Introduction

Environmental Justice and Contested Illnesses

Rachel Morello-Frosch, Phil Brown, and Stephen Zavestoski

Hazards are produced by business operations, to be sure, but they are defined and evaluated socially—in the mass media, in the experts' debate, in the jungle of interpretations and jurisdictions, in courts or with strategic-intellectual dodges, in a milieu of contexts. —ULRICH BECK, RISK SOCIETY, 1992

As mirror and conscience of society, sociology must define, promote, and inform public debate about deepening class and racial inequalities, new gender regimes, environmental degradation, market fundamentalism, state and non-state violence. I believe that the world needs public sociology—a sociology that transcends the academy—more than ever. Our potential publics are multiple, ranging from media audiences to policy makers, from silenced minorities to social movements. They are local, global, and national. —MICHAEL BURAWOY, "2004 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: FOR PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY," 2005

During the summer of 2008, community members in Richmond, California, filed out of a packed and raucous city council meeting after being handed a major setback. Despite Herculean organizing efforts and passionate testimony by fence-line neighbors, council members had voted to approve a conditional-use permit allowing the Chevron oil refinery to increase its production capacity by refining lower-grade crude oil with a higher sulfur content, resulting in increased emissions of harmful sulfur dioxide, sulfates, and metals (Jones 2008; Baker 2007). The Richmond Chevron refinery is one of the nation's largest, covering 2,900 acres, employing a thousand workers, and processing more than 240,000 barrels of crude oil daily into gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, and lubricants (Chevron Corporation 2009a, 2009b). At the meeting, community members presented scientific data from an NIH-funded household exposure study conducted collaboratively by an independent research institute, two major universities, and a regional environmental justice organization. The data showed that refinery activities were adversely affecting indoor and outdoor air quality and that the refinery should reduce emissions, not increase them. After the meeting, one of the scientists spoke with a community organizer about whether science could play a productive role in localized, high-stakes policy decisions such as the one that had just unfolded. The organizer's assessment illuminates the potential, the limitations, and the contested role of science in struggles for environmental health and justice: "Science has its limitations, but it develops strong advocates—people can speak for themselves. The data generated supports the claims, experiences, and demands that the community members bring to the podium in policy settings. Community members can say, `I know this because my home was tested and all these chemicals were found in my house!'"

As decisions about social policy and environmental regulation in the United States, are increasingly shaped by scientific and technocratic discourse, some communities and most industry stakeholders have used their own data and challenged scientific evidence to advance their interests. Yet the insistence on "better" science in decision making often reinforces dominant political and socioeconomic systems by slowing down policy making, precluding precautionary action, and ensuring regulatory paralysis through (over)analysis. Through this scientization of decision making, debates regarding the costs, benefits, and potential health and societal risks of new technologies and industrial production may be dominated by experts who work to ensure that battles over policy remain "objective" and divorced from their socioeconomic and political contexts. This outcome is achieved in three ways. First, questions are posed in scientific terms that may be impossible to answer scientifically, because of uncertainties in the data or the impracticality of...