When it came to environmental justice, Professor April Baptiste was first interested in three things: what people thought about environmental issues, how they responded to environmental issues, and what factors influenced their response to environmental problems. She first looked at case studies of marginalized environmental justice communities, such as fishers in Trinidad and Tobago and later with fishers in Jamaica’s Old Harbour Bay and Pedro Cays.
However, she soon realized that the dominant framing of environmental justice theory was a U.S.-based lens. “I’m seeing environmental injustice, yet no one has theorized what environmental justice looks like or the tenets of environmental justice/injustice within the Caribbean context,” says Baptiste, Colgate’s associate dean of faculty for global and local initiatives and professor of environmental studies and Africana and Latin American studies. Baptiste is also an inaugural Leary Family Chair in environmental studies.
She and Stacy-Ann Robinson, associate professor of environmental studies and dean of global engagement at Colby College, opened a call for a special issue of the Geographical Journal to begin defining the “elements that shape environmental justice and environmental injustice in the region.”
The collection starts with their introductory paper, “The contours of environmental justice in the Caribbean.” The paper’s central focus is that, while the Caribbean has greatly contributed to the deep history of resistance and protest against imperial control and domination, one facet of that resistance — environmental justice — has not been well documented throughout history. This collective work is an attempt to change that.
The special issue includes 10 papers, each presenting one intersectional facet of environmental justice in the Caribbean. They range from discussing the plantation system and economy to environmental justice from a loss and damage perspective from countries like Haiti and the Bahamas to the historical knowledge of environmental justice in the Caribbean itself.
To develop the introductory paper, Baptiste and Robinson systematically analyzed the commonalities between the issue papers’ themes, revealing coloniality, sovereignty, and resistance as the emerging elements of environmental justice theory for the Caribbean.
The first theme, coloniality, is Eurocentrism and Western modernity as the universal and neutrally accepted practice. Historically, this ideal has led to delegitimizing, othering, and erasing entire knowledge systems. Coloniality, as explained by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano, is the distribution of global power in the modern system, often associated with racial classification and the control and exploitation of labor, wealth, and land to advance capitalism. Baptiste points out that to fully understand coloniality as a theme of environmental justice in the Caribbean, we must separate it from imperialism and colonialism. “This is one of the challenges we have thrown out for scholars to expand on the theory,” says Baptiste. While she and Robinson see coloniality as a rooted mindset, they want academia to respond and expand on its definition.
The second subtheme the issue explores is sovereignty and looks to autonomy and independence to understand the political and social standing of Caribbean nations. True sovereignty is the ability to self-determine and self-govern. Independence — the status that Caribbean countries such as Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia have achieved — is the “formal separation from the former colonial power,” according to Baptiste and Robinson. However, there may still be some levels of dependence and pressures that hinder full self-governance. Puerto Rico’s political arrangement with the United States prevents genuine autonomy, which sociologist Bianca Gonzalez-Sobrino, a contributor to the special issue, describes as “legally belonging yet historically unwelcomed.”
Regarding Puerto Rico, sovereignty is inhibited in several ways. For example, policies such as the 1920 Merchant Marine Act keep Puerto Rico economically dependent on the U.S. When Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in 2017, the island could not receive aid from other sources, and bureaucratic requirements resulted in the delay of U.S. aid. Lack of information and miscommunication also inhibit sovereignty. These issues feed into predatory practices that “impact the ability of countries to self-govern and respond to injustices,” according to Baptiste and Robinson.
The third subtheme — resistance — discusses how this concept is ingrained in the Caribbean due to the long history of colonial domination, control, and exploitation. The special issue argues that resistance takes many forms and surpasses our usual understanding of protests. Leaving plantations, establishing communities in other parts of the Caribbean, and protecting and defending Indigenous homelands from encroachments are all ways of resistance in the pursuit of environmental justice.
Environmental justice can take a legal approach too. For example, Daphina Misiedjan, researcher, lawyer, and also a contributor to the special issue, points out that climate litigation is a viable pathway for Caribbean nations to get the support needed for adaptation and compensation for loss and damage. Misiedjan points out that the Caribbean nations under Dutch rule, such as Aruba, Curacao, and St. Maarten, are some of the most vulnerable countries to climate change but have contributed the least to the phenomenon. These same nations are wholly excluded from participating in international climate change agreements and receiving compensation simply because they are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
“[They] get second-class treatment,” says Baptiste. While these Caribbean nations are affiliated with the kingdom, these islands are far from the metropole. “[They’re] thousands of miles away, [they] don’t get proper representation in these rights or when decisions are being made, and external powers would look at the kingdom as a whole, without taking into consideration that there are marginalized parts,” says Baptiste. Utilizing climate litigation can be a strategic way of resistance.
Baptiste wants to make clear that while Caribbean scholars and activists may not use the U.S.-based environmental and climate justice terminology in their everyday language, Caribbean nations “have been fighting for the right to protect their environmental resources [and] the right to use their environmental resources as local individuals.” Additionally, Baptiste points out that it’s essential to recognize that this attempt to theorize environmental justice in the Caribbean is a challenge and an opportunity to test the theory of coloniality, sovereignty, and resistance. It is the hope that these tenets would eventually build up to the 40 years of environmental justice scholarship that the U.S. has.
Baptiste asserts that environmental justice within the Caribbean is more than climate justice, as the latter focuses on the urgent action needed to prevent climate change. “The issues of marginality, disproportionality, and exposure to environmental harms to marginalized populations are very much present within the Caribbean,” says Baptiste.
She and Robinson see this special issue as a call to activists, scholars, and practitioners to theorize and continue to gather evidence that will contribute to the past, present, and future of environmental justice in the Caribbean.
To further this scholarship, Baptiste is working toward a book with another colleague that will use the same tenets of sovereignty, coloniality, and resistance that will be applied to climate change happening in the region. “We are hoping to use multiple examples and case studies from what has been written on climate change to develop these elements,” says Baptiste.