Adaptation or mitigation? community responses to global climate change

This paper focuses on what I call “embodied” or “situated” environmental science and community-based environmental health justice activism. The central argument interrogates conventional environmental health science and policy approaches, which tend to concentrate on global, cosmopolitan, and macro-level frameworks of organized power: states, markets, global institutions, global environmental sciences, and international environmental organizations. That selective attention to the macro scale tends to dismiss or simply disregard community/local/situated practices and approaches to environmental health science and policy as overly micro level and parochial (i.e., not relevant or up to the task of addressing the big environmental health problems of the moment, like those associated with global climate change). Using the conceptual framework of “embodiment” and drawing on the feminist political economic theory of social reproduction (the maintenance and sustainability of bodies/families/communities and everyday life), the paper examines the harm done to (human and non-human) bodies, communities, and local environments, which has been eclipsed by dominant discourses emphasizing the global scale. The paper highlights from a historical perspective the innovative and diverse environmental health justice strategies generated by grassroots activists to build sustainable, just, and resilient communities in the face of broad-scale environmental problems like global warming and climate change.