Robert Melchior Figueroa University of North Texas Department of Philosophy & Religion Studies March 22, 2013

1. Robert Melchior Figueroa University of North Texas Department of Philosophy & Religion Studies March 22, 2013 Extending Environmental Justice: From Equity and Identity to Nonhuman Agency

2. Redistribution-Recognition Problem DistributionRecognition Injustice Inequitable Distribution Underrepresention___ Remedy Compensation/Redistribution Inclusion, For Equity Representation, Respect____________ Collectivity Socio-Economic/Class Cultural____________ Difference Eliminate Deconstruct/Celebrate Reconstruct

3. Fraser’s Bivalent Levels for Remedies to Redistribution-Recognition Problem • Normative-Philosophical Level (Participatory Parity) Fig’s Departure • Social-Theoretical Level (Perspectival Dualism) Fig’s Departure • Practical-Political Level (Transformative Remedies) Fig’s Departure

4. Objections to Bivalent Structure • Linda Alcoff • Heuristic Challenge • Over 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)

5. Departing From Fraser at the Normative-Philosophicl Level Participatory 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, respectively

6. Bivalent Rhizome Metaphor and Perspectival Dualism: New Moves for the Social-Theoretical Level I want to be a Rhizome!!! 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.

7. 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.

8. Despite Extensions and Departures, there have been Some Challenges to Fig’s Bivalent Environmental Justice • Shane Ralson’sComments: “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 Itself

9. ~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”

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

11. Moral Terrains has Gained Significant Support in Environmental Scholarship and Policy and Likewise has Invited More Critiques Some critics- • Pascal Tremblay: “The Contribution of Tourism Towards Aboriginal Economic Development: A Capabilities-Based Perspective”, Technical Report :Cooperative Research Centre for Sustainable Tourism • An 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.

13. 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.

14. Dotson & Whyte: :“Environmental Justice, Social Invisibility and Unqualified Affectability” forthcoming, Environmental Values We 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.

15. Another Extension: Interspecies Justice • Ethical Extensionism and Justice in Environmental Philosophy Two 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 Justice

16. Re-Routing Bivalent Environmental Justice to Interspecies Agency Adjoining 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 Justice • Cognitive Ethology and Species-Specific Justice……..

17. From Plumwood • In 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).

18. 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