Abstract
As the climate crisis intensifies, recovery efforts increasingly occur at the interface of diverse landscapes and overlapping struggles for justice. To better understand the environmental justice implications of climate disruption and uneven recovery, this article casts a critical light on disaster waste. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a deadly debris flow in California and the dumping of toxic sediment on public beaches, I provide a “flows of injustice” framing to bridge environmental justice and climate justice concerns across multiple spatial contexts and temporalities. Although it is often assumed that recovery is spatially confined to the site of immediate disruption, residual injustice can arise when hazardous waste is disposed of near poor, working class, and minoritized communities without appropriate remediation measures. The case study illustrates how disaster recovery shifted vulnerability downstream away from wealthy communities, mirroring systems of value that prioritize privileged areas while designating new sacrifice zones. This suggests a need for a relational understanding of disaster recovery that goes beyond conventional landscape binaries that normalize unjust adaptation practices.
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