ABSTRACT
The distinction between natural and urban spaces is a prevalent one within both political and environmental philosophy. The natural/urban distinction has a rich and varied history that contributes to the way we have thought, and continue to think, about environmental spaces. One thing the natural/urban distinction does is shape the way we understand the environment and nature more generally. For example, mainstream environmental movements in the United States, largely created and articulated from the social location of upper class, white, cisgender men, have traditionally not regarded built urban environments as properly natural or constitutive of the natural world in important ways. This tradition, which is deeply permeated with untenable dualistic understandings (such as human/nature, culture/nature, urban/natural, and so on), has led to undertheorization of a whole range of environmental injustices that occur in built environments, contributing to the unchecked expansion of environmental racism. In this chapter, I will provide a comprehensive overview of the development of environmental justice as a response to the exclusionary logics of the US mainstream environmental movements, which do not properly consider the city or the urban as a part of the environment. I will do this by exploring the ways in which the construction of the natural and urban are deeply compromised in racist, classist, and sexist ways, which work to present certain communities (largely poor, communities of color in urban settings) as disposable.
