5 Chapter 4: “Land Use Legacies: Sociomateriality and the Struggle for Environmental Justice” by Leanna Smithberger

Land Use Legacies and the Struggle for Environmental Justice

One of the biggest challenges for environmental justice advocates is to avoid “activist burnout” (Rettig, 2006) when faced with slow progress and the difficulties of cultivating a culture of environmental equity. While this is a problem for all social justice activists, perhaps due to the deep emotional and spiritual connection advocates have to their cause (Kovan & Dirkx, 2003), it is especially difficult for environmental justice activists since activists must work within a discourse of imminent crisis and impending doom. In such a crisis discourse, the only acceptable form of action is rapid response, and any delays to significant action are experienced as failure. Unfortunately, as I will explore in this chapter, rapid response to environmental inequity is often impeded by material actors other than humans – namely legislation, land use regulations, and the built environment. In this chapter, I show how material agents like legal texts and human-built infrastructure perpetuate environmental inequity and thus are apt targets for advocacy work. For while land use decisions are made by humans, it is the material agents constituted by those decisions that continue to enforce those decisions and the ideologies they represent long after they are made. Before diving into a discussion of how land use planning and policy have shaped our environment, I want to clarify what I mean by environmental justice.

An Environmental Justice Orientation

I understand environmental justice as the movement toward the equitable access to environmental spaces and resources, distribution of environmental burdens and the consequences of degradation, and involvement in environmental decision-making and governing across all socioeconomic divisions. Inequity, not inequality, is the target of environmental justice-oriented advocacy. Inequality is inescapable due to the incredible variations in weather patterns and geographic features, as well as the diversity of indigenous plant and animal life, across the globe – a focus on equality would necessarily lead to homogenization and reduce the diversity that makes Earth such a wonderful anomaly in the universe. Inequity in how we experience accountability for environmental developments compared to how we feel the consequences of environmental developments is what leads to injustice.

Advocates for environmental justice must work to expose and call attention to the incongruity between accountability for making land use decisions and the felt consequences of living with those land use decisions. The goal of such advocacy work is to reduce disparities between those who make land use decisions, those who carry out land use decisions, and those who must live with land use decisions so that everyone may live in a healthy, sustainable environment. In the sections that follow, I will provide a summary of our historical attitudes toward land use and planning in the U.S., along with a discussion of how sociomaterial realizations of those attitudes (i.e., the passing of laws, enactment of policies, and alteration of the landscape) perpetuate environmental inequities.

Land Use Legacies

When considering environmental justice, it is necessary to account for and reckon with the legacies of land use planning and policy that have quite literally shaped our environment. While all land is subject to governance, the impact of land use decisions is most obviously felt in urban environments – what we sometimes call the built environment – where the material agency of the land and the human agency of policymakers, city planners, architects, engineers, and residents is rendered visible through the construction of roads and buildings, the installation of infrastructure like electric grids, landfills, and water treatment facilities, the design and management of parks, and the alteration or utilization of waterways. However, all land is subject to laws and policies that enable and constrain how that land can be used, including environments we consider untouched wilderness. In the sections that follow, I provide an overview of our shifting attitudes toward land use policy and planning to demonstrate how sociomaterial actors, including legal texts and the material environment itself, are agential in the sense that they are constantly enacting and enforcing the environmental inequities created by centuries of land use policies. To begin, I briefly explain how moving beyond a narrow conception of agency originating with humans toward a more expansive understanding of hybrid, sociomaterial agency accounts for the stubborn staying power of past land use decisions.

Theoretical Threads: Discursive Practice, Sociomateriality, and a Hybrid Understanding of Agency

I adopt a theory of communication as discursive practice in which agents mobilize material and semiotic resources (Cooren, 2004; Jones, 2016) to constitute experience. I do not assume that all things are of discursive origin, but rather that things are realized — they are made real, as matter made to matter — through discursive practice. The material and the social are co-occurring in the constitution of experience (Barad, 2007; Gherardi, 2017) — it is impossible to distinguish between them because everything, even social phenomena and abstractions, “must be materialized to matter” (Kuhn et al., 2017, p. 35). For anything to exist, it must take on a material dimension. In other words, to be real is to be matter with significance; not social or material, but sociomaterial.

Both exceptional and everyday interactions involve various sociomaterial actors performing a hybrid agency that itself becomes the origin of action (Cooren, 2004). A starting place of action-with-agency highlights how actors perform stability by standardizing and repeating practices over time and in relation with other agents. Thus, we can understand environment as a hybrid accomplishment (Smithberger, 2021); its meaning and apparent stability are performed by a multitude of agents, not all of them human (Coole & Frost, 2010). It is this meshwork (Ingold, 2008) of sociomaterial agents, including legal texts, government policies, and the material landscape itself, that I argue is responsible for the maintenance of unjust environments.

Legal discourse has constituted our relationship to land for centuries. As Graham (2010) astutely observes, “what we see when we look at a landscape is a series of legally prescribed land use practices in action,” not so much a landscape as a lawscape (p. 1). Legal texts are powerfully agential because once imbued with the authority to act with the force of law, they act continuously and of their own accord. We write the law, the law writes (acts upon, affords and constraints) our possible futures, we write those futures onto the land, the land pushes back (by providing circumstances which challenge the applicability of law), and we write more law. Even when we are not actively reading and engaging with a legal text, it is still acting because within legal discourse there is the expectation that any text ought to be read (that is, interpreted and implemented) under the applicable circumstances. Because of their consistency across contexts, intertextual linkages to other authoritative texts, and situation within complex social practices, legal texts are especially resistant sociomaterial actors, and therefore essential targets of justice oriented environmental critique.

 

Land Use Policy in the United States

The fundamental assumptions underlying our orientation to land in the United States come from a legacy of British governance, Enlightenment ideals, and capitalism (Graham, 2010; Maley, 1994/2013; Platt, 2014). From these traditions, we have inherited two ways of relating to land — as power, and as property. Within the last century, discourses of preservation and conservation have further complicated our ways of using land. In this section, I describe the historical origins of our relationship to land and the underlying assumptions which continue to characterize our interactions with it.

Land as Power and as Property

Before the development of a land market in which land was assigned economic value, land was principally valued for its direct connection to political participation (Graham, 2010). During the feudal period, possessing land was an indication of identity and social status — any economic value of the land was secondary, since land was held by and ultimately subject to the sovereign power, the monarch or emperor (Graham, 2010; Platt, 2014). Possessing land meant entrance into those discursive spaces in which governing took place. In other words, land supplied the foundation of claims to authority.

Those who did not possess land in the Middle Ages, the peasants or commoners, benefited from the commons — that land which was not viable for crops or grazing and was publicly accessible (Graham, 2010; Platt, 2014). Peasants were allowed to gather resources for personal use from the commons, collecting various fuel and fodder such as firewood, peat, and vegetation like straw, fruit, and nuts. As capitalism replaced feudalism, the commons were enclosed and communal land practices were deemed illegal. Land became private property, defined by a relationship of owner to object; humans were made distinct from their environments, and environments were reduced to abstract arrangements of persons and things.

Modern property law is dephysicalized, meaning the value of the land is not located in its materiality, but in its commodification. Property law thus developed to protect “the standardized rights and wealth of the private realm independent of location” (Graham, 2010, p. 60). The discourse of property law renders land placeless and is concerned with general, rather than particular, characteristics of how that land can be used. A capitalist, land-owning system that prioritizes private gain at the expense of communal benefit is limited, though, by the sociomaterial agency of a finite planet that cannot support endless growth. As environmental resources and inhabitants were depleted and degraded, our capitalist attitude toward land use has had to expand to acknowledge the importance of diversity in environments.

Land Use and the Commodification of Wilderness

For much of organized human history, the wilderness represented all that is evil, untamed, violent, unpredictable, inhospitable, and uncivilized. The term itself developed from the Anglo-Saxon “wilddeoren,” which referred to places “where ‘deoren’ or beasts existed beyond the boundaries of cultivation” (Garrard, 2012, p. 67). Importantly, this orientation positions humans in opposition with wilderness — humans are morally called to tame, and therefore make useful, the wilderness, but the wilderness resists relentlessly. By the mid-19th century, humans had tamed much of the wilderness and the majority of Americans lived in urban settings. Thus “removed from the day-to-day hardships of living in rural areas” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 31), people were more inclined to view the wilderness as a place of retreat. The writings of Henry David Thoreau championed the sublime quality of wild nature, equating the awe that some experienced in wild spaces to a spiritual encounter. At the same time, the growth of mass production and construction of large-scale infrastructure, such as telegraph lines and railroads, was leading to the widespread destruction of forests, mountains, and waterways. The wilderness became something we might lose, and that loss would be to our detriment (Moscovici et al., 2015).

More unique to the United States’ environmental origin story was the sense that the American wildernesses were our national treasures (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017), the equivalent of what ancient ruins, castles, monuments, and cathedrals were for Europe. This nationalistic orientation to the American landscape found expression in the art of the Hudson River School and the writings of Thomas Cole. It was revived with the “See America First” tourism campaign, initiated by the railroads and later appropriated by the automobile industry after the widespread building of park roads and scenic parkways (Louter, 2009) in the early twentieth century. This nationalistic relationship to wilderness, as not only reflective but formative of the very character of America, along with the impact of the 19th century philosophy of transcendentalism, made the environment matter intrinsically, worthy of protection not only for the sake of its monetary value, but for its own sake.

Inspired by the writings of Thoreau, John Muir is often credited as beginning the preservation movement in the United States. Preservationists sought to protect environments like “national museums that attempt to keep the land as close as possible to the state that existed prior to North America’s colonization” (Moscovici et al., 2015), with the key difference between the preserved wildernesses and the wilderness before colonial invasion being the removal of humans. The absence of human inhabitants was a key facet of the Congressional definition of wilderness used in the Wilderness Act of 1964, and though many of the preserved wildernesses in the Midwest and Western states were never settled by colonists or early Americans (and Native populations had been removed from them long ago), national parks and forests along the East coast of the U.S., such as Shenandoah National Park, were often formed using eminent domain in the 1920s and 30s to remove residents (often low-income, minority communities, who had inhabited the rural environments for generations).

Preservationists advocated for the protection of America’s wildernesses so that generations of Americans to come could experience the sublimity of them. Movements and organizations dedicated to protecting America’s natural spaces quickly formed in the decades surrounding the turn of the 20th century. Women’s groups, such as Laura White and the California Federation of Women’s Clubs, played an important role in early preservation campaigns (West, 1992). Other groups included the Sierra Club in 1892, the Audubon Society in 1905, the Save the Redwoods League in 1918, the National Parks and Conservation Association in 1919, and later, the Wilderness Society in 1930, and the National Wildlife Federation in 1936. Legislation such as the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 and Antiquities Act of 1906 gave the president power to preserve land as forests and national monuments. Congress designated the first national park, Yellowstone National Park, in 1872, and by the time the Organic Act forming the National Park Service was passed in 1916, the Department of Interior oversaw 37 national parks, national monuments, and reservations.

As environments were set aside for preservation, a competing discourse emerged that “promoted economic gain as the primary value to arbitrate contested environmental decisions”: conservation (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 35). Whereas preservationist movements took their underlying assumptions from the philosophy of transcendentalism, conservationist movements were informed by a utilitarian moral philosophy that sought to manage the environment so as to maximize the greatest good for the greatest number of Americans. The phrase “wise use” is widely associated with the conservation movement, a sentiment which today exists in the multiple use mandate of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. While preservationist discourses are popular among environmental activist groups, conservationist discourses tend to prevail within economic and social legislation, policies, and practices. Thus, conservationist ideals become entangled with capitalist policies, and wilderness is made into a category of resource that can be marketed and made profitable.

Implications for Environmental Justice

In addition to the legacy of capitalism we must grapple with the legacies of racism, sexism, and other exclusionary orientations written into our land use policies, and therefore onto the land itself. This is especially true in the case of the built environment and spaces that have been intentionally or unintentionally altered. For many centuries, only people with the right set of social affordances (e.g., Caucasian, male, land-owning, educated, employed, etc.) had any say in law making and urban design, and that privileged group of policymakers consistently opted to prioritize the not-in-my-backyard desires of constituents by locating anything dirty, smelly, ugly, loud, or otherwise polluting in low-income, minority-populated areas.

Even when efforts are made to allocate economic resources for development and mitigation more fairly, improve political representation so it is more reflective of the populations represented, and replace or repeal discriminatory land use policies, the alterations we make to the land become agential in their own sense by constraining what can be done and the ease with which it can be accomplished. In this chapter I have presented some of the dominant ideologies about land use that have shaped American policy and environments to illustrate how these ideologies have come to shape our environment. Even though reducing environmental disparities is made especially difficult because of the sociomaterial agents working with (or sometimes, against) human actors, an understanding of the sociomaterial, hybrid accomplishment of land use provides scholars a generative foundation for inquiry.

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