Globalization, Environmental Health and Social Justice

Countries in the West regularly export their environmental harms – dumping heavy metals and greenhouse gases, for instance – to countries with (often fast) developing economies. These practices may seem beneficial to both the core and the periphery, providing jobs and investment in the latter, whilst outsourcing expensive health and safety commitments in the former. But, given the lack of infrastructure and regulation necessary to assess and manage these hazards, is it safe?

Globalization, Health and Environmental Justice argues that the globalization of hazards puts the health of people in peripheral countries at risk in order to benefit those living in the core countries. Contextualizing the export of hazardous products, industrial production processes, and wastes in a world-systems framework, it discusses how ecological unequal exchange, the treadmill of production and metabolic rift have contributed to the globalization of health, safety and environmental risks. Three case study chapters explore the forces driving these transfers and the adverse socio-economic consequences associated with them. Including examples from Mexico, China and Bangladesh, they present empirical research on hazardous products and processes from pesticides, cigarettes, and leaded gasoline, to ship-breaking, e-waste and specialist export processing zones. Frey discusses the need for an alternative political strategy of globalization from below, arguing that conventional solutions fail to take into account a world system based on unequal relationships between core and periphery.

This innovative volume is essential reading for researchers and students of public health, environmental health, social justice and the processes of globalization.

R. Scott Frey is Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Social Justice at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA.