Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality

It would be highly surprising if the world of global environmental politics existed above, or somehow transgressed, the global politics of exclusion and inequality 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 between these worlds, borne out by diverse literatures including those on environmental racism, social ecology, historical materialism and feminist political ecology 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 identifying 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 focus on intra and transnational social and economic divisions, looking for example 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 environmental 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 environmental hazards of industrial activity because those communities, as