ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how dialectical critical realism (DCR) can strengthen Environmental Justice (EJ) activism. It argues that DCR can help EJ to challenge scientific reductionism in immediate confrontations, in this example about pollution, as well as to challenge currently hegemonic thinking that obstructs us in envisioning and working towards a society based on environmental justice. Critical realism enables us to rethink and reword our realities. It brings ethical practice or activism into the centre of knowledge production. It anchors knowledge in our practical interaction with the world. At its heart is a desire for freedom, empowered by the ability to think change. The argument is built by reviewing a case of community resistance to pollution, Steel Valley in South Africa’s industrial heartland, the Vaal Triangle (1952–2012), in three phases with very different historical contexts: under apartheid; in the context of a new, democratic South Africa with a constitutional right to a healthy environment; and the current phase in which EJ is used as a conscious discursive and organizing principle. It shows that historically, the EJ movement, and how it developed in South Africa in the early 1990s, has worked with similar concerns as critical realism: an ethics of freedom and solidarity, a holistic approach, looking for the best feasible explanation, and actively working for change. It explains how these concerns are central to critical realism. The chapter addresses two audiences: researchers working within the broad environmental justice (EJ) tradition, to show that critical realist concepts can enrich and enable the analysis of an EJ case study, and researchers who work within the critical realist tradition, in order to show how critical realist concepts can be applied in environmental justice.
