Abstract
As the climate crisis intensifies, recovery efforts increasingly occur at the interface of diverse landscapes and overlapping struggles for justice. To better understand the environmental justice implications of climate disruption and uneven recovery, this article casts a critical light on disaster waste. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a deadly debris flow in California and the dumping of toxic sediment on public beaches, I provide a “flows of injustice” framing to bridge environmental justice and climate justice concerns across multiple spatial contexts and temporalities. Although it is often assumed that recovery is spatially confined to the site of immediate disruption, residual injustice can arise when hazardous waste is disposed of near poor, working class, and minoritized communities without appropriate remediation measures. The case study illustrates how disaster recovery shifted vulnerability downstream away from wealthy communities, mirroring systems of value that prioritize privileged areas while designating new sacrifice zones. This suggests a need for a relational understanding of disaster recovery that goes beyond conventional landscape binaries that normalize unjust adaptation practices.
INTRODUCTION
Although it is widely recognized that climate-related disasters disproportionately harm the most vulnerable members of a community, including low-income people of color, 1 less is known about how recovery processes privilege some areas while relegating others to sacrifice zones. Attention often fades long before the final stages of cleanup, with some noteworthy exceptions. 2 As such, the environmental justice implications of postdisaster recovery remain an understudied dimension of climate disruption. 3
However, research on disaster waste emphasizes that residual injustice can arise when hazardous waste is disposed of near poor, working class, and minoritized communities without appropriate remediation measures. 4 Furthermore, the effects of ruination can linger long after an initial disruption, particularly as injustice becomes woven into the social and material fabric of daily life. 5
To broaden our understanding of the environmental justice implications of climate disruption, I offer a “flows of injustice” framework to draw attention to the maladaptive tendencies of uneven recovery practices that transfer vulnerability from one place and time to another. I apply this framing to a case study of a deadly debris flow in Santa Barbara, California, and discuss how disaster waste management reinforced spatial inequality, distributing harm downstream while normalizing unjust adaptation practices. The case exemplifies complex relationships of toxic sediment, climate change, and environmental justice, shedding light on the ways that disaster recovery converts space into sacrifice zones through flows of injustice.
Flows of injustice
Climate disruption entails multiple temporalities and spatial inequities that coalesce into conditions of vulnerability, challenging conventional notions of what constitutes a disaster. Rob Nixon's concept of “slow violence” articulates the broader spectrum of harm posed by climate disruption while pointing to the representational challenge of linking urgency to a slow-moving crisis—an observation that is now embraced in the field of climate and disaster studies. 6 This dilemma of recognition has prompted scholars to redefine notions of what an “extreme” event is, broadening the definition to include “the cumulative impacts compounding to produce impacts often far greater than the periodic extreme event.” 7
Some further stress the importance of understanding how “slow emergencies” operate within uneven geographies of racial injustice. 8 Unlike natural hazards, disasters are social phenomena shaped by economic and cultural inequalities that come together to create conditions of social vulnerability. 9 As such, disasters are not determined by physical risk alone, but are conditioned by historical injustices that operate across institutional, environmental, and spatial dimensions. 10 Recovery efforts can further reinforce health inequities and spatial inequities by shifting vulnerability downstream.
Attending to the complex temporal and spatial dimensions of climate disruption requires a more fluid understanding of how injustice flows through existing management practices and material formations. To address this challenge, I suggest a “flows of injustice” framing for bridging environmental justice and climate justice concerns across multiple spatial contexts, temporalities, and struggles. For example, in California, sea level rise is expected to impact existing superfund sites and toxic facilities located near communities of color—a problem that climate adaptation planning has thus far neglected. 11
In coastal Louisiana, Dean Hardy et al. caution that embedded histories of racism contribute to unjust coastal formations, and when ignored, this leads to “color-blind adaptation” planning. 12 Furthermore, as climate-related flood mitigation takes center stage, some communities are bound to benefit while others experience adverse impacts, as Kuei-Hsien Liaoa, Jeffrey Kok Hui Chanb, and Yin-Ling Huang observe in the Taipei Area of Taiwan. 13
Flows of injustice takes its cue from environmental justice scholars who have long underscored the adverse impacts of industrial pollution, 14 including flows of toxic waste downstream and upstream as well as globally across the ocean. 15 It recognizes that climate disruption entails unjust impacts for communities who are least responsible for damaging the planet and have the least resources for remediation. 16 A flows of injustice framework extends prior notions of distributive justice, 17 while engaging a relational understanding of the climate crisis that goes beyond conventional landscape binaries and practices of compartmentalizing spatial ecologies into discrete categories.
One of the biggest obstacles to understanding the social implications of climate disruption is that landscapes and their associated hazards are methodologically and epistemologically disconnected from one another. For example, coastal hazards, including sea level rise, coastal erosion, water quality, and flooding, are treated separately from the hazards of the wildland–urban interface. Similarly, in terms of adaptative capacity, fire adaptation and coastal adaptation are far removed. Although flows of injustice can exist independent of sudden and extreme disasters, this article focuses on how recovery processes carry harm through diverse and spatially disadvantaged communities long after a disaster.
In the past decade, environmental justice scholarship has expanded beyond the distributional justice paradigm to consider other critical dimensions of injustice. 18 As scholars move beyond single-axis analysis to embrace more intersectional approaches to environmental justice, the distributional harm of vulnerability remains a critical compounding factor. For example, Erica Morrell and Dalvery Blackwell offer the concept of “spatialized intersectionality” to attend to the ways that preconfigured geographical inequities, including residential segregation, deepen intersectional injustices of racism and sexism. 19 This broadening of the environmental justice lens alerts us to the multiple injustices that intersect through the construction and ruination of place in contexts of climate disruption.
METHODS
To illustrate how flows of injustice transfer harm across multiple spatial contexts and temporalities, I offer a case study of disaster waste management following a 2018 debris flow in Santa Barbara, California. The case study approach is ideally suited for a study of disaster waste, a phenomenon that involves multiple and overlapping social, physical, and temporal factors that converge to influence outcomes and lived experiences.
Data collection took place over a 2-year period, from March 2018 to March 2020, and was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the University of California, Santa Barbara. During this time, research methods included site visits, participant observation, semistructured interviews, and document analysis. Document analysis included a 2015 Goleta Beach user survey conducted by the Goleta Parks and Recreation Department, newspaper articles, and policy documents. From January 2018 through October 2018, close observations of nine community meetings and four city press conferences were conducted. These meetings were organized by city and county officials and attendance was open to the public, drawing a wide range of people from across the city. From October 2018 through March 2020, semistructured interviews were conducted with 25 respondents.
Owing to the sensitive and ethically complicated nature of conducting research in a disaster zone, recruitment started by establishing trust with a liaison from the Montecito Center who worked directly with residents who had their property impacted by the event. Permission was granted to post a research study invitation on the center's email listserv and several impacted residents reached out voluntarily. These volunteers were interviewed first, and snowball sampling was used to recruit additional interviewees. Snowball sampling involves establishing trust with a select group of impacted residents and then expanding the network by asking each interviewee for recommendations and contact information of others who were impacted and have important stories to share.
Interviews followed the model of “conversations with a purpose” put forth by Robert Burgess. 20 An interview guide with open-ended questions was used to provide respondents flexibility to discuss details relevant to their unique experience regarding disaster recovery. Questions concerned experiences of loss, processes of recovery, changing sense of community, knowledge of debris flows, thoughts about emergency management, and decision making before and after the Thomas Fire and Montecito debris flow. Questions also engaged how respondents felt about adaptation and mitigation. Interviews varied in length and typically lasted for ∼1 hour.
All of the interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed. Observation field notes were written and logged. The content of the interview transcripts, fieldnotes, and primary document sources was analyzed and carefully coded using NVivo software. A team of two social scientists worked closely together to read each transcript and log, using a phenomenological approach to identify and define codes. The coding process took several months and went through several iterations of collaborative reading and rereading, listening and relistening, to establish intercoder reliability.
Some of the codes that emerged centered around experiences related to debris flows communication, property damage, injury and loss of life, evacuation and rebuilding, ethical concerns, labor impacts, risk perceptions, community dynamics, insurance experiences, and social vulnerability. Respondents were anonymized.
CASE STUDY RESULTS
On the morning of January 9, 2018, after a month of record-breaking wildfire and a few intense moments of torrential rain, the mountains above the wealthy enclave of Montecito came crashing down. Boulders the size of large vehicles barreled down the creeks in a river of mud, toppling trees and lifting rubble, decimating homes while residents slept inside. In a matter of minutes, 23 lives were lost and hundreds more were injured. 21 Montecito, an unincorporated community situated in the wildland–urban interface of Santa Barbara County on the central coast of California, is known for both its beautiful beaches and picturesque mountains.
With a median household income of $159,706, Montecito is considered a wealthy community; most residents are white (89%), college-educated (72%), and homeowners (72.5%) with properties that are valued at a median of >$2 million. 22 Nevertheless, roughly one-third of the fatalities consisted of immigrant working class families. 23 A survey conducted by university researchers showed that most residents (63%) hire at least one worker, including gardeners, housekeepers, caretakers, and babysitters. 24 The debris flow and the preceding Thomas Fire disproportionately impacted service workers and undocumented laborers. 25 As one respondent reflected, “We were all in that river. We may not have been killed but we were all hurt somehow.” 26
In Santa Barbara County and throughout the United States, the wildland–urban interface has been rapidly growing due in large part to residential construction, and is subject to a unique blend of hazards, including drought, flammable vegetation, and intense weather. 27 These extremes periodically converge into debris flows through a process called the “Wildfire-Debris Flow Cycle.” 28 According to historical records and fieldwork, debris flows of varying size have occurred in the Santa Barbara area every 30–40 years. 29 And although high-impact debris flows are considered to be rare events, their impacts are often noticeable enough to shape public opinion and drive policy in maladaptive ways. 30
The 2018 debris flow cannot be understood without attention to the built environment of Santa Barbara, which relies on a never-ending process of sediment accumulation and disposal that enables people to live close to beautiful natural environments. As is the case in most places, sediment is always on the move—both naturally and artificially—to create environments that are not always what they appear to be. 31 For example, beach nourishment is a standard practice in Santa Barbara County and involves placing dredged sediment onto the foreshore. In some cases, beach nourishment is driven by the aesthetic demands of tourism, often described as a “soft” adaptation measure that contrasts with hard measures such as seawalls. 32
In other cases, beach nourishment is driven by a need to clear sediment from infrastructural systems, including the harbor, airport, and debris basins. 33 In Santa Barbara, basin clearing and beach nourishment have become further entwined with the ongoing threat of debris flows. 34
Disaster waste at the wildland–urban interface
The 2018 debris flow left Montecito in such a state of ruin that military-grade machines were needed to trek through the mud, which the city had already acquired before the disaster in an ongoing effort to equip the police with heavy-duty tanks through federal grants. 35 With the winter storm cycle still in effect, city officials were focused on rapidly clearing roadways and debris basins that had filled to capacity, threatening surrounding areas. To assist in clearing the debris, the Federal Emergency Management Agency authorized $110.4 million to The Army Corps of Engineers to remove debris from roads, bridges, rights-of-way for emergency vehicles, and to clear Santa Barbara's 11 debris basins and 11 channels. 36
Before returning to the area, residents were advised to get vaccinated for tetanus as well as hepatitis A, B, and C. 37 A boil water mandate was also in effect, indicating waterborne health concerns. 38 Not only was disaster waste still present in the disaster zone, additional debris was transferred onto private property from rapid road, creek, and basin clearing. This raised concerns about who should be responsible for removing debris—private residents, the county, the state, or the federal government.
At an overcrowded community meeting on February 8, 2018, County Supervisor Das Williams informed the public that “using public funding to clean up private property is illegal.” 39 Some residents felt unfairly burdened. One interviewee reported a cost of $54,000 to remove the debris from around their property, 40 and others struggled to get their insurance to cover the expense.
To fill gaps in county cleanup efforts, the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade emerged and started to remove mud from damaged homes. In a short span of time, the group mobilized >3000 volunteers to help with county debris removal. Yet not everyone was happy with the manner in which the disaster waste was managed in Montecito. For those still suffering the loss of family and friends, there was some frustration with the haste of debris removal. One respondent, who was still actively searching through uncleared areas for the bodies of missing children 10 months after the debris flow, felt that cleanup efforts were haphazard and inadequate. 41
From public beach to sacrifice zone
Goleta Beach in Santa Barbara County became one of the primary sites for disaster waste disposal. With upload disposal sites and adjacent county areas filled beyond capacity, truck after truck could be seen heading north on Highway 101 to Goleta Beach full of mud and debris. Emergency permitting enabled the transfer of disaster waste to Goleta Beach, allowing the county to bypass Santa Barbara's Coastal Hazard Policy 5.1–49 that states that “Sediment removed from catchment basins may be disposed of in the littoral system if it is tested and is found to have suitable physical, chemical, color, particle shape, debris, and compatibility characteristics appropriate for beach replenishment.” 42
Later, independent researchers found that the sediment contained toxic residues, including sewage, oil, and gas from ruptured lines, as well as pesticides, ash, and chemicals from inside houses. 43 With water quality impaired, the beach park was subsequently closed for months. 44
Goleta Beach is a popular coastal access point that is predominantly used by low-income Spanish-speaking residents of the county of Santa Barbara, particularly from the densely populated and adjacent disadvantaged residential area of Old Town Goleta. 45 These individuals often struggle to live and recreate within the highly exclusive tourist economy of Santa Barbara. They gravitate to Goleta Beach for its free parking, sandy beach, picnic area amenities, playground, and public fishing pier. As one respondent noted, “It's a place you can bring a family of 10 to 20 to a big family barbeque … you don't have a backyard when you're living in an apartment, you don't have outside space.” 46
According to a 2015 survey, 46% of Goleta Beach visitors come from lower income households. 47 Furthermore, people from lower income households visit Goleta beach on average nine times more often than other households. Of all beach users, 61% consider Goleta Beach to be their primary coastal access point. The beach is also accessed by low-income residents from inland areas, such as Lompoc and the Santa Ynez Valley. As many residents do not have access to air conditioning, Goleta Beach has become a site of relief from extreme heat. According to one respondent, residents also use Goleta Beach as a “cooling zone” during times when indoor temperatures become a health hazard. 48
The 2015 survey offers a glimpse into the social demographics of Goleta Beach users, but it is limited. For example, it failed to capture a significant population of struggling and low-income fishermen who use Goleta Beach and its pier for subsistence fishing. Also, it is important to note that the survey actually may underestimate the number of Latino users of the beach because it was initially conducted in English, before being offered in Spanish halfway through the survey.
Several respondents noticed that much of the debris removed from Montecito was transferred with very little oversight to public locations throughout Santa Barbara County and Ventura County. As one interviewee expressed, “I feel like they moved too quickly with the debris. It just went everywhere … there were no controls on sifting it.” 49 For some, the placement of debris on Goleta Beach was justified by the assumption that the waste was destined for the ocean from the start.
Although the placement of disaster waste was largely overshadowed by the urgency of recovery, a comment at a community meeting on May 1, 2018, revealed a latent sense of NIMBYism among homeowners in Montecito: “They don't want it on their beaches and we don't want it on our homes and insurance doesn't pay to remove it, so that's a big question.” 50 A student at the University of California, Santa Barbara—a campus adjacent to Goleta Beach—called out the “dumping” as an “environmental injustice” in a local newspaper, condemning the city for transferring toxic waste to one of the few remaining coastal access points for people of color.
Although the disasters that struck Santa Barbara County were blind to social status, the immediate cleanup effort may not have been so. At face value, many question the decision to transport thousands of truckloads filled with debris from affluent Montecito to the underserved community of Goleta, 20 km to the north. 51
The transfer of disaster waste to Goleta Beach continued long after the initial event. Over 2 years later, sediment disposal from the debris basins was being justified as an adaptation measure; according to the county, “Beach nourishment operations have also protected Goleta Beach Park from further erosion by creating a wide shore near the location of the sediment deposit.” 52 For the past 25 years, Goleta Beach has faced significant shoreline erosion, including increasing threats from sea level rise, and has regularly been a site for transferring sediment from locally dredged creeks and flood-control basins.
Routine beach nourishment is increasingly seen as a justification for the transfer of debris basin sediment to Goleta Beach. However, the longer term physical and social impacts of sediment disposal on Goleta Beach are not well understood and the communities who use Goleta Beach have historically been left out of management discussions and decisions. Furthermore, the approach used at Goleta Beach was not used at other beaches in Santa Barbara. Tourist beaches were spared the unsightly deposits of disaster waste.
DISCUSSION
The impacts of disaster recovery are often assumed to be neutral and spatially confined to the site of immediate disruption, rather than distributed across time and space through uneven geographies of risk and privilege. After a disaster, emergency remediation and waste disposal reinforce spatial and racial inequality, sometimes distributing harm downstream. As the case illustrates, postdisaster recovery resulted in the transfer of disaster waste across multiple spatial contexts through emergency sediment management practices that prioritized the safety and well-being of wealthy residents in Montecito over low-income beach users in Goleta.
The transfer of disaster waste involved legal justifications for shifting harm from highly valued areas to a public area used by working class residents. Public health concerns afforded to residents of Montecito, who were advised to vaccinate before returning to debris-damaged areas, were overlooked in Goleta. This suggests that the management of disaster waste mirrors systems of value that prioritize privileged areas.
Remediation and waste disposal also intersect with existing struggles for justice, including environmental justice on the coast. Although these struggles are contextually specific, the case presents an example where seemingly isolated concerns over coastal injustice intersect with the concerns over mitigating debris flows in the wildland–urban interface. Although it often assumed that the social vulnerabilities of fire-prone mountainous areas are distinct from those of the flood-prone intertidal zone, the ripple effects of climate disruption extend far beyond the epicenter of a disaster, often carrying injustice to unexpected places.
Given the immediate- and long-term threats to Goleta Beach and the critical social and ecological importance of the beach to local disadvantaged populations, there is a pressing need to address coastal environmental justice. There is also a need to expand justice concepts across both marine and terrestrial environments and to consider how the fluidity of ocean spaces complicates traditional frames of environmental and climate justice. 53 Future study on flows of vulnerability would benefit from attending to the intersectional dimensions of vulnerability. 54
As the climate crisis intensifies and emergency permitting becomes normalized, adaptation logics can transfer vulnerability to marginalized areas. The case demonstrates how the never-ending emergency of debris clearing translated into top-down and downstream sediment management practices without input from the communities who use public beaches. The use of toxic sediment to “nourish” Goleta beach for the purposes of adaptation contributes to what Dean Hardy et al. describe as color-blind adaptation, further reinforcing racial coastal formations. 55
Furthermore, the disconnect between working-class families, low-income beach users, and Montecito homeowners in adaptation planning prevents policy from moving beyond maladaptive practices. This has important implications for coastal justice in particular, which often centers on the right to access coastal resources as well as who gets to take part in decisions about what to do with the coast in response to climate change and rising sea levels. Furthermore, the findings suggest a need for a relational understanding of climate disruption that goes beyond conventional landscape binaries and conceptual divisions between struggles for coastal justice and environmental justice.
CONCLUSION
With the intensification of climate disruption, including climate-related disasters, efforts to recover will necessarily engage with concerns over justice and equity. As more people live in hazardous areas, the downstream impacts of climate disruption will enter into existing sociocultural contexts, environments, and relationships of power. Although some equity issues are highly visible, others remain hidden.
As climate disruption expands, it is likely that existing racial formations will collide with what Lindsey Dillon conceptualizes as “waste formations,” defined as geographies of environmental injustice that combine race, space, and waste. 56 Therefore, it will be increasingly important to attend to how flows of vulnerability shape environmental injustice and future sacrifice zones—including the ways that resilience and disaster recovery policies result in the formation of new sacrifice zones.
The flows of injustice framing introduced in this article joins the work of scholars that are advancing a critical lens on mainstream framings and understandings of climate adaptation to seek avenues for transformative change. 57 Drawing attention to the transfer of disaster waste is one means of pursuing a more critical study of climate adaptation that strives for solutions that combine the principles of climate justice with the work of critical environmental justice. More generally, a flows of injustice framework can be applied across multiple decision spaces to better connect the environmental justice implications of climate-related hazards and disasters, including but not limited to the impacts of coastal adaptation, wildfire management, and flood mitigation.
By attending to the uneven spatial and temporal dimensions of recovery and adaptation measures, flows of injustice can better inform pathways of resilience across diverse landscapes, deepening our understanding of the environmental justice implications of climate disruption while also opening opportunities for seeking avenues for just recovery. 58
Footnotes
AUTHOR DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No competing financial interests exist.
FUNDING INFORMATION
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.