Robert Melchior Figueroa - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Robert Melchior Figueroa University of North TexasDepartment of Philosophy & Religion StudiesMarch 22, 2013

Extending Environmental Justice:

From Equity and Identity to Nonhuman AgencySlide2

Redistribution-Recognition ProblemDistribution

Recognition

Injustice

Inequitable Distribution

Underrepresention

___

Remedy

Compensation/Redistribution

Inclusion

,

For Equity

Representation

,

Respect

____________

Collectivity

Socio-Economic/Class

Cultural

____________

Difference

Eliminate

Deconstruct/Celebrate

ReconstructSlide3

Fraser’s Bivalent Levels for Remedies to Redistribution-Recognition ProblemNormative-Philosophical Level (Participatory Parity) Fig’s DepartureSocial-Theoretical Level (Perspectival

Dualism

)

Fig’s Departure

Practical-Political

Level (Transformative Remedies)

Fig’s Departure Slide4

Objections to Bivalent StructureLinda AlcoffHeuristic ChallengeOver simplification

False Problem

Respond with Nature of Heuristic Device

Respond with Environmental Racism Debate

Axel

Honneth

Reductionist Challenge

Recognition is Prior

Identity Reduced to

Parity (challenge to

Normative-Philosophical Level

)

Identity

Destablized

and Deconstructed Collapses into

Distributivist

Picture of Identity

Respond

with

Anti-Reductive Pragmatism

Respond with

Perspectival

Dualism

(

Social-Theoretical

Level)

Slide5

Departing From Fraser at theNormative-Philosophicl LevelParticipatory Justice and the Bivalent Bridge Metaphor

Fraser:

participatory

justice exists as a bridge between the two paradigms

Figueroa:

we

span participatory parity between a weaker and stronger sense, between distributive and recognition paradigms, respectivelySlide6

Bivalent Rhizome Metaphor and Perspectival Dualism:New Moves for the Social-Theoretical Level

Let’s imagine the rhizome of environmental justice existing with co-primary limbs (it can still work with a tree metaphor if you prefer, especially an old growth

plumwood

tree).

Branches of compensation, restitution, redistribution, and even retribution may primarily stem from the distributive connectors; whereas, branches of identity, reconciliation, and even restoration stem from the recognition connectors.

My

perspectival

dualism

widen’s

from the two analytical dimensions of justice defended by Fraser. First, to multiple realizations of the dimensions themselves and secondly to an environmental justice framework that extends

perspectival

dualism to collapse the social from the environmental, the political from the natural, and inside of environmental philosophy canon, the anthropocentric from the non-anthropocentric.

I want to be a

Rhizome!!!Slide7

The ontological status of the rhizome is something I believe is apprehended by my concept of environmental identity and its attendant concept, environmental heritage: both are consequent extensions of the bivalent environmental justice approach. A departure from Fraser’s Practical–Political Level (Transformative Remedies).Environmental Identity

= the amalgamation of cultural identities, ways of life, and self-perceptions that are connected to a given group’s physical environment.

Environmental identity is closely related to

Environmental Heritage

, where the meanings and symbols of the past frame values, practices, and places we wish to preserve

as members of a community

.

In other words, our environmental heritage is our environmental identity in relation to the community viewed over time.

-Group-oriented

-

Not

constrained by an anthropocentric reduction. Slide8

Despite Extensions and Departures, there have been Some Challenges to Fig’s Bivalent Environmental Justice

Shane

Ralson’s

Comments:

“Dewey and Leopold on the Limits of Environmental Justice” (

Philosophical Frontiers,

4:1)

“One

possible upshot of the previous analysis is that in order for environmental justice to become what Robert Figueroa calls “a transformative form of justice,” its proponents must speak about EJ issues differently, that is, exclusively in the language (or discourses) of hope and empowerment. However, this is to restate my argument in stronger terms than I would prefer. Rather, we should seek an alternative framing of environmental justice, one that would not displace the present framing, but that would complement it, understanding EJ issues as series of problematic situations, wherein moral agents seek to strike a healthy balance between an ethic of control and an ethic of restraint

.”

Too Transformative and not very pragmatic to stray from direct issues and cases to transforming the Nature of Justice ItselfSlide9

~Fig’s Response to Ralston: “same old justice will yield same old results”

~Departure

from Fraser, environmental justice

=

social justice

…

~“Environmental

is

Political”

~My sentiments: Actually BV-EJ is

not transformative

enough in justice theory or environmental issues:

Restorative

Justice

Recognition

, Subjects-of-Harm, Offenders

Reconciliation

Communicative Democracy

Responsibility

Frederick’s “Environmental Guilt”Slide10

Extending EJ to the Moral Terrains of Uluru (w/Gordon Waitt)Slide11

Moral Terrains has Gained Significant Support in Environmental Scholarship and Policy and Likewise has Invited More CritiquesSome critics-Pascal Tremblay: “The Contribution of Tourism Towards Aboriginal Economic Development: A Capabilities-Based Perspective”, Technical Report :Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable TourismAn Antithesis of Ralston’s complaint.Kristie Dotson and Kyle

Powys

Whyte: “Environmental Justice, Social Invisibility and Unqualified Affectability” forthcoming,

Environmental Values

From ally to defender and beyond….limitations of moral terrains and affective environmental justice for black feminist epistemology and abjection of difference. Slide12
Slide13

Alternatively, some researchers prefer focusing on discrete, arguably narrow aspects of a broad and significant problem, and reduce it to small-but-interesting controversies by identifying simple contradictions associated with it, for the sake of alerting to analytical contradictions and deriving management lessons. For instance, the evolving conflict arising out of tourists wanting to climb ‘the Rock’ at Uluru has

attracted considerable

attention at the juncture of the literatures on tourism, park management and Aboriginal

cultural management

(du

Cros

& Johnston 2002,

Hueneke

2006,

Hueneke

& Baker 2009,

McKercher

, Weber & du

Cross 2008

,

McKercher & du Cros

1998, Robinson, Baker &

Liddle

2003, Shackley 2004, Waitt, Figueroa &

McGee 2007

). While this seems of interest as a case of conflict-ridden tourism politics, it is questionable whether

this instance

of land-use conflict is especially meaningful to address the basic questions listed in the previous section

. The

cultural and political predicament linked with the climb surely pales in insignificance in contrast to

the vastness

, depth and numbers of critical land dispossessions and social-political quandaries that have

historically shaped and continue to affect contemporary Aboriginal Australian life.

The

positioning of this iconic attraction has attracted considerable fascination with tourism researchers (

and become

an Aboriginal tourism symbolic dilemma) because of the rather basic and typical

host-guest disagreement

it represents. In fact, tourism researchers have

analysed

it in terms of a confrontation

between government

agencies and industry ideologies where one aspect of the tourist

behaviour

‘the climb’

is condemned

, but others are to some extent endorsed. As if the walk on the rock by holiday-makers was

more degrading

to Aboriginal identity or culture than the alienation from that piece of land and its uses, and the

segregation of spaces between infrastructures around the park-enclave and other less visible and

disconnected where

they live. Of course any such interpretation is excessively simplistic and disconnected from the

deeper meaning

and essential forces at play.Slide14

Dotson & Whyte: : “Environmental Justice, Social Invisibility and Unqualified Affectability” forthcoming, Environmental ValuesWe will then move on in section 3 to summarize a particularly well-developed version of an argument linking affectivity and moral knowledge, Robert Figueroa and Gordon Waitt’s

“moral terrains” theory. They claim that detecting the moral claims of Indigenous peoples and other communities requires members of the dominant society to engage in direct embodied experiences of the contexts that frame the moral claims themselves. In section 4, we will test this theory against two forms of social invisibility identified in black women’s literature, absent presences and present absences . In section 5, we will argue that this kind of naturalization project, which attends to the natural, social and political components of corporeal affectivity, can only address the first kind of invisibility. Moral epistemologies that can detect the moral claims of various communities must be able to handle the second kind of invisibility, i.e. the

abjectification

of difference.

The reason why Figueroa and

Waitt’s

theory does not extend to abjection is because it conceives of affectivity primarily according to embodied affectivity. We claim that building unqualified interdependence into the conceptual structure of moral epistemologies will aid in detecting the

abjectification

of difference in environmental justice situations. Our work seeks to build some of the basics of a bridge linking Figueroa and

Waitt’s

scholarship on environmental justice with literatures of oppression by people of color in other domains, in this case Black women’s social theory.Slide15

Another Extension: Interspecies JusticeEthical Extensionism and Justice in Environmental PhilosophyTwo takes on interspecies justice:

Martha Nussbaum

- Capabilities

Subjects of

Justice

Sentience

fallback

People who see themselves in this way, and who do not pride themselves on an allegedly unique characteristic, are more likely than is the

contractarian

to see themselves as making principles for an interlocking world that contains many types of animal life, each with its own needs, each with its own dignity (Nussbaum 2006, 356).

David Schlosberg

- Beyond Capabilities

Ecological Justice vs. Environmental JusticeSlide16

Re-Routing Bivalent Environmental Justice to Interspecies AgencyAdjoining the Affective, Recognition, Restorative, and New Extensions. Phenomenological Tendency, Rethinking Agency, and Cognitive Ethology Current inclusion of recognition: EI/EH

David

Abram

- Phenomenological Participation and

Perceptual Reciprocity: “

that participation is a defining attribute of perception itself (Abram 1996, 57).”

Val

Plumwood

- Intentional Recognition Stance and

Non-Human

Agency

Mark

Bekoff

and Jessica

Peirce

- Wild JusticeCognitive Ethology and Species-Specific Justice……..Slide17

From PlumwoodIn the non-human case, if our dominant theories and reinforceing cultural experience lead us to stereotype earth others reductively as mindless ‘objects,’ non-intentional mechanisms with no potential to be communicative and narrative subjects, as lacking potential viewpoints, well-being, desires and projects of their own (all intentional concepts), then it is quite likely that we will be unable to recognize these characteristics in the non-human sphere even when we are presented with good examples of them. (Plumwood 2002, 175

)

A simple spectrum or scalar concept like consciousness has the disadvantage, additional to

unclarity

and obscurity, of having little capacity to

recognise

incommensurability or difference, and none at all if interpreted in terms of hegemonic otherness. Intentionality can allow us to take a better account of incommensurability because there is enough breadth, play and multiplicity in intentionality to allow us to use diverse, multiple and

decentered

concepts that need not be ranked relative to each other for understanding both humans and more-than-humans as intentional beings (

Plumwood

, 2002 179-180).Slide18

Thank you…..Rob

Robert Melchior Figueroa, UNT

Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies

Director, Environmental Justice Project

Center for Environmental Philosophy

robert.figueroa@unt.edu