Environmental Assessment As Bureaucratic Violence: Regulatory Failure for Environmental Justice

The United States federal government has issued two executive orders that commit to environmental justice. By requiring new projects to both meet the National Environmental Protection Act and also meet environmental justice orders, the state purports to protect both the environment and marginalized communities. However, weaknesses in the regulations as situated in settler colonial structures alongside state commitments to capitalistic production can leave communities as the victims of great environmental harms. As the state legitimates decisions through claims of procedural justice rather than informed consent, and meets established requirements to measure environmental justice, the outcome is one of known harm. The relationship of slow violence through deeply entrenched environmental hazards that unfold throughout time, and the bureaucratic violence that comes from knowingly allowing for environmental injustice to overburdened and victimized communities exposes the failures of the regulatory state. This project analyzes the process of environmental assessment and its uses in decision making for energy projects on or near Indigenous lands to identify the mechanism by which they are deployed against the communities and ecologies they claim to protect.