“We Didn't Get the First 500 Years Right,So Let's Work on the Next 500 Years”: A Call for Transformative Analysis and Action

Abstract

This article begins with a guiding framework for how we might think about environmental justice (EJ), from a sociological standpoint. The next section argues that, if we would like to move societies closer to a state of environmental justice, then future EJ research and activism might move in a much more transformative and radical direction. The need for this kind of analysis and action is illustrated in a discussion of the problem and promise of “crisis.” Crises represent policy failures in the eyes of mainstream scholars and observers, but this article views many such phenomena as the result of routine functions of our policy-making apparatus and market-based political economies. When we view environmental inequalities in such a light, one might then reach the conclusion that transformative and radical ways of thinking and being are required to address these situations.