Solidarity as environmental justice in brownfields remediation

Abstract

What do individuals owe to affected communities in the name of environmental justice? Principal accounts of environmental justice have made inroads in developing a pluralistic and activist-led approach. Yet precisely because of their strengths, such accounts face three problems – indeterminacy, epistemology, and structure/agency – that hinder activism and widespread engagement and threaten to leave ‘every neighborhood for itself.’ The current article examines an effort at brownfields remediation in Louisville, Kentucky, asking where environmental justice lies and how individuals ought to be engaged. Activist-led environmental justice cannot guide action, so the article defends a principle of solidarity as equity. Such solidarity requires individual engagement and, in the Louisville case, opposition to the proposed brownfields remediation plan.