Our Future Environment

This play on words, Scales of Environmental Justice, as introduced to me by Cindi Katz, points to two ways we can think about and study environmental justice.

In GIS research (and others which emphasize horizontal geography) scale can refer to the scale of analysis used in a study and the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of populations at that level of aggregation. “The scale of analysis, levels of aggregation and other location specific characteristics can significantly influence results as well as create difficulties in identifying spatial clustering. An interesting researchable issue is whether the phenomenon of environment inequity is observed at various levels of geographical aggregation for any given region using the same estimation methods” (Haynes 2002).

Another way to think about scale in environmental justice is how it encompasses different social processes, and can mean quite different things at different geographic scales. This scalar ambiguity poses many challenges for environmental justice theorists and activists working to solve social disparities which may be experienced at the local level of small communities, but which may originate at larger scales of political and economic decision-making institutions.

Filed under: natural landscape, social justice, environmental planning on June 1st, 2008