Melissa Checker

The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice

Over the past two decades, sustainable initiatives have transformed some NYC neighborhoods into waterfront, green oases. However, the greening of these neighborhoods has also meant the exponential rise of property values and rents. At the same time, neighborhoods not slated for redevelopment remain overburdened with polluting facilities and under-protected against the effects of climate change. This talk delves into the uneven distribution of environmental improvements across New York City and the connections between sustainability and high-end redevelopment, known as “environmental gentrification.” I argue that contemporary growth imperatives combine with public alarms about climate change to create three distinct types of environmental gentrification. After identifying these types, I link them to historic policy, planning and land use decisions that have produced uneven urban landscapes and environmental injustice. In addition to historic and quantitative research, I conducted long-term, intensive fieldwork with grassroots environmental justice activists and community members. Here, I find another paradox. While sustainable initiatives supported EJ activists’ long-fought battles for environmental improvements, those same improvements wound up contributing to the displacement of EJ organizations’ own constituents. Moreover, I demonstrate that the greening and upscaling of certain neighborhoods further concentrates polluting facilities in non-gentrifying neighborhoods that already house more than their fair share of environmental burdens.

Finally, long-term ethnographic research involved following activists as they ran around attending public hearings, meetings, listening sessions, visioning sessions, providing testimonies, sitting on steering committees, over and over. However, these activities had little effect. This led me to develop an idea of activist overwhelm, which is a co-optive process that appears to support collective action and citizen engagement but that actually achieves the opposite effect.

Melissa Checker is the Hagedorn Professor and Chair of Urban Studies at Queens College, and a Professor in the PhD programs in Anthropology and Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on environmental justice activism in the U.S., urban sustainability and environmental gentrification. She is the author of The Sustainability Myth: Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice (2020), which won the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of North America Book Prize and Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town (2005), which won the 2007 Society of Humanistic Sociology Book Award. She co-edited Sustainability in the Global City: Myth and Practice (Cambridge 2015) and Local Actions: Cultural Activism, Power, and Public Life (2004) and has published numerous articles in academic journals as well as mainstream publications.