ABSTRACT
This article examines how regional policymakers in Southern California deployed a green growth strategy that cemented racial, environmental, and class precariousness into the region’s ecological fabric. It uses participant observation and extant data to show how environmentalist statecraft provided ideological cover for a type of neo-Keynesian logistics growth regime that used infrastructure spending to stimulate the economy without addressing underlying issues of racial, economic, and environmental justice. Urban political ecology and racial capitalism are used as theoretical frameworks to stretch the boundaries of how sustainability is conceptualized and to challenge assumptions behind a green capitalism framework. Finally, the article examines how labor and environmental justice activists used what Sze et al. (2009, 836) called “cultural and ecological discourses” to challenge the green capitalist agenda by incorporating subaltern spatial imaginaries.
