Underburdened Communities

Waste is built into modern culture. Yet the problem of what to do with all that waste remains unresolved. The Western over-consumptive lifestyle relies on the highly racialized transfer of the burdens associated with managing waste away from certain communities and onto others. Indeed, our entire way of life hinges on overburdening some communities, so that other communities may be underburdened, and thereby enjoy the benefits of clean air, water, and land. Perhaps the most striking thing about the relationship between overburdened communities, and underburdened communities is that underburdened is not even an English word. By its very absence, the word underburdened encapsulates the way that environmental privilege is invisible, unproblematized, and unconsidered. This article draws back the curtain and shows how communities are systematically either overburdened or underburdened, largely along racial and socio-economic lines. By making visible the way that polluted neighborhoods subsidize clean air and water elsewhere, this article offers suggestions for the kinds of structural change that will be needed to achieve environmental justice.