Initially used in livestock and energy management circles to designate spaces earmarked for exploitation and degradation in order to preserve others, the nomenclature of sacrifice zones has been reclaimed by the environmental justice movement to call to our attention the unequal distribution of environmental harms due to the spatial patterning of industry. While the term helps bring visibility to how racialized and marginalized communities bear a high burden of environmental hazards, it is also toxic, for it has resulted in narratives that consistently stress how polluted an ecosystem is and how unhealthy the communities it sustains are. This is treacherous terrain, for perceptions of populations and ecosystems as “waste(d)” prime them to become pollution sinks. Simultaneously, such rhetoric, by championing relocation as the most desirable remedy to environmental injustice, encourages further land dispossession.

To make this case, this presentation probes framings of Aamjiwnaang First Nation’s experience of environmental injustice and offers representational justice as an orienting principle that acknowledges the binds between representation as a civic and political right and representation as depiction, as how one is shown and made recognizable to the world.

Register and More details: https://www.environment.utoronto.ca/events/environment-seminar-series-i-wish-these-were-trees-case-against-sacrifice-zone-framings-dr