Geography, Capitalism, and Environmental Justice

A comprehensive vocabulary review of key concepts in human geography, racial capitalism, labor exploitation, and environmental justice.

Accumulation by dispossession

The creation of surplus value by dispossessing and/or dislocating peoples (e.g., the French government using cheap land for redevelopment, raising value and prices so people have to move).

Anthropocene

A period characterized by increased industrialization and a vast change between "humans" and "nature," marked by the late 1700s with an uninterrupted rise in carbon dioxide emissions, or argued to begin with the orbis spike when population and consumption boomed in the post-war period.

Black Placemaking

The ways that urban Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction.

Black Radical Tradition

Finding new ways to exist within an oppressive system that individuals did not choose to be a part of.

Carceral Geographies

Areas where people are subjected to a specific type of labor to make a living and funneled into jobs (typically vulnerable individuals such as prisoners or migrant workers), based on the concept that businesses and job opportunities brought into an area create confines that force wage laborers into quasi-slavery.

Environmental Racism

"Racial discrimination in environmental policy-making, [in] enforcement of regulations and laws, [and] the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the siting of polluting industries."

Environmental Justice

The principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public laws and regulations.

Metabolic Rift

An irreparable rift where sustainability is recognized as good, but the consumption of the elite depends on the labor of people in other countries and increasing yields to meet growing consumption.

Globalization/neoliberalism

Unrestricted capitalism in its freest form yielding a competitive economy, which leads to offshoring to obtain cheap labor.

Offshoring

A business practice where corporations move production and obtain labor from other countries for cheaper costs to take advantage of cheap and lax labor protections and environmental regulations, resulting in citizens in the residing country not being paid a living wage.

Organized abandonment

The condition of residents being purposely abandoned by the government (e.g., the broiler belt where Jim Crow and segregation define labor).

Operational Landscapes/Hinterlands of the Capitalocene

A system where a city can no longer sustain itself and extracts materials through labor processes.

Capitalocene

Environmental and global change driven by capitalism.

Planetary Urbanization

A framework stating that urbanization is taking over all landscapes, enrolling the entire earthly landscape to supply urban cities.

Premature Death/Disability

The outcome where workers apply for disability or become disabled as a result of dangerous work conditions and the expectation of speed.

Proletarianization/Depeasantization

The transition from people making goods for themselves as their land is damaged to working for others in exchange for an hourly wage.

Redlining

A tactic used by the FHA where areas are generalized by how many white people are present in order to reject loans for housing.

Racial Capitalism

The process in which capitalism accumulates power through the exploitation of racialized groups.

Time-sense

The alteration of people's sense of time caused by corporations speeding up production, leading to premature death.

Stealing Time

The process whereby corporations use and abuse wage laborers to extract as much profit as possible in a given time frame, reorganizing lives around labor (e.g., incarcerated firefighters placed in dangerous situations without proper or equal pay compared to well-paid Cal firefighters).

Sacrifice Zones

Segregated and stigmatized spaces where the health and quality of life are compromised for economic development.

Cultural sovereignty

The ability of a group or people to exercise their beliefs.

Slow violence

Slow-moving injustices stemming from human-caused degradation and climate change.