, it is unsurprising
that negotiations constructed around speciªc issues are unlikely or unable to
capture, let alone address, cross-cutting questions of justice and distribution de-
riving from environmental degradation even if, on occasion, as with the toxic
waste negotiations, activists attempt to highlight these concerns.

Is there a sense, however, in which there is a race dimension to the ways in
which decisions about the environment in global fora are made? Many deci-
sion-making processes on the environment are rationalized and underpinned
by cost-beneªt analysis, reºecting the privileged role of economists in delibera-
tions about the costs of environmental action. In the context of the global nego-
tiations on climate change, this prompted controversy over the value of life as-
sumed by conventional modeling techniques. The debate centered on the
assumption, built into IPCC WG3 models on the economic costs associated
with different courses of action on climate change, that because of their lack of
willingness to pay, people in the global South valued action on climate change
less than their counterparts in the North. The confusion between willingness and
ability to pay as a determinant of whether action should take place allowed du-
bious conclusions to be reached about the lack of demand for action. Critics,
such as the Global Commons Institute, suggested that the resulting assumption
was that the lives of people in developing countries are valued at 1/15 of those
of people in the North. They thus dubbed such ªndings “the economics of
genocide” by accepting that some parts of the world (and some people by impli-

36. CorpWatch 2005.

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• 79

cation) would be lost because the case for acting to save them was economically
“irrational.”37 Within conventional economics such assumptions make perfect
sense, hence Lawrence Summer’s controversial suggestion that Africa was “un-
der-polluted” and, by implication, that it was logical to transfer toxic wastes to
that region given the lower value attached to life on the continent. If we follow
the logic of civil rights law that racism becomes visible through outcomes as
well as intentions, then it may not be too extreme to suggest that withholding
environmental protection from the poor on the grounds that they lack the will-
ingness to pay for it, amounts, in many cases, to racialized triage.

Though I have noted the lack of participation of working class and race-
based movements in global environmental negotiations, environmental NGOs
have played key roles in such processes. The environmental movement is often
held up as a democratizing force in global environmental politics, helping to
promote tougher action than would otherwise be agreed and providing a voice
for those not at the negotiating table.38 Yet elements of the environmental
movement have had a controversial courtship with racist thinking which raises
questions about its ability to perform democratizing and representative func-
tions on behalf of a broad spectrum of racial groups and classes. Controversial
stances on issues of immigration and a support base drawn from wealthier so-
cial groups, as well as the receipt of substantial donations from business, serve
to magnify concerns about the commitment of conservative environmental
groups to a broader social justice agenda. On occasion, conservationist impera-
tives have also been allowed to trump considerations of human welfare. The
policy of shoot to kill, applied to poachers in Kenya, was encouraged by conser-
vative conservation groups such as WWF and Conservation International who
took the position that “increasing population was a major threat to the survival
of elephants and other wildlife.”39 The adoption by more radical elements of the
environmental movement of the “lifeboat ethics” promoted by Garrett Hardin,
with its apparent acceptance of global triage, as well as over-emphasis on the
importance of population control by thinkers such as Ehlrich, which helped to
rationalize forced sterilizations across the developing world, has done nothing
to alleviate suspicions about the excessive prioritization of ecology over justice
and human welfare.40

Again, in so far as the consequences of decisions, programs and campaign
priorities impact disproportionately on poorer people of color, as clearly in
these cases they do, there is evidence of racialised environmental politics at
work. Conversely, there is also evidence in some quarters of the environmental
movement of a kind of essentialism around race. Just as eco-feminists are criti-
cized for positing reductionist connections about women’s intrinsic connec-
tions to nature which are said to make them more effective as caring nurturers,

37. Newell 2000.
38. Wapner 1996; and Lipschutz 1996.
39. Peluso 1993, 57.
40. Ehlrich 1972.

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80 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

so too the romanticization of the indigenous, particularly the reiªcation of
communities allegedly untouched by “civilization” and more in tune with na-
ture than their modern counterparts, often characterizes contemporary environ-
mental campaigning. The unfortunate and unintended effect may be to rein-
force racial stereotypes that, in the gender case at least, have led to women being
burdened with stewardship of the environment and, through increased atten-
tion and visibility, the subject of unwelcome donor and government policy in-
terventions.41

At the level of access to resources, the processes by which decisions are
made about managing environmental change and the distributional conse-
quences of these processes, we can see then the way in which questions of race
penetrate environmental politics and vice versa. Though for the purposes of
identifying literatures and for setting out the issues analytically, I have separated
race and class, Pulido alerts us to the need to get beyond viewing race/class as
competing issues.42 They are not discrete things that can be easily compartmen-
talized. Szasz and Meuser argue that race and class are “rather, social relations
that interact in complex ways. Environmental justice research reiªes these cate-
gories. It reduces them to their operationalizations. It sets them as airtight
things that can be isolated, both conceptually and methodologically, typically
with multivariate statistics. It then tries to determine, in an either/or fashion,
which is the more important or powerful variable.”43 The problem, as Pulido44
sees it, is that such approaches are forced to assume that racism is an abnormal-
ity, an unfortunate occurrence and not a structural or inherent feature of many
societies, which much of the work I cite above suggests it is. Ruiters highlights
another danger of focusing solely on race; it can imply homogeneous commu-
nities not fractured by class, where fetishizing skin color prevents us from a
broader and deeper understanding of how inequality is produced. In many set-
tings, it is poverty that links race and class.45 I explore this idea further in the
next section on class and global environmental politics.

Class

How are we to understand class in this context? Burnham reminds us that ex-
ploitation, not consciousness or common awareness, is the hallmark of class.46
He cites De Ste. Croix’s claim that “class (essentially a relationship) is the collec-
tive social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is
embodied in a social structure.”47 The difference then is between class and class

41. Bretherton 1998.
42. Pulido 1996.
43. Szasz and Meuser 1997, 108.
44. Pulido 1996.
45. Ruiters 2002.
46. Burnham 2002, 117.
47. De Ste. Croix 1981, 43 [cited in Burnham 2002, 117].

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Peter Newell

• 81

struggle, where the former can be identiªed in relation to the degree of owner-
ship or control over the means of production, and the latter to the process of
domination and resistance that results from the exploitation of labor. In envi-
ronmental politics, if we take as given that the contemporary nature and possi-
ble future forms of global environmental governance are heavily shaped and cir-
cumscribed by the organization of the global economy, and in its current phase,
globalization, then production (and who controls it) has to assume a central
role in our analysis. This then is the entry point for understanding how class be-
comes relevant to the study of global environmental politics. In so far as class is
apparent in both the causes and consequences of processes associated with
globalization, how does it render itself visible in the world of environmental
politics?

As a mechanism for capturing the dynamics at work in global environmen-
tal politics, some of the insights from neo-Gramscian versions of historical ma-
terialism become useful. As Murphy suggests, “the social forces that have con-
tinued to back the neoliberal agenda are truly transnational, which implies that
to understand contemporary global governance we need to develop a class anal-
ysis that transcends national boundaries.”48 At the same time he notes, “Global
governance is not simply a superstructure responding to the needs of an already
differentiated global ruling class. It is more a site, one of many sites, in which
struggles over wealth, power and knowledge are taking place. It may be more ac-
curate to argue that contemporary global governance remains a predictable in-
stitutional response not to the interests of a fully-formed class, but to the overall
logic of industrial capitalism.”49 For Robinson, it is the state as a class relation
that is being transnationalized. Its composition, he notes, “comprises those in-
stitutions and practices in global society that maintain, defend and advance the
emergent hegemony of a global bourgeoisie and its project of constructing a
new global capitalist historical bloc.”50 Class analysis then presupposes a theory
of the state.

In environmental terms, an understanding of the operations of the ruling
class reveals the ways in which decisions get made that systematically distribute
risk and hazard to the poor while at the same time preserving the privilege and
property of the bourgeoisie. The economic incentives for the ruling class to
behave in this way are clear. Haynes notes “Political elites are very likely to be
major wealth holders with interests in a variety of activities, some of them envi-
ronmentally damaging, including commercial logging, mineral and oil exploi-
tation, plantation cropping and large-scale irrigated farming.”51 This relates to
Marx’s contention that the capitalist state is “based on the contradiction be-
tween public and private life, on the contradiction between general interests
and private interests.”52 Its role is to maintain market discipline and mediate be-

48. Murphy 2002, xiv.
49. Murphy 2002, xiv.
50. Robinson 2002, 215.
51. Haynes 1999, 224.
52. Marx 1975, 46.

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82 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

tween the contradictions of general and particular interests even within capital,
such that as Newell and Paterson show, competing fractions of capital seek to
present their interests as consistent with those of capital-in-general in environ-
mental as in other issue areas.53 The state then is not seen as a separate sphere
with its own logic, not “suspended in mid-air” as Marx noted, but giving form
to economic institutions and production relations.54 An analysis of class allows
us to locate the state within those larger relations that are implied in the pro-
duction of environmental degradation. The lack of state theory employed in
analysis of environmental politics is problematic in this sense.

Considerable attention is given instead in the study of global environmen-
tal politics to international law, uninformed by these insights.55 As a result,
there is a tendency to valorize law as the apriori response to global environmen-
tal crisis and to ignore the social relations within which law is cast and which it
serves to entrench. Cutler argues, “The possibility for the law to exhibit bias or
to serve unrepresentative interests or undemocratic ends is ruled out by pre-
sumptions of the law as natural, neutral and consensual order.”56 Even accept-
ing that state laws to some extent do not intend to generate inequalities, Cole
and Foster note “State permitting laws remain neutral or blind toward these in-
equalities; they therefore perpetuate, and indeed exacerbate, distributional in-
equalities.”57

Others argue that legal systems are not neutral towards the inequalities
they produce, but rather exist in order to preserve such injustices. In this read-
ing, legal relations cannot be divorced from the material conditions in which
they are produced and seek to preserve. Rupert and Smith argue that “Legal rules
are a crucial constituent of property relations and privatized class power, and
also form the ‘legal culture’ of a transnational bloc advancing a globalizing
neoliberal agenda under the guise of naturalized representations of property,
market and capital.”58 Environmental politics then are played out on this
broader canvas of material and institutional power. Levy and Newell59 have
shown how global shifts in the relationship between state and capital impact on
the world of environmental politics, in particular protecting the agents of envi-
ronmental degradation, such as multinational companies, from interference in
their activities, through regulation.

Invoking ideas about the “marketiztion” of environmental policy, I have
shown elsewhere how the possibilities of effective environmental policy are nar-
rowed by the hegemony of market practice in global environmental politics; a
hegemony sustained through a combination of material, organizational and
discursive power.60 One increasingly prominent and controversial aspect of the

53. Newell and Paterson 1998.
54. Robinson 2002.
55. Sands 1992.
56. Cutler 2002, 233.
57. Cole and Foster 2001, 71.
58. Rupert and Smith 2002, 10.
59. Levy and Newell 2002.
60. Newell forthcoming.

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Peter Newell

• 83

marketization of environmental policy is the importance attached to property
rights as a mechanism for incentivizing environmental action. “Privatized na-
ture,” as one book puts it, is made possible through property rights that deter-
mine patterns of access, exclusion and wealth extraction.61 Rupert, for example,
illustrates the way in which “property is assigned to the private sphere as a pri-
mordial individual right and hence is exempted from ongoing political dia-
logue in the public sphere.”62 This relates to Gill’s argument about how law, in
form of the new constitutionalism, serves to expand the private sphere of capital
accumulation while constraining potentially democratizing inºuences.63 This is
unsurprising in so far as Cutler suggests “The law globalises rules that facilitate
transnational patterns of capital accumulation, attenuating certain regulatory
practices while advancing others. Thus the ability of states to regulate produc-
tion, trade and ªnance for national policy purposes is subordinated to the need
for states to act as market participants or ‘competition states’ in the search for
expanding market opportunities.”64 In this way, in Gramscian terms, globalized
law “advances the interests of a transnational class whose members function as
the ‘organic intellectuals’ for the globalization of capitalism.”65

Just as many neo-Gramscian accounts explain the ways in which elites
seek to preserve their power over the collective management of the global econ-
omy through strategies devised by a transnational historic bloc, an environmen-
tal account would posit the ways in which fundamental economic interests and
privileges are protected through strategies that reify those structures of property
and decision-making from which the transnational managerial class beneªts.
Alliances with conservative elements within the environmental movement have
been key to this strategy of accommodation, producing as Sklair shows, “a
global environmental elite which has been more or less incorporated into the
transnational capitalist class.”66 The function of this sustainable development
historic bloc is to distance global capitalism from the sources of environmental
problems.67 As Sklair points out, “The transnational capitalist class even accom-
modates some mild criticism of consumerism and globalization, but the fatal
connection between the capitalist mode of production and the holistic ecologi-
cal crisis is almost entirely suppressed.”68 Global ecology literatures that
emerged in the wake of the UNCED conference suggested that they have been
very successful in the task of obscuring their own role in the processes they are
ostensibly regulating.69

The different notions of class employed here reºect the emphasis by neo-

61. Goldman 1998.
62. Rupert 1995, 24.
63. Gill 1995.
64. Cutler 2002, 231.
65. Cutler 2002, 231.
66. Sklair 2002, 276.
67. Sklair 2001.
68. Sklair 2002, 57.
69. Chatterjee and Finger 1994; and Hildyard 1993.

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84 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

Gramscians on understanding the speciªc historical structures of capitalism, as
opposed to other work within historical materialism which takes the mode of
production as the central point of departure.70 While some argue that class
should still be understood in fairly national terms, on the basis that “we are still
a very long way from a truly global capitalist class,”71 broader understandings of
class are helpful in understanding the dynamics of coalition-building and the
maintenance of hegemony in environmental arenas where direct connections to
structures of production form just one, albeit very important, part of the picture.
As with analysis of race above, class analysis also has the potential to gen-
erate insights into the environmental movement itself. Sklair’s72 description of
the sustainable development historic bloc implies a division between reformers
and radicals within the environmental movement that hold opposing views of
the compatibility of neo-liberal capitalism with sustainable development. An
analysis more narrowly focused on classical notions of class (as opposed to class
as managerial coalition) would also point to differences in strategy reºecting
those classes groups represent and therefore the extent to which they are able to
question the structures that produce environmental harm. The middle-class
membership base of many conservation-oriented organizations perhaps helps
to explain their reluctance to adopt campaigns which challenge property rela-
tions or questions of access to land. The political interests of the class they rep-
resent make it unlikely that anything other than a weak sustainability reformist
agenda can be pursued given the extent to which they beneªt, directly and indi-
rectly, from the status quo.

This would be in contrast to working class environmental movements, ur-
ban or rural-based, that are able to challenge more fundamental relations of
property and organized inequality which keep them in poverty. Though much
has been written about the movement of the landless in Brazil (MST) and other
campesino movements, less populist and smaller-scale versions exist in the
global North. “The Land is Ours” group in UK would be an example. In both
cases, at issue is land ownership and its redistribution, currently concentrated in
the hands of cattle ranchers and plantation owners in the former case and the
British aristocracy in the second. In many parts of the developing world in par-
ticular, conscious and deliberate links are forged with the left around a platform
of opposition to neo-liberalism and its concrete manifestations in attempts
to privatize water supplies, for example. There is also evidence of connections
increasingly being forged in the North between environmental groups and or-
ganizations that are traditionally assumed to represent the working class,
such as trade unions, in the context of broader campaigns for fair trade or anti-
globalization protests.73 O’Brien describes what brings these groups together:

70. Lacher 2002; and Burnham 2002.
71. Wood 2002, 27.
72. Sklair 2001.
73. Obach 2004.

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Peter Newell

• 85

it has always been the case that much environmental damage, whether it is
radiation leakage from nuclear power stations, asbestos poisoning or pol-
luted water, has a disproportional affect on those people working in the in-
dustries themselves and their communities. So there has always been a case
for unity. What is signiªcant about today’s protests and campaigns are the
overt links being made between workers and other campaigners about the
environmental effects of the rampant expansion of the market.74

Acknowledging these connections, new coalitions have been formed such
as the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment, formed around the
time of the Seattle WTO summit and involving environmental groups such as
Earth Island Institute alongside the United Steel Workers of America. This is in
addition to more momentary unities during the Seattle protests where labor
and environmental activists came together under banners such as “Teamsters
and turtles, together at last.”75 At national level, in the South African context,
Khan notes how “Trade unions began to accept that industrial health and occu-
pational health and safety were legitimate environmental issues and therefore
of concern to them in their commitment to creating working areas that were
safe both for workers and for the surrounding communities.”76 Such alliance-
building was signiªcant in the campaign for justice for the rural community liv-
ing close to the Thor chemicals plant in KwaZulu-Natal whose water was poi-
soned with mercury waste. Earthlife formed an alliance with the Chemical
Workers Industrial Union, the Environmental Justice Networking Forum, as
well as with Greenpeace International, who conducted tests on soil and water
samples taken from the ground around the plant.77 In many other cases, how-
ever, relationships between trade unions and environmental groups remain un-
easy and fragile.78

In terms of the class politics of the environmental movement, there may
be a difference between second wave environmentalism, which is said to be
overwhelmingly white and middle class in its staff, membership and perspec-
tive, and the third wave of grassroots environmentalists, largely, though not en-
tirely, working class people, many of whom are people of color.79 The latter
bring different histories and experiences to the table because of their back-
grounds and often have less faith in the law and more experience with non-legal
strategies than mainstream environmentalists having uncovered through their
own experiences “the hidden power dynamics of pollution and environmental
laws.”80 Integrating class and gender dimensions, Ford notes how in relation
to struggles around toxic waste, “the politicization of working-class women

74. O’Brien 2001, 73.
75. Moody 2001, 293.
76. Khan 2002, 29.
77. Lukey 2002, 278.
78. Bullard and Wright 1990, 305.
79. Cole 1992.
80. Cole 1992, 643.

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86 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

through the issue of toxic waste has instilled a suspicion of mainstream envi-
ronmental organizations that fail to analyze the underlying issues of inequality
in access to power and inºuence.”81

The point here is not to reduce all interpretations of environmental move-
ments to class. To do so would be to overlook the many rich insights from femi-
nist political ecology,82 and of course work on environmental racism that I draw
on here, about the politics of movement identity, exclusion and effectiveness.
The point is that attention to class dynamics reveals much about the composi-
tion, strategies and agendas of elements within the environmental movement.
More broadly, as with the discussion on race, we have seen how issues of access
and control of resources, decision-making processes and the distribution of
gains and hazards can each be usefully understood through a focus on class. The
challenge remains to integrate them in an analytically meaningful way.

From Race and Class to Environmental Inequality and Exploitation

In so far as some historical materialist accounts are guilty of a particular type of
economism which posits that capitalism constitutes a form of domination
more fundamental than race and gender,83 there are issues of how readily we
can combine insights from historical materialism about class with insights on
race and gender in the sphere of environmental politics. Lekhi suggests class
analysis imposes an unreasonable coherence on the world when even Marx ac-
knowledged how social entities constituted by a multiplicity of relations and
structures cannot, in and of themselves, be reduced to class.84 The challenge for
Marxism that Colás identiªes is to consider “how capital grafts its own logic of
exploitation upon pre-existing institutions and social structures such as sover-
eign political communities, households, ethnic, religious or caste hierarchies
and, most notably, sexual differentiation.”85 He concludes that “In as much as
the processes of globalisation are a reºection of the class antagonisms arising
out of such social hierarchies [such as sex and race], they often reinforce, rather
than undermine, these divisions.”86 Suggesting that capitalism, racism and pa-
triarchy fuse at certain junctures is not to suggest that they are synonymous,
however; interconnections have to be understood as historical articulations of
particular sets of social relations.87 Given this, Scott and Rupert suggest, “a polit-
ical movement must be built through the recognition that those exploited and
dominated by globalizing capitalism share a potential unity in view of their
common structural relation to capital, but that this commonality is embedded

81. Ford 2005, 317.
82. Rochelau et al. 1995; Brown and Ferguson 1995; and Krauss 1993.
83. Laffey and Dean 2002.
84. Lekhi 1995.
85. Colás 2002, 205.
86. Colás 2002, 206.
87. Lekhi 2000.

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Peter Newell

• 87

in and mediated by manifold social relations which mark them off as meaning-
fully different.”88

Environmental inequality often then goes hand in hand with other forms
of exploitation and discrimination. The fact that poorer communities of color
are disproportionately exposed to high levels of environmental pollution and
that environmental protection measures are often poorly enforced or neglected
altogether in the areas where they live suggests a form of “double-discrimina-
tion.” If you are working class you are more likely to be exposed to environmen-
tal pollution. If you are a person of color and working class you are even more
likely to be exposed to hazards. If you are a woman of color and working class,
the forms of discrimination, including environmental, that you are likely to en-
dure in your day to day life, will almost certainly be even more pronounced.
Trying, however, to posit a hierarchy among these forms of discrimination when
it comes to access to natural resources and exposure to hazard becomes almost
meaningless when they are so interrelated and reproduce one another so inti-
mately. Separating race and class for analytical purposes in the way I have above,
has not meant to imply a uni-dimensional analytical approach; merely to iden-
tify, in turn, the interaction of issues of race and class with the multiple arenas
of global environmental politics and to highlight insights from distinct litera-
tures associated with each.

I have emphasized the global dimensions of these patterns in order to
make a case for addressing the issues they raise more systematically within the
study of global environmental politics. However, though processes of globaliza-
tion are often cited as the catalyst for awareness about the social consequences
of environmental injustice, the condition is hardly a new one. As Keeva notes,
“The poor have always lived downwind and downstream from what the privi-
leged could afford to avoid. What is new is the extent to which the problem is
being documented.”89 Nevertheless, patterns of exploitation that exist within
countries along the lines of class, caste, race and gender are often exacerbated by
global economic pressures. While others have noted the social consequences of
adjusting economies to the requirements of global capital,90 Miller was alert to
the environmental consequences of this process. Referring to export processing
zones, she noted “The corporations enjoy special privileges such as tax breaks,
the use of valuable land, inºuence in local government decision-making and
priority access to local water supplies and power generation; in addition, local
taxpayers pay for the infrastructure these enterprises need. Sometimes these
businesses add to the cost by contaminating local land and water supplies with
their toxic wastes. All of these costs seem disproportionate to the beneªts re-
ceived, especially when the primary beneªt is low-wage jobs.”91

88. Scott and Rupert 2002, 298.
89. Keeva 1994, 88.
90. Lazarus 1998–1999.
91. Miller 1995, 145.

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88 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

However, injustices enabled through processes of globalization are ren-
dered invisible through distance, as Marian Miller was acutely aware. She noted:

When there is a separation of producer from consumer, employee from em-
ployer, and investor from investment, the decision making process is freer to
ignore the externalities that might otherwise be factored in. This kind of de-
cision-making process justiªes the hazardous waste trade and the establish-
ment of hazardous waste landªlls and incinerators in poor communities.92

Increasingly, as a result, attempts to contest the race and class-based allo-
cations of risk and beneªt that this observation implies have had to take on
transnational dimensions. Pellow and Park claim, for example, that “progressive
changes in high tech have been realized only when social movements, workers
and communities are organizing and demand them. And this must increasingly
happen on a transnational scale as high tech and other industries go global.”93
An example would be the “International Campaign for Responsible Technol-
ogy” established in 1991 to increase grassroots participation in transnational
high tech policy development, comprising more than eighty representatives
from over twelve nations.

Often what start as campaigns about particular siting decisions become
struggles over decision-making processes which allocate risks in these ways. In
this sense, Cole argues that “many in the grassroots environmental movement
conceive of their struggle as not simply a battle against chemicals, but a kind of
politics that demands popular control of corporate decision-making on behalf
of workers and communities.”94 Cole and Foster note how anti-toxics activists,
through the process of local struggles against polluting facilities, came to under-
stand discrete toxic assaults as part of an economic structure in which, “as part
of the ‘natural’ functioning of the economy, certain communities would be pol-
luted.”95 This, in turn, raises many strategic questions. Ruiters suggests merely
calling for environmental equity reproduces a naïve faith in procedural justice
in social conºict settings and the ability of distributional notions of fairness to
tackle the structural and institutional sources of injustice.96 He argues: “The em-
phasis (wrongly) falls on the distribution of environmental hazards; the strug-
gle for improved regulations; stricter enforcement; and better access to informa-
tion about industries, their products and workplace conditions. A deeper
approach to environmental justice, however, requires a focus on the production
and prevention of injustices.”97

There is more learning and exchange in all directions that needs to take
place between local community-based forms of activism contesting the conse-

92. Miller 1995, 144.
93. Pellow and Park 2002, 185.
94. Cole 1992, 633.
95. Cole and Foster 2001, 23.
96. Ruiters 2002, 118.
97. Ruiters 2002, 112.

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Peter Newell

• 89

quences of environmental injustice and the social inequities it reinforces and
creates, and more “professional” forms of activism within the environmental
movement which aim to produce change in the practices of governments and
corporations generating these injustices through negotiation and dialogue. The
two have neglected one another for too long. Such exchanges provide one possi-
ble vehicle for highlighting the chains of injustice that link what we tradition-
ally understand to be global environmental politics, that which takes place
within formal institutional arenas at the global level, with micro level conse-
quences of environmental change and its management.

Conclusion

Drawing on a diverse set of literatures, I have sought in this paper to take for-
ward the challenge Marian Miller engaged with in her work; understanding en-
vironmental politics through an understanding of their links to the global polit-
ical economy. I have used the lenses of race and class to understand patterns of
causation, process and distribution that emerge from the relationship between
environmental change and the contemporary organization of the global politi-
cal economy. I am conscious that in seeking to proªle the importance of race
and class I have paid less explicit attention to gender dimensions. It has been
clear, though, in the use of work from the feminist political ecology tradition
and the examples used, that gender is central to an adequate and comprehen-
sive understanding of practices of social exclusion and can rarely be divorced
meaningfully from considerations of race and class.

Though the contours of the approach I have begun to articulate here chal-
lenge the orientation of existing theoretical approaches to the global politics of
the environment, they have nonetheless important implications for the contin-
ued pursuit of more conventional types of enquiry. With regard the preoccupa-
tion with explaining and promoting international cooperation, Miller noted “it
is difªcult to obtain the required cooperation when, on the one hand,
signiªcant destitution is found in the society and, on the other, a small class is
ready to exploit the available natural and human resources.”98 Tackling some of
the obvious manifestations and visible elements of environmental injustice
might be seen as a prerequisite to the achievement of even narrowly deªned
functional environmental goals. Miller notes “It is difªcult to envisage the
achievement of sustainable development in an environment of severe inequity
. . . Inequities at the global, national and local levels . . . present obstacles to the
support of the regimes and constitute a real threat to adequate implementation
and enforcement of international environmental institutions.”99

More broadly, however, attention to race and class in global environmen-
tal politics does require us to address a broader set of questions than the role of

98. Miller 1995, 143.
99. Miller 1995, 152.

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90 • Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

institutions in global society and the interactions of state and nonstate actors on
the global stage. If we accept that broader social and economic structures tran-
scend distinctions between global/international and national/local, state/
nonstate and public/private, producing inequality and environmental destruc-
tion in their wake, how long can we afford to understand environmental poli-
tics as a world in which race, class and patriarchy do not exist? They may be rele-
vant to explaining and changing even narrowly-deªned global practices of
environmental politics, but a focus on race and class may require different ana-
lytical categories. Ford’s use of the distinction between global as a spatial cate-
gory, that which IR scholars often use to deªne the legitimate and distinct ter-
rain of their research, and global as a causal category, which is more relevant to
capturing the dynamics that have been featured centrally in this paper, is helpful
in this regard.100

Many of the worst environmental impacts that working class people and
communities of color live with on a daily basis do not derive directly from deci-
sion-making processes that we have traditionally labeled global. Nevertheless,
the articulations of power, concentrated around state-capitalist elites and their
allies are not divorced from, and often indeed reºect, what we can observe lo-
cally because of their implication in the structures of production that create en-
vironmental harm. They form part of wider structures of power which trans-
gress, but also serve to maintain, the visible institutional conªgurations of
global governance. While the more visible and noticeable dimensions of the in-
terface between environmental politics and race and class are observable locally,
similar patterns are to be found globally when we turn to questions of access,
process and the distribution of environmental beneªts and harms. It is this that
makes them increasingly applicable to understandings of global environmental
politics.

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