Impact Assessment in the Ring of Fire: Contested Authorities, Competing Visions and a Clash of Legal Orders

In 2007, a significant mineral deposit dubbed the “Ring of Fire” was discovered in the boreal peatlands in Treaty No.9 territory in the far north of Ontario. The original project proposal submitted to the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency was for a chromite mine and an associated infrastructure corridor to connect the remote location to the provincial high-way system. As years went by without progress on the regulatory approvals, the proponent sold its claims at a loss. In the period that followed, Ontario negotiated with the Matawa First Nations (the nine most proximate First Nations) who were, as a united block, claiming to hold inherent jurisdiction and governing authority over their homelands in the Ring of Fire region, an area exclusively occupied by Indigenous peoples. Those negotiations soon broke down and Ontario pivoted to bilateral negotiations with individual “mining-ready” First Nations. Deal-making from that approach has produced two First Nations willing to act as proponents for all-season roads along the same corridor as the mining road originally proposed. Three road segments became subject to both provincial and federal environmental/impact assessments. The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada also initiated a Regional Assessment for the Ring of Fire region, which was intended to examine the cumulative impacts of all the expected changes in the region brought about by opening up the far north. Each of these assessments is now mired in controversy about who holds jurisdiction, who can provide or withhold their consent to major projects in the region, and whose law applies when environmental/impact assessments are conducted. This case study illustrates how difficult it can be to apply a term such as “Indigenous-led impact assessment” in a context of overlapping territories, competing authorities, and multiple legal orders

Law\u27s Slow Violence: A Review of Rob Nixon\u27s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (HUP, 2010)

With gripping urgency, Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor seeks to reveal the “occluded relationships” between transnational economic actors and the things that tie them to particular places, such as labour, land, resources and commodity dynamics. He brings into view the bodies caught in the middle – those that have been raced and erased, made invisible, and wiped away -- by exposing the violence perpetrated against them across time and space. Nixon’s work is a broad synthesis of a seemingly disparate set of literatures in post-colonial studies, eco-criticism and literary studies. His arresting narrative engages three primary concerns: the phenomenon of “slow violence,” the environmentalism of the poor, and the role of the writer-activist in the work of making the first two ‘visible.’ Slow violence, in Nixon’s conception, is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.” Because he views a major aspect of the critical challenge to be representational – the problem of devising “stories, images and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” – Nixon focuses on the storytellers themselves. And the storytellers he chooses are the writer-activists that have inspired an environmentalism of the poor, primarily in the Global south. They include Arundhati Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Abdulrahman Munif, and Jamaica Kincaid, among others. They are all figures who, like Nixon, demonstrate a stubborn resistance to liberalism’s urge to “locate violence outside law.” Instead of treating law as that which contains violence, they plainly confront its complicity

What is Environmental Justice?

This posting outlines the concept of environmental justice as I recently described it for an encyclopedia entry in the field of Action Research . In this discipline, the term environmental justice describes more than a fair outcome. It is a social movement, and a theoretical lens, that is focused on fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens, and in the processes that determine those distributions. In both cases, an attention to environmental justice means amplifying the voices of poor, racialized and Indigenous communities in environmental and natural resource policy-making venues -- places that have typically produced decisions resulting in those communities bearing more than their fair share of environmental harms. It also means, increasingly, paying attention to the manner through which disadvantaged and historically oppressed peoples within those communities will often be disproportionately harmed, often along familiar social gradients of gender, class, sexuality, caste, and (dis)ability. Effective research in the environmental justice framework has tended to involve robust partnerships between local communities, organizations and/or groups of activists seeking to achieve environmental justice, and university-based researchers employing participatory-action methodologies. These collaborative efforts have proven to be very fruitful in many cases, but should not be understood as easy or straightforward to implement. New models are emerging that seek to combine and enhance the expertise, capacities and perspectives of the partners in order to meet primarily, the needs of communities, and secondarily, the aims of researchers

Confronting Chronic Pollution: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Risk and Precaution

The central aim of this article is to demonstrate a socio-legal approach to risk and precaution using the example of chronic pollution. Drawing on ongoing empirical work with the Aamjiwnaang First Nation, which is tucked into Sarnia\u27s Chemical Valley, a secondary aim is to influence and shape how we understand the problem and confront the risks of chronic pollution. This article forwards the argument that the prevailing regulatory approach is incapable of capturing the essence of contemporary pollution harms, because those harms are increasingly linked to continuous, routine, low-dose exposures to contaminants that are within legally sanctioned limits. Community residents and advocates struggling against chronic pollution are increasingly identifying with the environmental justice movement and adopting its strategies of resistance, including its mantra of precaution. These strategies of resistance have the potential to dramatically expose the impotence of the prevailing regulatory approach to chronic pollution

Environmental Justice and the Hesitant Embrace of Human Rights

This chapter explores some of the tensions inherent in employing ‘rights strategies’ in environmental justice movements. Using the example of a judicial review application brought by Indigenous environmental justice activists in Canada demonstrates the symbolic power of using rights-based language for environmental justice, but also underscores the serious procedural, logistical and resource barriers that frustrate these groups in their attempts to deploy litigation tactics. Legal scholars need to think critically about ‘rights-talk’ and confront the hard questions about its utility for advancing environmental justice. In working with communities, we must learn to listen to what communities want before we default to ‘rights’ and other legal tools often ill-fitted to the task

The Networked Infrastructure of Fossil Capitalism: Implications of the New Pipeline Debates for Environmental Justice in Canada

A read of the critical geography literature on the concept of “networked infrastructures” generates two arguments in relation to the environmental justice implications of the new pipeline debates. First, the proposed coast-to-coast pipeline is likely to exacerbate existing environmental inequities in Canada. Conceiving of the crude oil in a pipeline as a material flow of commodified nature demonstrates that, at the end of the pipe, inputs of labor, technology and capital are required to convert the crude into useable forms of energy. This leads to a serious engagement with the communities at the ends of the proposed pipes. Here, I illustrate the type of analysis that is required with a preliminary examination of the expected environmental health impacts from increased refinery emissions in Sarnia, Montreal and Saint John. Second, the notion that pipelines, despite their vital effects, are fixed and durable installations of built infrastructure -- lending a marked inertia to the routes they cement -- produces intergenerational equity concerns in relation to fossil capitalism. These concerns are brought powerfully to the fore by activists under the banner of Idle No More. In fact, it is this growing indigenous resistance movement centered on lands and resources that best illustrates the obvious contradiction: the permanence of the pipelines on the landscape, once built, underscores the gravity of the choices we are weighing, just as the active resistance of indigenous people across the county reveals the inherent instability of the networked infrastructure

Gender-Benders\u27: Sex and Law in the Constitution of Polluted Bodies

This paper explores how law might conceive of the injury or harm of endocrine disruption as it applies to an aboriginal community experiencing chronic chemical pollution. The effect of the pollution in this case is not only gendered, but gendering: it seems to be causing the ‘production’ of two girl babies for every boy born on the reserve. This presents an opening to interrogate how law is implicated in the constitution of not just gender but sex. The analysis takes an embodied turn, attempting to validate the real and material consequences of synthetic chemicals acting on bodies — but uncovers that finding a harm in a declining sex ratio depends on a static conception of the human form, based on unfounded assumptions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘normalcy’. Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of ‘becoming’ offers a compelling challenge, essentially pointing to the conclusion that we should find harm where we find illness and suffering and not simply where we find difference. At the same time, we cannot discount the political economy of the pollution: the paper concludes by returning the focus to the role of power, colonialism and the state in the perpetuation of the pollution on the landscape