Towards a Critical Environmental Justice: An Analysis of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection's Environmental Justice Policy Revision

Open Access
- Author:
- Hernandez, Nebraska
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 09, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Brian King, Program Head/Chair
Jennifer E Baka, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Joshua F Inwood, Committee Member - Keywords:
- critical environmental justice
Pennsylvania
policy - Abstract:
- Approximately four decades after the 1982 Warren County, North Carolina protests credited with launching the environmental justice movement, environmental injustice still pervades across landscapes. Recently, environmental justice has received renewed interest in academic, governmental, and social movement sectors and calls for including environmental justice into U.S. state and federal policymaking have increased. In Pennsylvania, the Department of Environmental Protection (PADEP) is currently revising its environmental justice policy. This paper seeks to analyze how this revision fits into a broader push for environmental justice in Pennsylvania in the current political climate and to challenge the normative conceptualization of the state as a benevolent or neutral force in the pursuit of environmental justice. To do this, I explore four main research questions in regard to environmental (in)justice in the commonwealth: (1) Who participated in the PADEP environmental justice policy revision comment period? (2) What sentiments are expressed through these comments? (3) Who/which communities were absent, and what were barriers to their participation? (4) Is this process reinforcing environmental justice as a technocratic exercise by the state? In order to answer these questions, I analyze the policy revision through Pellow’s (2018) Critical Environmental Justice Studies (CEJS) framework by recounting this history of environmental justice in Pennsylvania and creating a sentiment analysis of 71 unique comments gleaned from the 1,253 comments public comments generated during the public participation period of the policy revision to better gauge public opinion and participation on the topic, as well as critique the PADEP revision process.