Re-pairing Ecologies of Harm: Resisting the Material and Legal Infrastructures of 'Cancer Alley'

Abstract

 Which legal strategies can be construed to repair irreparable harms? In this article, I problematize the prevailing adoption of rights-based approaches to reparations in a context of socio-ecological harm. This juridical articulation of reparations accounts for only a limited set of relations of harm. While reparations prioritize the quantification, economic valuation, and monetization of harms, I focus on tactics that account for irreparable socio-ecological harms embedded in infrastructures that are vastly spread across matter, subjects, space, and time. The infrastructures I focus on are both material—the petrochemical plants, tank farms, and refineries that enable the extraction, transformation, transportation, and consumption of fossil fuels—as well as legal—the land use permits, property rights, trade agreements, and foreign investment treaties that shape the material infrastructures of the global carbon economy. By analyzing the strategies deployed by a fenceline community in ‘Cancer Alley’, Louisiana, to resist these carbon infrastructures, I show how their claim for justice sets in motion a deeper process of repairing. I propose the concept of ‘relational re–pairing’ to render legally legible a broader set of ecological attachments and a multiplicity of entangled harms. Legal strategies for re–pairing broken relations confront, disrupt, and reckon with the historically sedimented injustices of ‘fossil modernity’, rather than merely mitigating its adverse effects. Premised on the irreparability of systemic harms and historical injustices, such processes activate legal claims distinct from liberal rights-based approaches to reparations. What is irreparable might still be re–pairable—a legal legibility of the fragile fabric of life under duress.

Keywords: Entangled harms, reparations, relational re-pairing, insurgent jurisprudence, 'cancer alley'