Environmentally Just Technology

Technologies and structures of inequality

In his now-classic paper, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?,” political scientist Langdon Winner shows how technologies—specifically, the material properties of technological artifacts—can structure social inequalities. The design of an artifact, he says, can be “a way of settling an issue in the affairs of a particular community” (123), including enforcing social stratification. ¹⁰ In his example, access to Long Island's beaches was limited to middle class whites by the decision to make the overpasses over the roads leading to the beach particularly low. Buses could not pass under the low-hanging overpasses, and bus riders—primarily African Americans and poor whites—were denied access to the beaches.

But technologies can structure social relations in a second sense, as well, according to Winner: the material properties of technological artifacts can make them more compatible with certain social and political arrangements than others. Fissile materials, for example, are so dangerous as to demand authoritarian political structures to protect them; large-scale industrial distribution systems such as railroads require hierarchical administrative control. Although Winner leaves open the possibility that these technological systems could be managed by alternative social arrangements—suggesting that the “demands” and “requirements” are in part a product of value judgments that have come to be naturalized—he asserts that the material properties of the technologies make them at least “highly compatible” with the forms of organization that surround them.

Building on Winner's argument, other scholars have asked what properties of artifacts would make them compatible with desirable social arrangements. Decrying technological developments that erode communal life and shrink the possibilities for political association and deliberation, Sclove sets forth a set of criteria for technologies compatible with democracy. ¹¹ For example, he advocates “technologies that can enable disadvantaged individuals and groups to participate fully in social and political life” and recommends avoiding those that “establish authoritarian social relationships” or “support illegitimately hierarchical power relations between groups, organizations, or polities” (106). Nieusma similarly shows how design decisions can help subvert discrimination based on disability and gender, move society toward a greener future, and make individuals more able to advance alternative practices that challenge the status quo. ¹²

Political technologies and environmental justice

Showing that design decisions can impede democracy and reinforce social stratification—or, alternatively, foster democracy and challenge discriminatory “governing mentalities” ¹² —work on the politics of artifacts suggests that technology can also be a structural contributor to environmental justice or injustice. That is, it suggests that particular technological configurations can be more or less compatible with environmentally just social and political organization. Thus far, however, little work has been done to explore the environmental justice implications of particular technological artifacts. Ironically, what has been done has focused on the shortcomings of technology used by environmental justice activists. For example, Galusky ¹³ and Delborne and Galusky ¹⁴ argue that Scorecard and other right-to-know Web sites, which have become important tools for communities wishing to understand what toxins are being emitted into their environments, are constructed in such a way as to individualize environmental action: they encourage users to be aware of their own risks and to write letters to decision makers. But they stop short of providing resources for community organizing or tools to see patterns of pollution across communities—strategies that have been powerful in moving toward environmental justice. Similarly, Ottinger ¹⁵ finds that, because of its low-cost, easily manipulable design, one of the air monitoring technologies used for measuring ambient concentrations of toxic chemicals in environmental justice communities is highly compatible with decentralized, community-based decision making. In contrast, a second one, increasingly popular because of its superior data-collection ability, has design features that tend to centralize decision-making authority, leaving environmental justice support organizations and not community members to determine what environmental conditions are worth representing.

The politics of the technological infrastructures that produce environmental hazards—that is, their inherent compatibility or incompatibility with environmental justice—have not received comparable attention. Few, if any, studies have examined how the physical properties of industrial production facilities or electricity distribution infrastructures or toxic waste disposal sites might stand in the way of environmental justice. Nor, in arguing for technologies that reduce overall environmental impact, have scholars or activists examined how alternative designs might also make it easier to distribute hazards more equitably, to enforce environmental laws fairly, and/or to make decision making more accessible to all people.

While an adequate treatment of the topic clearly demands further study, it is possible to make a few straightforward observations. For example, technologies that depend on economies of scale—that is, those for which the biggest operations are the most efficient—are highly incompatible with a just distribution of environmental hazards. Systems built on such technologies, like our current electricity infrastructure, comprise a small number of very large facilities; these facilities necessarily have a large impact on a small number of communities while delivering benefits to a much wider population. Likewise, highly complex technologies are relatively incompatible with democratic decision making and even with equitable enforcement. Substantial specialized knowledge and significant experience are required to fully understand the intricate processes that make up, for example, a chemical manufacturing plant. Without that expertise, community members wishing to challenge the plant's environmental record will always be at a disadvantage in democratic deliberations, and even technically trained environmental regulators are likely to have to depend on facility personnel for insight into the workings of their particular plant.

Environmentally just technology

Technology, then, can be more or less compatible with certain political arrangements, including environmentally just ones. Many of the technological infrastructures currently in place appear to be relatively incompatible with the just distribution of environmental hazards and benefits, with fair and meaningful participation in environment decision making, and with equitable enforcement of environmental laws. Further, even the technological tools available to environmental justice activists tend not to be designed to be highly compatible with collective action and distributed decision making—forms of social organization that arguably characterize the movement.^1,16 So how would one design, or identify, technologies that are compatible with environmental justice? What would inherently just technologies look like?

The answers, of course, depend in large part on how one defines a just social order. While conceptions differ in their details, environmental justice seems, at minimum, to require (1) that environmental hazards be minimized and distributed fairly, in proportion with benefits; (2) that protective environmental regulations be established and enforced with the same vigor whether they protect poor or minority communities or wealthier white ones; (3) that the communities most likely to be disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards be able to build their capacity to thrive, both economically and socially; ¹⁷ and (4) that the people most affected by environmental hazards be able to participate equitably and meaningfully in decisions concerning their environment.

A series of design criteria follow from each of these aspects of an environmentally just social order. Technologies compatible with fair distribution would

- Avoid the use of materials hazardous to human health in all phases of the life cycle

To be compatible with equitable enforcement of protective regulations, technologies would

- Favor the most basic physical and chemical processes

Technology that fostered development of communities' social and economic capabilities would

- Operate at a scale that permitted local ownership

Finally, to promote meaningful, equitable participation, technology would

- Give all people access to the information on which regulators and other experts claim to base their decisions

While these characteristics of environmentally just technology have been broken down into categories, it should be noted that many of them serve multiple aspects of environmental justice. Simplicity in design and direct verification of proper operations not only make technologies easier to regulate, they also make it easier for affected communities to understand the technologies and thus present their concerns about the technologies in an informed, credible way in decision-making contexts. Similarly, design features that support capacity building in communities also indirectly support meaningful participation; for example, technologies that help people articulate their local knowledge also help them to insert that knowledge in public deliberations of local environmental issues.

At the same time, the design criteria listed above suggest that developing environmentally just technology is likely to require rethinking the standards normally used to evaluate technology. Efficiency, as it is usually defined, tends to push engineers to look for economies of scale; in contrast, just distribution of hazards calls for appropriateness of scale—technologies which distribute benefits at the same scale that they impose risks. Environmentally just design also values simplicity and manipulability over intricacies that might make a design more efficient. Likewise, reducing risk, or the probability of accidents, is less important in an environmental justice framework than reducing the consequences of accidents when they occur: even if they happen very infrequently, accidents that result in losses of life at, for example, energy facilities would almost certainly be out of proportion to the benefits enjoyed by workers and nearby communities (though possibly not with the benefits to the society as a whole). Finally, measurement technologies usually judged in terms of the quantity and reliability of the data they produce would, in an environmental justice frame, need to be evaluated instead in terms of their ability to produce persuasive data relevant to community concerns. ¹⁵

Judged in terms of these criteria, much of our existing technological infrastructure appears quite incompatible with environmental justice: refineries, coal mines, and large hazardous waste facilities, to name a few, are characterized not only by a mismatch between the scale of risks and the scale of benefits, but also by complex engineering that tends to stand in the way of effective regulatory enforcement, independent verification of the facilities' safety, and meaningful public participation in decision making. But “green” alternatives do not necessarily fare any better. Solar energy, for example, holds the promise of producing energy cleanly on a household scale. However, the solar panels installed on (probably affluent) people's homes are manufactured using toxic chemicals in a far-off plant, imposing a new set of risks on people not necessarily benefiting from the “clean” energy source; they are also black boxes, in that sense that they do not permit tinkering by users but require expert intervention if they fail. Further, while solar can be a distributed form of energy, developments in solar technology are moving toward increasing efficiency through very large scale operations—power plants producing tens of thousands of megawatts, and covering tens of thousands of acres. ¹⁷ A more just form of energy might be microhydro, which both operates and provides electricity on a community scale, is based on relatively straightforward technological principles, and would be conducive to community control and governance—serving, potentially, as a site of community capacity building. Any form of hydroelectric power has its drawbacks, of course, and it's hard to imagine any technology that could be thoroughly just. Yet these examples make clear that environmentally friendly is not necessarily synonymous with environmentally just, and they demonstrate the importance of asking which alternatives are more compatible with justice.