Advancing an Environmental Justice-Centered Approach to Understanding Cumulative Impacts: Community-Engaged Analysis of Industrialized Biogas Development from Rural Eastern North Carolina

In recent decades, environmental justice experts have advanced understanding of cumulative impacts, defined as the harm that can result when multiple forms of environmental and socioeconomic distress converge on a place and compound through time. Concurrently, U.S. industry leaders have launched climate mitigation projects that often exacerbate environmental injustice in overburdened communities. We consider this critical disconnect, drawing from our collective experience in eastern North Carolina. In this rural, economically disadvantaged, and multiracial region, state and corporate leaders have authorized the development of industrialized biogas as an ostensibly renewable energy source and climate mitigation strategy. Our community-engaged analysis of cumulative impacts reveals how chemical, ecological, social, and political processes linked to industrialized agriculture and energy production interacted through time to solidify social and environmental harm. In turn, this accumulation of harm generated the conditions for industrialized biogas development to become a climate mitigation program that relies on, rather than ameliorates, environmental injustice. We argue that environmental injustice can emerge, feed back into, and solidify across socio-ecological systems through time, creating foundations for environmental “solutions” that compound harm. Centering the knowledge of communities facing environmental injustice across the natural, built, social, and policy environments will expand and improve scientific understanding of cumulative impacts. In a time of dramatic change in the U.S. federal administration, wherein environmental justice may be removed from the policy and funding agenda, now is the time to turn toward, not away from, justice.