Environmentally affected peoples and modes of doing science: from controversy to epistemic injustice in a case of bioethanol contamination
Keywords:
epistemic inequality, enviromental pollution, bioethanol, enviromental injusticeAbstract
This article analyzes an experience of a citizen’s struggle for the recognition of health and environmental rights in a case of environmental contamination due to bioethanol production in the Province of Córdoba, Argentina. As the basis of this claim, they also face the need for the recognition of their condition as legitimate knowers of the problem, as those directly affected, since their homes are located next to one of the most important bioethanol plants in the country. First, a contextualization of the problem is presented, characterizing the environmental sacrifice zones in agribusiness, and then focusing the analysis on situations in which the knowledge of those affected is ignored and/or excluded in the testing process. It also highlights the co-responsibility of the scientific community in relation to the inequality between the aforementioned science of production and the science of impacts, connected to the promise of bioethanol’s environmental sustainability. The aim of this study is to show how, in the context of environmental pollution problems, epistemic inequality and violence are co-constitutive aspects of environmental injustice, aggravating the condition of the environmentally affected, as, in addition to the deprivation of rights, they are also deprived of intelligibility as legitimate knowers of the problem. While controversies imply debate or confrontation, in the case analyzed in this paper, such confrontation does not take place because the exclusion of one of the positions takes precedence, in a situation of disadvantage or inequality vis-à-vis the legitimized expert knowledge.
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