A concept I repeatedly returned to last semester, so much so that, recently, it’s mention in an ethnographic book I was reading for another class legitimately excited me, is Lefebvre’s Production of Space and Tuttle’s combination thereof with theories of race and racialization. In this semester, my work with CRCQL remains primarily focused on media campaigns. Whether resistive—Facebook posts and calls to local governments about the dangers of Liquefied Natural Gas—or constructive—advertising solidarity events like the annual EJ March—CRCQL constantly works to shape understandings of Chester. The organization’s consistent actions against the incinerator, for example, continuously stress its harmful and exploitative nature to make people see it as a negative, invasive structure into the city. (To be clear, all this is true; CRCQL’s work lies in making that common knowledge and the corollary that the incinerator and other polluting industries need to be expelled from Chester common consensus, not in fabricating any kind of false narratives.) This was the theoretical frame I used to analyze CRCQL at the end of last semester, and I’ve found myself extending and improving that interpretation as I deepen my involvement with the organization this semester. Another pertinent example is C4’s policy of wearing our official t-shirts to any hearing or meeting we attend. The commitment to the visual branding serves to imbue even our silent presence with the strength of representing CRCQL as a witness, asserting that we are watching and listening, and doing so at scale— making our presence to some extent a given of the local political landscape—makes the pressure of environmental justice an inherent part of the space of Delaware County.
Of course, to some extent, what I am describing here is the basic idea of political pressure in a representative democratic system. Theoretically, politicians respond to the majority opinion of their constituents, and advocacy groups like CRCQL seek to both change that majority opinion and convince politicians to act on the basis of their opinion. (More precisely, the argument I summarized above seeks to capture not necessarily the majority public opinion as it functions in a representative democracy, but rather the ways in which the majority public opinion is inscribed and carried out in space: a broad dislike of the incinerator might, for example, drive protest actions against it and cause it to be inherently characterized negatively in public discourse. One would assume this attack on its place in the mental and social space manifests politically in changing the actions of democratic representatives.) If I were to bring my thoughts and experiences of the above to Chester’s government, I almost certainly would not bring up that theoretical framework. Besides being generally inaccessible and not immediately helpful, it strikes me as a bit of a faux pas to discuss a theory of how political influence works to the politicians it ostensibly works on. Instead, if given such a chance, I would probably emphasize the importance of staying accountable to one’s constituents beyond responding to direct, large-scale complaints. The nature of environmental injustice is that the communities most vulnerable to it often do not have good access to comprehensive information about its dangers, glutted as its industries are with technical speech and figurative (and literal) smokescreens. Thus, it is of utmost importance that politicians take affirmative action against environmental threats, signing in laws that mandate higher scrutiny against polluting industries and treating promises of waste disposal and job generation with suspicion. Only then, when their space has become socially, mentally, and economically hostile to environmental injustice, can an organization like CRCQL be said to have succeeded.