The Burden of Racialized Time: Exploring Cumulative Impacts Using an Intergenerational Environmental Justice Framework

Cumulative impacts, as both a concept and an assessment tool, are critical to environmental justice efforts and provide meaningful context to the inequitable burdens historically excluded groups endure. How can we further strengthen our understanding of time within the context of cumulative impacts, so that we can enact meaningful and timely change, particularly within local policies? We draw on critical environmental justice and intergenerational justice activism and scholarship to propose intergenerational environmental justice as an emerging evaluative framework that employs intersectionality, considerations of age, time, and place, life course theory, and multiple forms of justice to analyze local policymaking within the context of environmental harms. We first provide a brief overview of the framework. Then, we center our discussion of cumulative impacts within the context of intergenerational environmental justice, paying particular attention to racialized time, a key aspect of the framework. Using Louisville, Kentucky’s Anti-Displacement Law as an example, we argue that an explicit inclusion of racialized time within cumulative impact analysis is necessary in addressing the unevenness of environmental harm within and across generations.