6 Chapter 5: “Storytelling for Environmental Justice Advocacy” by Mariam Dames

In 1978, employees of the Ward Transformer Company deliberately and illegally dumped over 30,000 gallons of PCB chemicals along the roadside of numerous North Carolina counties. State government officials in North Carolina and the EPA then faced the challenge of deciding what to do with the chemicals—or rather, where to put them. They chose Warren County, NC, a majority-minority and low-income area, despite Warren County not meeting EPA criteria for the landfill siting.^[1] With the support of Civil Rights leaders, the citizens of Warren County came together to protest the siting and make known their belief that racial and economic factors drove the siting. Although the protests and their amplification of the connection between race and environmental decision-making led Warren County to be known as the “birthplace” of the environmental justice movement, state officials ultimately constructed the landfill and deposited the chemicals there in 1982.

The above story introduces a truncated version of the events of Warren County. In fact, this story is barely the beginning of a single version of the numerous stories told by various stakeholders involved in the Warren County environmental injustice. In her work with Warren County residents, Pezzullo (2001) found that residents had a nuanced relationship with this dominant “birthplace” narrative. Through further exploration, Pezzullo (2001) found that residents told many other narratives in their continued fight to have the chemical landfill shut down and its toxins removed. In cases of environmental injustice, stories or narratives told by those negatively impacted have the power to become powerful tools of advocacy, breathing presence into the otherwise exclusionary narratives of the dominant group(s). This chapter explores how history and public memory go on to impact the types of narratives arising from various environmental justice case studies and how marginalized communities utilize storytelling and other narrative-based methods to give voice and power back to those facing environmental injustices.

History and Public Memory

History and public memory are distinct yet interconnected concepts that influence how narratives are constructed and shared. History is proposed as an “objective” telling of past events influenced by widely accepted ideas and beliefs. Often determined by those in power and further solidified through dominant discourses, history is considered “settled.” Further, history may be perceived as “neutral;” however, because those in power determine it, it may often be deliberately shaped to serve particular interests. In contrast, public memory is subjective, fluid, and collective—it is a product of individual and community experience. Thus, public memory often reflects the cultural practices and beliefs of the individuals and communities from which it arises. Pezzullo (2003) argues that this cultural investment politicizes memory, thereby “denaturaliz[ing]” how people recall history and opening possibilities for its negotiation (p. 228). This negotiation of new understandings of history via the inclusion of public memory is an exercise in community building, as it allows marginalized individuals to find voice and power within their knowledge and the knowledge of others around them (Pezzullo, 2003).

In the context of environmental justice issues, public memory often fills the gaps left through typical accounts of history that lessen or ignore the burdens shouldered by marginalized communities. Nixon (2013) argues that environmental injustices are too often “incorporated into history and rendered forgettable and ordinary precisely because the burden of risk falls unequally on the unsheltered poor” (p. 65). However, public memory centers and humanizes the outcomes of these burdens by asking questions such as, “Whose evidence is present? Whose evidence is absent? Whose history has been forgotten? And whose memory should be told?” (Pezzullo, 2003, p. 232). In reckoning with whose memory should be told, marginalized communities bearing the burdens of environmental injustice may turn to sharing their stories to resist historical erasure. This public sharing of stories based on collective memories can then function as a powerful tool of advocacy—a topic to be further explored throughout this chapter. However, stories inspired by the objective or widely accepted truths of history are also prevalent in environmental justice cases and serve to construct a dominant narrative, often erasing lived experience. In the next section, master narratives and counternarratives will be explored as the products of understandings of history and public memory.

Master Narratives and Counternarratives

Through different understandings of history and memory, narratives become a battleground for contested ideas and values in cases of environmental injustice. One way to conceptualize this battleground is by exploring the presence of master (or dominant) narratives and the counternarratives marginalized communities evoke in response. Pezzullo (2001) defines master narratives as “a set of taken-for-granted principles” that constrain the possibilities for addressing harmful practices and policies against marginalized communities. For example, she identifies two dominant narratives negatively impacting Warren County residents’ anti-toxin advocacy work. The first posits that Warren County’s recognition as the birthplace of environmental justice makes its story one of “success.” This narrative falsely and detrimentally relies on a historical principle that success occurs when advocacy is recognized, not when its aims have been achieved. The second master narrative relates to the role and culpability of the state, as it posited that while the state can admit harm done, it can simultaneously delay and defer actionable solutions into a near or far “future,” another historically common theme. While the specific nuances of a master narrative are often case-dependent, commonalities of their purpose—the allusion of blame and deferment of meaningful remediation—may exist.

Furthermore, Houston and Vasudevan (2017) posit that these “official” narratives seek to “minimize or erase” the environmental injury placed on communities of color. In bringing together Critical Race Theory (which sees storytelling as a theoretical tenet) and environmental justice advocacy, Dickinson (2012) states that CRT scholars write against a dominant narrative that environmental injury against communities of color is “unfortunate” but “not widespread” (p. 58). Houston (2013) identifies yet another form of the master narrative in her exploration of the case at Yucca Mountain, a proposed site for the storage of nuclear waste on indigenous land. This narrative, proposed by those who supported the Yucca Mountain storage site, argued that the site promoted a “common good”—seemingly leaving indigenous and other environmental justice stakeholders who clearly opposed the site out of the decision-making conversations. Houston (2013) identifies this master narrative as one where themes historically privileged in Western society—technological advancement and progress—are prioritized over protecting sacred indigenous sites. In all of these cases, master narratives rely on dominant understandings of historical “truths” to further environmental harm and erase the needs and desires of the community.

Counternarratives, which rely on collective power and experience, offer a means of resisting this erasure. For marginalized folks employing counternarratives, storytelling is a way of practicing knowledge (Houston 2013); it is an act of remembering and imagining an alternative future. These acts breathe presence into the site, urging outsiders to grapple with the real-life, day-to-day realities of the affected communities. The citizens of Warren County performed “critical interruptions” in public forums and environmental decision-making spaces, such as, for example, by introducing themselves by name, followed by the number of miles they lived from the toxic landfill. Pezzullo (2001) argues that these seemingly mundane acts are instead acts of “rhetorical invention” that fill the void left by purposefully vague and absent official narratives, forcing state actors to “see” the people impacted by the injustice.

Beyond Warren County, environmental justice practitioners use multi-modal forms of storytelling to bring awareness towards and advocate for redress of environmental injury that continues to impact people of color disproportionately. In another famous example, Pezzullo’s (2003) documentation of “toxic tours,” or bus tours led by environmental activists through Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” showcases how performing stories, along with the affective experience of a “tour,” can have profound effects on individuals not directly impacted by the injustice. By inviting outsiders to participate in the performance of toxic tours, Pezzullo (2003) finds that the activists leave bus riders with the lingering question, “what are we, the co-authors of these performances, going to do about environmental injustices?” (p. 246). While toxic tours offer the potential for those who partake to experience the impacts of pollution and environmental degradation physically, these stories can also play out on the page. In a scholarly-based example, Dickinson’s (2012) CRT narrative envisions a dystopian future where New Mexico’s sacred petroglyphs face further destruction due to state greed. This narrative illuminates the irrationality and absurdity of current policies that have allowed officials to construct a highway on the sacred site. According to Dickinson (2012), “using storytelling to examine environmental issues additionally can expose how politicians, left-leaning stakeholders, the justice system, and commercial and private forces continue to be driven by racist assumptions” (p. 60). By leaning on community knowledge to craft narratives that expose how marginalized people are affected by the adverse outcomes of environmental injustices, storytellers can transgress the status quo and draw attention to the lived realities of their communities.

Disrupting Time Logics

What do the counternarratives of various environmental justice movements have in common? One notable characteristic is that these narratives often seek to disrupt dominant Western notions of time as following a linear progression. Instead, counternarratives guided by environmental justice principles sustain indigenous ways of knowing and experiencing time cyclically. In his discussion of the controversy over the Makah Indian Nation’s right to hunt whales in their traditional fashion, Brigham (2017) proposes the terms linear chrono-logics and cyclical chrono-logics to name the value-laden origins of these different understandings of the movement of time and their effects on opinions of how environmentalism should be carried out. In the case of the Makah whale hunt, animal rights activists adopted a linear chrono-logic, which posited the former protection of whale hunting as a misguided historical treaty from “a distant past” (Brigham, 2017, p. 249). This dominant logic directly contested the cyclical understanding of time among the Makah, who remain deeply connected to the ancestral and cultural tradition of the whale hunt. In a different example relating to toxins, Houston and Vasudevan (2017) further explain why linear understandings of time serve to erase important community experiences:

While emissions from a local factory certainly may lead to an immediate spike in the incidence of childhood asthma, environmental injustice is often accumulative and unfolds across time-spaces that are not synchronized or well understood. Knowledge about industrial contaminants may become lost over time as toxic legacies are buried or built over. In other cases, the time-spaces between toxic exposure to a toxic or radioactive contaminant and the development of a related illness might be in the decades. (p. 249).

In cases where disparate pieces of an environmental injustice are spread across space and time, storytelling offers a potential for sense-making. Storytelling is a means of “representing the past, present, and future simultaneously,” a characteristic that makes this form of advocacy particularly suited for environmental justice issues (Houston 2013, p. 421). Because stories can work across spatial-temporal boundaries, storytellers are able to emphasize not only the political and evidence-based aspects of the event but also its experiential and embodied dimensions (Houston & Vasudevan, 2017, p. 249).

Storytelling as an Environmental Justice Advocacy Tool

Beyond challenging Western concepts of time, there are many other ways to think about the characteristics of effective counternarratives. Stories that aim to meaningfully impact a community facing environmental injustice should be authentic, culturally meaningful, and emotionally compelling. As Stewart (2023) states, “who gets a voice, and how they decide is the best way to raise it, are as important…as the content they reveal” (p. 7). Compelling narratives evoke empathy by humanizing abstract environmental harm concepts that may be unfamiliar to outside audiences. However, meaningful narratives also stay true to the cultural context and values of the community; they do not bend to the will of outside actors or misrepresent the needs and desires of those affected. In the case of Warren County, the most illuminating and impactful narratives were often simple, personal, and accessible, like the aforementioned example of stating one’s proximity to the landfill. These small narrative acts allowed residents to stay true to the ultimate message within their movement—that the harm was ongoing and their work would continue.

The various case studies discussed above offer a glimpse of the advocacy potentials of storytelling toward environmental justice. Across these cases, storytelling provided a means by which everyday people experiencing environmental injustice could take part in the effort to uplift and place power back in the hands of their community. In this regard, storytelling is an accessible means of advocacy that transcends the often exclusionary boundaries of other, often scientific-based forms of knowledge. Frequently working in the absence of or prior to the publishing of scientific knowledge, advocate storytellers rely on the personal to “bring into proximity the plurality of lives” facing harm in the present (Houston, 2013, p. 424). This is not to say, as Houston and Vasudevan (2017) argue, that environmental justice advocates and storytellers forgo scientific knowledge. Instead, they reflect critically on “the types of social realities [scientific knowledge] produce(s) and for whom” (p. 242). While the environmental justice movement broadly seeks to give a voice to the voiceless, the production of counternarratives and storytelling offers a mode for communities and advocates to activate that voice.

References

Brigham, M. P. (2017). Chrono-controversy: The Makah’s campaign to resume the whale hunt. Western Journal of Communication, 81(2), 243–261. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2016.1242023

Dickinson, E. (2012). Addressing environmental racism through storytelling: Toward an environmental justice narrative framework. Communication, Culture & Critique, 5(1), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01119.x

Houston, D. (2013). Environmental justice storytelling: Angels and isotopes at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Antipode, 45(2), 417–435. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01006.x

Houston, D. & Vasudevan, P. (2017). Storytelling environmental justice: Cultural studies approaches, in Holifield, R., Chakraborty, J., & Walker, G. The routledge handbook of environmental justice (R. Holifield, J. Chakraborty, & G. Walker, Eds.; 1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315678986

Nixon, R. (2013). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (First Harvard University Press paperback edition). Harvard University Press.

Pezzullo, P. C. (2001). Performing critical interruptions: Stories, rhetorical invention, and the environmental justice movement. Western Journal of Communication, 65(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310109374689

Pezzullo, P. C. (2003). Touring “Cancer Alley,” Louisiana: Performances of community and memory for environmental justice. Text and Performance Quarterly, 23(3), 226–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930310001635295

Stewart, M. (2023). Narrative, place, and environmental justice. Environmental History, 28(1), 4–13. https://doi.org/10.1086/722678