Pellow brings some interesting points to light in the first couple of chapters in his book Resisting Global Toxins. The most interesting ones that he brings are the unison of the four interventions and their contributions to the justice debate. By combining his contributions to the four ideas of justice talk, he points out the areas where environmental justice might not always have been considered. The trade of toxins, and the underhanded methods that companies go to in order to get away with it sounds like an astounding problem of global justice and onen that poses a larger problem. When injustice is being committed in the U.S. it is at least affecting people who have a chance to make it known to the rest of the nation. When it is committed across oceans in nations that have no ability to bring news of their position to the rest of the world, it raises justice problems to a whole new level. It poses an entirely new problem to the question of how best to approach environmental justice issues. Also Pellow brings to the EJ debate the idea of class and social problems along with the race issues of environmental justice. He shows that there are a greater number of vulnerable people out there who are subject to exploitation by structural institutions such as risk society and treadmill economics. Having such imbalanced practices at the heart of building the nation creates a huge problem when trying to help the people at the bottom. Also, when similar methods are used in other nations, it creates a global problem of exploitation.
The most interesting idea of chapter two was the idea of people of race seen as a toxic element of society. This idea was entirely foreign to me and caused some feelings of resentment for Pellow but at the same time led me to look critically at the world I take for granted. There are multiple examples where this situation could be claimed to exist. The one which we mentioned earlier in class discussion was the housing market in which people of color are denied more loans and have lower property values than the rest of society. It seems like there is something inherently wrong with that, yet it happens without second thought every day. People are not necessarily acting with intention to be racist, but their activities allow racism to persist in social norms.
Pellow also brought up the idea of social movement organizations as a way to fight back against injustice and brings to the environmental justice debate the idea of transnational organizations to fight the expansion of injustices to the global scale. Shrader-Frechette focused mainly on the effects at home and who to go after for injustices, but when the people in other nations are affected it makes it much more difficult to take action. First and foremost you have to have proof of action and know exactly who is at fault. Also you have to deal with multiple governments and their different regulations. This means that there are discrepancies in feelings of who is to blame. Is the the business who actually produces the waste, or the government for not having higher standards of health?
