Off the rails: A critical environmental justice analysis of the East Palestine train derailment

Abstract

The train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio resulted in extensive air and water pollution to communities near and far. Many news reports detailed the burning of vinyl chloride that posed serious threats to air quality and health risks to nearby residents. At the same time, East Palestine and surrounding communities suffer the limited economic opportunities that have accompanied deindustrialization and globalization. As a consequence, one might consider this a case of environmental injustice. To analyze the train derailment, we employ critical environmental justice studies, which broadens and deepens traditional approaches to analyzing disparate environmental outcomes and experiences. We set out to make a few key contributions to the literature: to call attention to the non-monolithic nature of whiteness and in so doing call for an increased concentration on solidarity and movement building across communities harmed by environmental injustices, to highlight intersectionality in intraspecies and interspecies terms, to recast the train derailment as a case of state-sanctioned violence that must be viewed in the context of environmental injustices across the region's history, and to illuminate East Palestine's community-centric, collaborative spaces of care.