Intersectionality and the Environment

Abstract

Given the breadth, depth, and duration of prominent developments in intersectionality scholarship and its relevance to themes of environmental inequality, it is encouraging that intersectional analyses are becoming more widely used by environmental sociologists. Over the past several decades, rich empirical work has demonstrated the connections between social inequalities and ecological degradation, making clear the importance of analyzing environmental problems through an intersectional lens (e.g., Bullard, 1990; Mohai et al., 2009; Morello-Frosch & Lopez, 2006; Pellow, 2018). Although intersectionality research did not originally center on human-and-environment relations, in recent years, scholars have begun to weave together environmental justice and gender-and-environment frameworks to create deeply intersectional socioecological theory (Gaard, 2017; Malin & Ryder, 2018; Pellow, 2018). Taken together, this diverse body of work illustrates the myriad ways in which social location, privilege, and disadvantage intersect to create very different effects on and experiences of the natural environment within society.