ABSTRACT

Industry provides us with the products upon which we have grown to rely and which we take for granted as necessary for survival, yet it pollutes our air, water, and soil, contributes signifi cantly to climate change, causes biodiversity loss, and leads to the exploitation of workers. Economic growth, fuelled by the productivity increases associated with the rise of industrial manufacturing since the eighteenth century, has however been seen as both the source of and the solution to modernity’s devastating ecological footprint as cleaner, more effi cient technologies emerge, environmental regulations increase, and more highly-educated populations gain greater environmental awareness. The famous Environmental Kuznets Curve, an inverse U-shaped arc, depicts the rise, peak, and fall of environmental degradation as a modern society increases its regulatory capacity and the selfrefl exive knowledge and expertise to pursue, as Ulrich Beck calls it, “ecological modernization”. But the Kutznets Curve masks the fact that wealth is correlated with ever-increasing consumption, and that domestic regulations are no indicators of the environmental impacts of imported products (Atıl Aşıcı and Acar 2016). In other words, wealthier countries simply allow poorer nations to engage in the dirty industries to which their own citizens no longer wish to be exposed. The export of environmental and social harms, such as pollution and resource depletion, associated with industrial expansion, represents a type of “spatial fi x” (Harvey 1982) in which global inequities are the twin of “pollution havens” (Rauscher 2005), the repositories of exported toxic electronic waste and other detritus from the global North. Industrial wastes, in turn, result from capitalism’s “treadmill of production” (Schnaiberg 1980), the constant and inevitable drive toward overproduction and overconsumption as companies continually seek new markets simply to survive. The global division of labor regarding industrial waste is of course replicated within the advanced industrial states: polluting industries preferentially locate their facilities in neighborhoods that lack the economic and political clout that would afford them support from decision-makers within national or local governments. These are usually poor communities, and often comprised of people of color (Mohai, Pellow, and Roberts 2009). Environmental injustice, in short, is multi-scalar.