Footnote:
In: Harvard Civil Rights- Civil Liberties Law Review (CR-CL), Vol. 57, No. 2, 2022
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2022 erstellt
Description:
Environmental justice controversies in the U.S. territories—often invisible to the larger U.S. populace—are partly about the imposition of disproportionate environmental burdens, but are also about something much more. For the peoples of the U.S. territories, these controversies are hard-fought efforts to restore cultural practices, promote economic self-sufficiency and traditional livelihoods, and exercise a measure of political self-determination over their land, water, and people. Environmental justice is one of the most important and powerful developments in modern environmentalism. At the same time, the established environmental justice framework can obscure U.S. territorial peoples’ unique historical and political statuses, cultural practices, and distinct decolonization claims, and, in so doing, often fails to acknowledge their unique needs for repair. Practically, both environmental and civil rights legal frameworks can limit environmental justice claims, and often diverge in methods, implementation, and available remedies. Conceptually, the one-size-fits-all approach still often carries the day: environmental justice claims and remedies often fail to capture “what [is] really at stake for differing communities”—and how those communities derive meaning from and connect to “the environment.” This Article employs and refines the “racializing environmental justice” framework to account for the unique experiences of the peoples of the U.S. territories that are deeply linked to U.S. colonialism and militarism in their homelands. In this way, the racializing environmental justice framework recasts the remedial imperative. “Repair” involves not just the clean-up of toxic chemicals and the preservation of cultural artifacts but reparative justice for the peoples of the territories. Among other things, this may entail the restoration of political power, the resurrection of Native cultural practices, return of lands, and the reanimation of spiritual and economic interconnections between the land, water, and people