disturbing the peace: environmental
CHANGE
AND THE SCALES OF JUSTICE ON A NORTHERN RIVER

TINA LOO

ABSTRACT

This article examines the environmental and social impacts of damming the Peace River in northern British Columbia as a way of exploring the challenges associated with doing environmental justice. It argues that environmental justice is not simply a matter of rectifying the distribution of environmental harms and benefits. Instead, doing environmental justice requires coming to terms with the different scales at which environmental change is apprehended and comprehended; scales that have sensual, spatial, and temporal dimensions.

IN LAW, "disturbing the peace" is an offense against the public order provided by the state. But the phrase evokes much more than its black letter definition. It resonates with the raucous sounds of urban revelry: shouting, pounding feet, sirens, and slamming doors.	1
Although the Peace of this essay is a river in northern British Columbia, disturbing it also disrupted an established order, albeit a human ecological one.1 That disruption was also a matter of the senses. In 1968, the provincial government dammed the Peace to generate hydroelectricity, setting into motion a series of environmental and social changes (see Map 1). While scientists gauged this transformation in terms of cubic meters per second of water flow, percentages of vegetation change, and parts per million of sediment, the peoples of the Peace experienced it much more directly, seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and tasting the changes in the land. Important itself, understanding the sensual dimensions of change is the key to understanding the differing scales at which environmental transformation was apprehended. More broadly, it is the key to understanding the dynamics of environmental politics and the possibilities for environmental justice.	2
Map 1. The Peace River Basin Map by Eric Leinberger.
The current global debate over climate change has made the connections between environment and politics apparent to us all now, but scholars have been exploring them for some time. In the last twenty years, researchers, mainly in the United States, have charted the environmental effects of urbanization and industrialization, and in the process argued that the risks associated with these changes were borne unequally.2	3
Poor people tend to live in poor environments. Why? Because they lack access to political power, and hence are not in the position to influence decision making—about the location of dumps, for instance, or sewage outflows.3 Terms such as "environmental racism" and "environmental inequality" are used to describe and explain why people on the social, economic, and political margins by virtue of race, class, and gender live in marginal environments.4 The social is the spatial.	. . .