Identities and Exclusion in Urban Environmentalism: The Edmonton Waste Incinerator Case

UCL ANTHROPOLOGY
SUBMISSION OF COURSEWORK
ACADEMIC YEAR 2020-21
MSc Anthropology, Environment and Development Dissertation
Identities and Exclusion in Urban Environmentalism
The Edmonton Waste Incinerator Case
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Online research: PARSONS/AED/2021/05/3/O
Face to face research: PARSONS/AED/2021/05/1/F
Word Count 14,749
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
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Anthropology, Environment and Development (UCL)
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Acknowledgements
My most sincere thanks to Prof Katherine Homewood whose insight, critique, and support made
this project not only stronger, but a truly enjoyable experience. I would also like to acknowledge
the input, conversations, debate and ideas that all of the AED faculty shared with me through the
course of this difficult, extraordinary, maddening, challenging, fulfilling year of learning, and
which informed this work. I am filled with gratitude.
Thanks, also, to everyone who participated in the research: the residents of Edmonton
and Enfield, the campaigners, activists and representatives of all of the community groups who
gave generously of their time and ideas. I am humbled by your trust and encouraged by your
focus, commitment, and criticisms of a system in need of repair.
Lastly, my deepest thanks to my mother, Rhonda, and my partner, Bill, for the
unwavering support and love that has given me a rock-solid foundation from which to jump.

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Abstract
This dissertation focuses on various environmental subjects/actors within the resistance to the
planned expansion of the Edmonton municipal waste incinerator in North London, United
Kingdom. Using the framework provided by Paul Robbins’ environmental subjects and identity
thesis, I explore how the resistance movement enables the formation of new identities as well as
the fault lines that appear between various actors within the campaign against the project. These
fault lines include environmental racism, ethnicity, social justice and issues of white privilege,
class and marginalization. Nested within Robbins’ work, it also examines this movement through
Vincent Béal’s idea of roll-back environmentalism, as well as several researchers’ applications
of white privilege to environmental justice movements. As Robbins’ work shows, however,
environmental movements also have the potential to unite discrete groups across various
identities and ecologies. The planned expansion, currently under early-stage construction, has
galvanized a coalition of local activist groups and individuals approaching the issue from a
variety of perspectives. But there is still a marked discrepancy in the ethnic and socio-economic
composition of the core group of resistance campaigners and the people who are immediately
affected by the incinerator’s operation. Therefore I identify several mechanisms of exclusion and
conclude with an offer of several practical suggestions generated by participants to support a
broadening inclusivity within the resistance.

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List of Abbreviations
BLME – Black Lives Matter Enfield
EnCAF – Enfield Climate Action Forum
ENGO – Environmental nongovernmental organisation
EREC – Enfield Racial Equality Council
GLA – Greater London Authority
GLC – Greater London Council
MWI – Municipal waste incinerator
NGO – Nongovernmental organisation
NLHPP – North London Heat and Power Project
NLWA – North London Waste Authority
NSM – New social movement
REACT – Residents of Edmonton Angel Community Together
STEIN – Stop the Edmonton Incinerator Now
XR – Extinction Rebellion

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Acknowledgements 3
Abstract 4
List of Abbreviations 5
Prologue 8
1 Introduction 9
1.1 Critical framework 12
1.2 Literature review 13
2 Histories 18
2.1 The shifting landscape of resistance: UK environmental 18
activism in the late 20th
century
2.2 Waste collection as environmental imperative 20
2.3 The historicised political geographies of Enfield 22
and Edmonton
2.4 The Edmonton EcoPark 25
3 Methodology 28
3.1 Research questions 28
3.2 Participants and sampling 31
Table 3.1 Interview details 31
3.3 Interviews 33
3.4 Positionality 34
3.5 Participant observation 36
3.6 Ethics 37
3.7 Consent and data collection 38

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Interlude 38
3.8 Challenges 39
4. The Political Ecology of Waste Disposal 42
Interlude 42
4.1 Mechanisms of exclusion 43
4.2 Fault lines 52
4.3 “It gives me purpose”: Identities 58
4.4 Connections and opportunities 60
5. Conclusions 64
Bibliography 67
Appendices 70

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Prologue
I jumped when I saw the hand reach toward me from the other side of the glass. I had been busy
trying to stuff a leaflet into the letter box when I saw movement on the other side of the window
in the front door. I braced for some form of conflict as a man opened it, expecting him to be
unhappy that I was shoving something other than mail into his house unsolicited. It was an
unseasonably cold, drizzly June Friday evening and I and four anti-incineration campaigners were
trying to get hundreds of fliers distributed so we could go get warm and eat pizza.
“Hi. Sorry about that. Do you know about the Edmonton incinerator?” I asked as I handed
him the piece of paper directly. Yes, he said. He sees it when he drives on the motorway toward
Chingford, a few kilometers away. The man was middle age, presented as white with accented
English, somewhere from Eastern Europe it seemed to my untrained ear. Not unusual for this
residential, working-class pocket on the south end of the Borough of Enfield in North East London.
“Do you know they plan to expand it and that people are fighting it?”
He looked at the leaflet in his hand for a moment, silent.
“I sign there?” he asked, pointing to the QR code that would take him to a petition run by
campaigners against the waste incinerator expansion. Yes, I said.
“I’ll sign,” he said. “I have lung problem.”

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Chapter 1
Introduction
“What the voracious city devours, it must
eventually disgorge in rubbish and excrement.”
– Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (336)
London is built on rubbish. Quite literally. It may be commonplace to imagine the city as a series
of civilizational layers, each built upon the decaying rubble of the previous one’s glory, and this
is an accurate, if romantic, imaginary. But, strip away the romanticized historicity, and on an
entirely mundane level the city rests on tonnes of human refuse, biological and manufactured. In
the late 16th
century, it was found that more than 40 dwellings on a certain Chick Lane were built
on top of a public dump “while Holywell Street [still extant] was built upon a site of rubbish and
waste which had accumulated for a hundred years after the Great Fire” (Ackroyd 2000: 336).
After WWII, Hackney Marshes was famously landfilled using the rubble created by the Blitz,
forever altering the leisure activity landscape of East London (not to mention the flood plain)
(Bloomfield 2011). Many contemporary street names belie their less-than-sanitary origins.
Maiden Lane takes its name from middens, not virginal young women, and to truly appreciate
Clerkenwell’s Laystall Street, one need only know that public dumps used to be known as
laystalls (Ackroyd 2000).
The question of what to do with the ever-increasing volume of waste produced by the
ever-expanding city has plagued authorities for hundreds of years, and legislation addressing the
problem in London can be traced to at least the 14th
century (ibid.). During the Victorian era,
technological advances allowed for industrial scale municipal waste incineration (MWI), and by

10
the late 20th
century, the practice of MWI, or burning household rubbish, began to expand
exponentially in response to the United Kingdom compliance with European Union regulations
that disincentivized the use of landfill (1999). The government marketed incineration as an
environmentally friendly alternative to landfill and its attendant emissions, and dozens of
incinerators were built throughout the United Kingdom. There are five MWIs currently situated
within the Greater London Authority boundary.
Today, municipal waste incinerators are billed by local governments as green,
environmentally responsible, and a vital part of a circular economy (2021). They are marketed to
the various publics they operate amongst as an answer to renewable energy demands: they have
been used to generate district heat for many years, but they also generate electricity for homes
and businesses. However, waste incinerators have also begun to generate an expanding and
strengthening resistance to their very existence. As the narratives that define and support MWI
have shifted in the last 50 years, so too have the narratives that undermine and attack the
practice. In response to a growing body of Western scientific-based knowledge on the negative
environmental effects of MWI in conjunction with local ecological knowledges, campaigners
against incineration emerged across the UK. This resistance movement is part of a larger
“landscape of resistance,” (Saville 2020: 4), a pastiche of environmental subjects/actors around
the country fighting a number of perceived environmentally destructive practices. However, as
relatively recent scholarly work on intersectionality and the racialized nature of
environmentalisms has shown, this movement is also a contested space, racially and socio-
economically, and this landscape often excludes people of colour, those of ethnic minority
backgrounds, or low economic status (Gibson-Wood and Wakefield 2013) (Pulido 2000).

11
Stemming from reporting I did while writing an article titled Political Ecology and Power
Generation for an internal UCL magazine and drawing on further interviews with members of
various organisations involved in the campaign, this dissertation focuses on an assemblage of
communities in resistance to the ongoing expansion of one of these incinerators in North East
London, officially named the Edmonton EcoPark. It concentrates on the perception and
reification of white privilege within the resistance in an era of “roll-back environmentalism”
situated within Paul Robbins’ identity thesis in political ecology (Béal 2012: 409). I explore the
overlap in commonality as well as the fault lines in and between the various groups that comprise
the coalition against the incinerator’s expansion, known as the Stop the Edmonton Incinerator
Now (STEIN) campaign.
This is a multi-sited ethnography. It would likely involve at least some digital sites even
in the best of times, given that activists are scattered through many of the seven North London
boroughs whose rubbish heads to Edmonton for disposal. But within the context of Covid-19, a
digital realm became crucial to the execution of campaigners’ plans as well as to my own as a
researcher. Indicative of the issue of class privilege, however, the siting and use of digital spaces
highlighted the inequalities within the groups as well as my own positionality. To attend any
organisational meeting entailed at the very least having a phone, but typically a computer and
reliable internet service were essential. It entailed a certain savviness with digital tools and media
literacy, to say nothing of access to and knowledge of these events. The digital sites themselves
are also multilayered. Often, member groups within STEIN have public Facebook pages that
share useful information, but if one desired to be more deeply involved, that necessitated a
change of digital platform, moving to Telegram or WhatsApp, for example, for active campaign
strategizing and deeper engagement. In a typical week of fieldwork, I joined participants via

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Facebook, WhatsApp, webcasts and live streams of government meetings, Teams meetings with
them at home, in offices, on physical streets in neighborhoods, in church and at Costa in a Tesco
supermarket.
What emerged was a view of actor networks as articulated by Bruno Latour (2005) – an
assemblage in constant relational flux under the umbrella of political ecology. Relational
dynamics connect and cleave the local governing body that controls the Edmonton rebuild, and
the campaigners fighting to change its course. Relational dynamics connect yet expose fault lines
between activists and campaigners within the STEIN coalition. And relational dynamics of
exclusion affect residents of the areas immediately surrounding the incinerator, largely
preventing them from exercising the option to participate through several mechanisms that I will
explore further. Lastly, the three thematic frameworks I have chosen highlight the relationality
all of these actors have to a piece of industrial infrastructure and various perceptions of
environment and environmentalisms.
1.1 CRITICAL FRAMEWORK
Within the resistance to the Edmonton incinerator’s expansion there is a nested nature to the
amount of power various actors wield. Therefore it is useful to examine the frameworks through
which these actor networks operate using the same nested structure, one within the next within
the next.
The outermost frame is the “community of practice” that Paul Robbins (2020: 17)
describes as political ecology. That all of my participants, whether identifying as campaigners,
activists, or residents (or all three) view the expansion – indeed, the continued existence – of the
Edmonton incinerator as an expression and reification of local and regional political power

13
robbing them of their voices, autonomy, and agency is indisputable. But rather than acting
outside the legal-political system as some direct action movements such as Extinction Rebellion
(XR) have done, the campaigners within STEIN utilize it and work within it. Further, Robbins’
ideas on identity formation within environmental movements contribute significant insights.
The next framework, situated within the overarching frame of political ecology is
Vincent Béal’s notion of a period of “roll-back environmentalism” in Britain at the end of the
20th
century wherein local, particularly urban, governments shifted the discourse around
environmental management to that of urban sustainability as a policy issue, rather than
environmental discourse as an election tool, which simultaneously and intentionally removed
local grassroots environmental groups and actors from the collaborative management of these
issues (2012: 409).
Finally, perhaps most important is the work of scholars such as Laura Pulido (2000) and
Hilary Gibson-Wood and Sarah Wakefield (2013) on white privilege in environmental
participation, activist movements and resistances. To ignore the racial and class components of
the resistance to the incinerator as well as the population that surrounds it would be to reinforce
the class and ethnic privilege of power not only within the campaign against the project, but also,
reflexively, within my own positionality as a researcher and anthropological discourse writ large.
1.2 LITERATURE REVIEW
To begin with the final frame above and work outward, there is a healthy body of scholarly
literature on environmental racism situated within the context of environmental justice, a set of
ideas and practices that emerged in the United States as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement
of the mid-20th
century (Pulido 2000). This work tends to focus, however, on the locations of

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environmental hazards in relation to vulnerable populations, rather than embedded racism within
policy making systems on the one side and resistance groups on the other. Although much of this
work is focused on the United States, there are parallels to British urban environmental policy
decisions that resonate with the Edmonton project.
Gibson-Wood and Wakefield (2013) demonstrate that there are quantifiable barriers to
entry to environmental movements for people of colour and/or immigrant communities when these
movements are dominated by middle class white residents in Toronto, Canada, and both elements
of society are prevalent in the wards that surround the incinerator. Laura Pulido’s (2000) work in
Southern California highlights the systematic nature of white privilege in urban development and
challenges the perception and narrative that racism is an individual malicious act.
Reflexively, the underlying foundation of this work that highlights the gap in this area, still
in American but particularly within British scholarship, is that, as Liévanos et al. point out,
“environmental sociology, as a whole, pays limited attention to race and racism in the structure of
socioenvironmental relations” (Liévanos, Wilder et al. 2021: 103). So this lens is of especial
importance in unpacking the various relational dynamics within the STEIN coalition as well as
between it and residents who are not involved.
The issues of whose voices are heard and carry sociopolitical power within environmental
campaigns in Britain is set within an urban socio-temporal period which Vincent Béal has dubbed
“roll-back environmentalism.” This period, he observes, began in the early 1990s when he notes
“a discursive shift from the management of ‘the local environment’ to the management of ‘urban
sustainability’,” when “The hegemony of economic development objectives led to a dismantling
of the grassroots framework of environmental management”. Crucially, in this chronology
according to Béal,

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“… there was a profound change in the actors involved in environmental policies,
such that the role played by local environmental NGOs, groups and organisations
in the policy process was in constant decline. This marginalization often
occurred as a result of conflicts between environmental protection and economic
development” (2012: 409).
There is a fractal quality to this marginalization within the actors in resistance to the
Edmonton expansion. Members of STEIN routinely stated that they are marginalized and
dismissed by the North London Waste Authority (NLWA), who owns the company London
Energy Ltd., which operates Edmonton. In turn some campaigners of colour I spoke with as well
as residents who identify as people of colour and/or immigrant who are not involved directly with
the fight against the expansion but who do not support that expansion stated their voices are
dismissed by both the NLWA and the campaign. There is a clear repeating pattern of narrative on
an ever-shifting scale.
Thus, if, as some scholars have argued, power has become more distributed within British
environmental direct action as capitalism has become a moral system (Doherty, Seel et al. 2000)
that distribution has ceased to manifest on the local level within the Edmonton project. Béal’s work
demonstrates that in contradiction to Doherty, the local move to control environmental policy in
the name of urban sustainability means that power has become more concentrated in governing
entities such as the NLWA in the era of capitalistic growth within service industries such as waste
management. It is important here to note that waste incineration provides multiple revenue streams
and facilities are frequently operated by private companies contracted by local governments.

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Finally, the overarching framework that supports the previous two is the premise that
“environmental change and ecological conditions are the product of political process” (Robbins
2020: 16). This constitutes the idea of political ecology as I will interpret and apply it to the
Edmonton case study. The basic idea that environmental costs and benefits of a certain
circumstance affect actors unequally, reinforcing class, ethnic, and socio-economic disparity
which results in even more unequal political power amongst these actors lies at the very thematic
heart of the resistance campaign against the incinerator.
Further, Robbins identifies five theses of political ecology, two of which are particularly
useful for interpreting the various identities within and without the resistance. The first is the thesis
of environmental subjects and identity. This theory suggests that within the realm of political
ecology, “power-laden environmental management regimes have led to the emergence of new
kinds of people with their own emerging self-definitions, understandings of the world, and
ecological ideologies and behaviors” In other words, it is not a peoples’ belief about a given
environmental issue that leads to new actions or “rules systems,” it is new rules systems, such as
those embodied by the NLWA that lead people to develop new self-definitions. This is certainly a
common strain with some of my participants who are actively involved in the resistance – they
expressed the emergence of a new identity as environmental activists. A subset of this thesis is the
parallel notion that a new environmental power regime creates an opportunity for “local groups to
secure and represent themselves politically” which also plays out in the mechanisms and modes of
resistance of the campaigners (Robbins 2020: 207).
The second thesis is what Robbins calls political objects and actors, which posits that non-
human elements within a social system are “inevitably political” because they bear influence on
the world of human struggles (ibid.: 224). This idea dovetails with Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor

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network theory (ANT) to suggest that the entanglement of humans and non-human things, in this
instance a municipal waste incinerator and its governing power regime, rubbish itself and the
attendant effects of burning it, transform themselves, all, into political objects and actors in a
relational network simultaneously collaborative and divisive.
Taken together, these critical frames act as a telescope of sorts – the further it is extended,
the deeper we see into the layers of the networks, actors, and identities, and how these are
constitutive of one another as well as exclusionary.

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Chapter 2
Histories
The historical context in which the resistance to the Edmonton incinerator is situated comprises
several threads. While it is outside the scope of this paper to address this history exhaustively, it is
germane to place the campaign within the context of the development of social movements in the
United Kingdom, particularly environmental movements, in the latter part of the 20th
century.
Environmental campaigns addressing a host of problems in London are not new, of course.
There were campaigns both official and social in the 19th
century to address a number of
environmental ills typically approached through the frame and moral imperative of public health.
The city’s waterways were effectively open sewers for much of London’s history and with the
advent of coal as an energy source, air pollution became increasingly a matter of life and death
(Luckin and Thorsheim 2020). The problem of dangerous air quality for so long makes one wonder
why it took until 2020 for air pollution to be listed officially as a cause of death as it was in the
2013 death of a 9-year-old girl from Southeast London (BBC 2020).
2.1 THE SHIFTING LANDSCAPE OF RESISTANCE: UK ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISM
IN THE LATE 20TH
CENTURY
Extinction Rebellion activist Nicola Saville (2020) refers to the assemblages of actor networks
involved in environmentalisms and resistance campaigns in the United Kingdom as a spatial and
temporal “landscape of resistance” (4) and this construct is a helpful lens through which to view
the disparate movements: as a collection comprising a whole, a panoramic view rather than discrete
vistas. That landscape has altered under its own weight during the last 50 years. It has seen a

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marked shift in the nature of environmental movements, their pathways, and networks of
relationality as well as in the actors that make up these networks.
As social movements shifted from a focus on parliamentary processes and lawmaking, in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, several nascent but growing international environmental NGOs set
up branches in the UK, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. This introduction marked
a period of increasing professionalization within environmental organizing and campaigning, and
efforts typically targeted national policy but worked collaboratively with some grassroots
resistances on local issues (Doherty, Seel et al. 2000: 4). In the 1990s, tactics increasingly relied
on direct action – acts of typically illegal civil disobedience – and successes were mixed, although
there were triumphs. A concerted resistance to the national government’s roads expansion scheme
in that decade, for example, did not stop the plan outright, but it was scaled back in response to
pockets of local backlash partnered with these large umbrella ENGOs (McNeish 2000). So, by the
end of the century, the socio-political processes of the environmental movement in the UK began
to give way to a distinct radicalization.
This turn to radical direct action (usually when all else failed) was accompanied by a
concurrent shift in the politics of environmentalism on the government side in a sort of dialectic
exchange. During the same period in the 1990s when the discourse surrounding environmental
problems changed within politics, from simply stump speech rhetoric employed by politicians to
get elected to transforming into actual policy (especially at the local level), power was slowly
stripped from grassroots environmental campaigns and campaigners (Béal 2012). A relational
linkage then begins to appear in the period leading to the beginning of the new century. As
discourse and transformations among nongovernment actors and groups concerned with
environmentalisms shifted from participation in lawmaking midcentury to the formations of

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ENGOs and myriad coalitions and direct action, government actors internalized these discourses
and transformed them into policies, the process of which served to further remove the voices and
influence of various campaigners from the policy development and lawmaking process. While it
is possible to interpret this internalization as the positive inclusion of campaigners’ voices and
influence in mainstream policy, which in itself would be a goal of campaigners, Béal tracked a
different phenomenon in his case studies. Rather than grassroots organizations being incorporated
into this transformation, the turn was to professionalization, wherein urban coalitions replaced
NGOs and grassroots environmental groups with consultants and businesses.
There is a third thread in this time frame which is salient to my case study. As these “new
social movements” (NSMs) of the latter 1900s shifted away from national collective effort, the
emphasis shifted in a “quest for autonomy” to the “role of independent and small groups and the
importance of local activities, and they promote grassroots politics” (Rucht 1990: 158). Also of
note is that while participation by NSMs in the parliamentary process decreased through the later
20th
century, the utilization of court action increased, a tactic which STEIN has employed several
times (Doherty, Seel et al. 2000). Therefore while coordinated direct action often organized and
facilitated by large ENGOs proliferated on the national level, so too did the pastiche of hyperlocal
grassroots activisms. The STEIN coalition manifested in the wake of these trends.
2.2 WASTE COLLECTION AS ENVIRONMENTAL IMPERATIVE
As I touched on in the introduction, the question of what to do with exponentially increasing
volumes of rubbish in London has been on socio-political as well as capitalistic agendas for
centuries. In the past 200 years, various authorities have supported centralization of waste handling
systems which the scores of boroughs that constitute the city historically handled individually

21
through private entities with varying degrees of success. These sanitation advocates in the mid-
1800s endorsed a number of pathways including but not limited to shipping all collected waste
into the countryside via the city’s canals, or by barge to dumping grounds at the Thames estuary,
moving it by cart to the outskirts of the metropolis and selling it profitably as fertilizer, and enticing
(some suggested forcing) sizeable portions of the lower-class population to relocate to smaller
rural towns to cut the problem off at the head (Luckin and Thorsheim 2020). The codification of
sanitation policies in this period took the form of the Public Health Act 1875 which, as Timothy
Cooper writes, meant local government structures:
“… pursued policies that resulted in the progressive municipalization of
responsibility for refuse collection services that had previously been provided by
private contractors. In turn, these processes led to the development of a specialist
field of knowledge embodied in an emerging cadre of public health professionals
…” (2010: 2)
Setting aside for the moment new categories of socio-political identity springing from
rubbish, in the latter part of the 19th
century, incineration technology enabled vast amounts of
rubbish to be processed. These incinerators, known as “dust-destructors” (Gordon 1889: 677)
substituted one public health and environmental problem for another. They were coal-fired, which
contributed mightily to London’s notorious air pollution. Chimneys were short so there was no
chance of smoke and its contaminants being carried over the city and out to the countryside.
Atmospherically, the prevailing westerly winds that sweep London did the east side of the city no
favors, as air pollution has historically been carried to that side of the metropolis on those great

22
jets of air. One of my participants, an elder who was raised in Edmonton in the 1940s, and later
worked at the current Edmonton incinerator, remembered that with the older generation of
incinerators “you couldn’t hang your clothes out on the line. They’d be black.” The chimneys to
these facilities were astoundingly short, he said, about the same as a five storey building. The stack
at Edmonton today measures 328 feet.
Possibly in part because the problem of increased air pollution did not offset nor remedy
the problem of solid waste disposal, from the 1920s through the 1960s, Britain largely turned to
controlled tipping at prescribed dump sites and landfills, though incineration never completely
went away (Cooper 2010).
In the early 1960s, a Royal Commission on Local Government report recommended that
Greater London look at ways of better handling waste. The result was that in 1965 the Greater
London Council became the responsible authority for waste management, whereas handling
rubbish had been spread between 90 local authorities prior. The GLC inherited a mess, pun
intended, and was immediately confronted with how to process enormous tonnages of waste
“through obsolescent refuse incinerators, inadequate road or barge handling stations and railway
transfer depots. Urgent action was necessary if a major break-down was to be averted” (Dainty
1972: 1).
2.3 THE HISTORICISED POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF ENFIELD AND EDMONTON
One does not need to speak with many people inside or outside the resistance to the Edmonton
expansion before it becomes clear that there is no environmental narrative, indeed no
environmental subject/actor, no environmentalism without historical narrative. They are
concomitant, infusing, informing, and feeding off one another. Campaigners often center their

23
conversations on the chronology of the incinerator, speaking of the current facility’s age and its
beginning in the 1970s. Residents of Edmonton, some who have lived in the area their entire lives,
speak of it in terms of personal chronology and historical memory.
As I will detail later, there is an insider/outsider theme that laces the speech of both
residents of Edmonton (whether or not involved with the resistance) and activists who live outside
it. I argue that this discourse is rooted in historical social identities of Edmonton and Enfield – the
town as well as the borough – in which Edmonton is now situated. This insider/outsider dynamic
has at least some historical-political roots in the fact that for most of their existence as legal, social,
and political entities, Edmonton and Enfield had nothing whatsoever to do with one another until
relatively recently. Their relationship is the product of the iterative nature of local governance
structures which have defined London for hundreds of years.
As discrete localities, both Edmonton and Enfield Town can trace their beginnings to the
Roman period and there is evidence of brickmaking and tile manufacture from this time (Council
2017). William the Conqueror gave the manor encompassing Edmonton and Enfield to Geoffrey
de Mandeville sometime around 1086 and by the 15th
century they were both large parishes,
Enfield north of Edmonton, both bordering the River Lea on their eastern sides. But as the villages
of Enfield and Edmonton developed, it was Edmonton, which lay closer to the river, that developed
industry at a faster pace. Maltmen and tanners occupied both parishes by at least the mid-1400s,
but the village of Edmonton, on the main road from London to Ware, had the infrastructural
advantage. Tanners and millers used the river to ship their goods and raw materials to and from
the city for centuries and growth of the population was led by craftspeople and labourers (Baggs,
Bolton et al. 1976). In perhaps historical echoes of the complaints of “stomach-churning” stench
I heard from Edmonton residents who live near the incinerator, tanning was described as “a

24
nauseous and dirty business in all its branches” (Burnby 1988: 23). So the odoriferous stink of
byproducts of industry and growth have floated over this part of the city for a very long time,
indeed. All of this techno-social development meant that by the late 19th
century when rail
connected Edmonton to London, its working-class identity was well established. In contrast, while
agriculture certainly had its place in both parishes, agricultural land still comprised two-thirds of
Enfield parish as late as 1911 (Baggs, Bolton et al. 1976).
With fast population growth, however, came the attendant problems of rapid urbanization.
In an effort to combat overcrowding in slums that sprang up, the local Edmonton council invested
in new estates such as Hyde Estate post WWI. It did not work out quite as planned. Before long,
the first clause of the rental agreement was being repeatedly violated: as an adaptation to poverty,
renters on the estate were taking in lodgers (Pam 1999). Density and overcrowding in Edmonton
were here to stay and are still complaints issued today.
It was not until 1965 that the London Borough of Enfield as it is now known was formed
of the former Municipal Boroughs of Southgate, Enfield, and Edmonton (Great Britain 1963).
This outline I hope goes some way in illustrating the notion that the in-group/out-group
rhetoric and identification I have observed with my participants has historical social origins which
reverberate today. These reverberations are reflected by the language, both verbal and physical, of
Edmonton residents I spoke with who are critical of the fact that many of the core group of
campaigners live in boroughs other than Enfield. Edmonton retained its working-class identity
even as it was folded into leafier, greener, middle-class Enfield. These distinctions are still a point
of narrative, as evidenced by conversations with my participants, but today, Edmonton also has
modern ethnic, immigrant and first-generation identities grafted on to the ancient
labourer/craftsmen identifications. As historically the East End of London has long been the point

25
of arrival and dispersal of wave after wave of in-migration – Huguenots in the 16th
century, Jewish
refugees in the 19th
and early 20th
centuries, and Bangladeshi immigrants in the 1970s (Kershen
1997) – so contemporary waves of immigrants still settle in Edmonton and various eastside
communities, a continuation of the long history of an expanding human mosaic. These identities
further inform the results I will discuss later in the case study of the Edmonton incinerator.
2.4 THE EDMONTON ECOPARK
Once the GLC became responsible for waste management in the mid-1960s, it began feasibility
studies for the siting and development of technologically up-to-date incinerators. The “very poor
disposal arrangements which had been inherited in North London indicated that this was the area
which would offer the greatest potential benefit in site location” (Dainty 1972: 1), and as the
Department of Public Health Engineering already had a sewage treatment plant in Edmonton and
would be responsible for the new incinerator, it was chosen as the most suitable site for the new
“Edmonton Refuse Incineration Plant” (ibid.). (At least two of my participants stressed the
perceived greenwashing behind the name change of the complex to the Edmonton EcoPark).
In 1971, two of the five furnaces of the then state-of-the-art facility fired up alongside the
River Lea – total cost approximately £10 million (ibid.). The remaining three were still under
construction. Now it burns about 500,000 tonnes of household rubbish per year from seven
boroughs of North London. Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Hackney, Haringey, Islington, and Waltham
Forest contract with the NLWA for municipal waste and recycling services. The NLWA itself is
the result of the iterative nature of governance structures I have highlighted and a trend toward
fragmented, devolved governance in the Greater London area, resulting from the Local
Government Act 1985 which dissolved the Greater London Council (Great Britain Laws 1985).

26
The NLWA has been for some years highlighting the anticipated end of the incinerator’s
operational life slated for “around 2025” (Authority 2015: 4). In 2014 and 2015 it held two public
consultation periods to gather input about a proposed rebuild from stakeholders including
residents, local councils, and businesses. By then, the project was known as the North London
Heat and Power Project (NLHPP), and the incinerator itself was known as an energy recovery
facility. Gone was any use of the word incinerator from the Consultation Booklet handed out
during phase two in 2015. Instead the incinerator was referred to only as “the existing plant” or
“energy from waste” facility (ibid.). The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change gave
the project the green light in 2017. Its capacity will be increased from 500,000 tonnes of waste
processed annually to 700,000 tonnes.
The STEIN coalition’s arguments against waste incineration range from public health
concerns to evidence that the practice disincentivizes recycling thereby hindering the development
of the circular economy. Evidence of health problems can be contradictory and inconclusive.
Smoke stack emissions include particulate matter, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, heavy metals,
nitrogen oxides, dioxins, and furans in various combinations depending on what is burned.
One Imperial College/Public Health England (Parkes, Hansell et al. 2020) study, for
example, found no increased risk of infant mortality directly related to incinerators when looking
at particulate matter from various UK sites. However, the research did find a slight increase in two
forms of birth defects in children who live within 10 km of an incinerator, though it could not
conclusively link these defects to incineration facilities. But a report commissioned by the Greater
London Authority attributed 15 deaths per year in the city directly to pollution from incineration
(Marner, Richardson et al. 2020). And one study from the Netherlands found elevated levels of

27
dioxin – a highly toxic, carcinogenic chemical found in incineration emissions – in grass and
backyard chickens’ eggs from homes around one facility (Arkenbout and Esbensen 2017).
The Edmonton EcoPark, originally named the Edmonton Refuse Incinerator Plant.
View from the River Lea navigation channel.

28
Chapter 3
Methodology
Methods chosen in the design of this research were unavoidably dictated by the presence of Covid-
19 in London and the attendant protocols at the national level as well as University College London
ethics requirements. I began preparation for the recruitment of participants with the understanding
that in-person work was strictly prohibited, and all interaction had to take place online or by phone.
This restricted interaction precluded some of the methods I initially envisioned utilizing, such as
in-depth Q methodology (Stenner 2020) which lent itself strongly to in-person exchange, or
participant observation in all except online meetings convened by my participants. In addition to
forbidding face to face interaction, this proscription necessarily also limited, to a degree, the kind
of participants I would have been able to reach. I had already begun outreach to key informants in
the leadership of the campaign coalition when I received approval to conduct in-person research
on 26 May 2021. In this chapter, I identify and justify the research methods I chose and discuss
how shifting to face to face research somewhat altered those methods. I will also reflect on ethics,
positionality, and unexpected challenges that arose as a result of being allowed to expand my
research to in-person work in Edmonton.
3.1 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
To state it crudely, the overarching question I had when I began to work on Political Ecology and
Power Generation was: Where is everyone else? I attended online meetings and webinars during
the reporting phase of the UCL magazine article and kept seeing the same predominant ethnic

29
makeup: white, middle age to elderly, almost always from the United Kingdom. Out of this
observation several more nuanced questions emerged.
1. What are the mechanisms that prevent or facilitate Black and minority ethnic residents
becoming involved in the campaign?
2. What are the fault lines, perceptual and techno-social, created within this space of
resistance for the actor/subjects involved?
3. What identities are formed or reinforced within this network of activism?
Although I have situated the resistance to the expansion of the Edmonton incinerator in
Robbins and Béal, I look at these questions also through the lens of Latour’s actor network theory.
From virtually any point of view, the resistance is a network of smaller networks whose
compositions shift and morph, and must be, at least in part, examined as what Latour calls an
assemblage (2005).
3.2 PARTICIPANTS AND SAMPLING
I took a purposive, non-probability, snowball sampling approach, reliant on network referrals and
associations. With the core activists in the formal campaign, I very much relied on introductions
from initial participants to other contacts, which were given unsolicited in all instances. To reach
residents who live near the incinerator and who were not involved in the campaign, I began by
compiling a list of 14 faith-based organisations within a 4km radius of the site and sent cold emails
to each.

30
Within the composition of the formalized resistance to the incinerator’s expansion, the
majority of the human actors are white, middle-class residents who, while living in the boroughs
of Enfield and Waltham Forest (directly downwind of the incinerator, given prevailing wind
direction) do not necessarily live close to the incinerator, relative to my other participants. They
typically have a high level of education and white-collar jobs or are retired. Two acknowledged
leaders of the campaign are environmental professionals, one an engineer and the other a
professional environmental campaigner. Only one is a person of colour who identifies as Black
British. Out of the 14 organisations to which I reached out, only one – a Christian church in
Edmonton – answered and invited me to come speak with its members. Six people from the
congregation spoke with me, three of whom identified as Black with two of those further self-
identifying as immigrant.
I contacted seven non-religious community organisations and from that effort, spoke with
four more community members, two of whom identified as Black, one as Eastern European, and
one as white British. These community groups were invaluable gatekeepers to the people who are
most directly affected by some of the health hazards presented by the incinerator and who were
not involved in the campaign. In total, I contacted 32 groups or organisations, including the
campaign groups, civic groups not involved in the campaign, and religious organisations. I
conducted 20 interviews.
I interviewed three informants more than once. I had spoken to them over the winter as
sources for the magazine article, and had made it clear at that point that if my dissertation was
approved, I would be revisiting them to speak about the issues relevant to my research which were
not the same as the issues we discussed for the article. I did not contact them again about the project
until I had been granted ethics approval.

31
Table 3.1: Interview details – self-identifications and main themes
Participants Date
interviewed
Face to
face/
online
Approximate
age range
Gender Ethnicity Occupation Themes/subjects
A 9/6/21 Online 30s F white
British
and Arab
Postgraduate
student
Diversity,
understandings,
deprivation/class
B 9/6/21 Online 60s M white
British
Retired Connections,
opportunities,
diversity
C 13/6/21 F2F 40s M white
British
Non-
environmental
NGO
Deprivation/class,
emotional
connections,
immigration
D 13/6/21 F2F 30s M white
British
Communication
barriers, language
E 13/6/21 F2F 40s F Afro-
Cuban
Attorney Diversity,
exclusion, denial
of agency
F 13/6/21 F2F 30s F white
British
Communication,
environment
G 13/6/21 F2F 50s F Black
African
Exclusion,
communication
H 13/6/21 F2F 50s M Black
African
Accountant Environment,
emotional
connection, class
I 23/6/21 Online Teens F Turkish
and
Kabardian
Student Immigration,
class, deprivation,
environmental

32
justice, diversity,
understandings
J 6/7/21 Phone 70s F Black
Caribbean
Retired Class, diversity,
exclusion,
communication,
environmental
justice
K 5/521 Online 60s M white
American
Educator Diversity,
connections,
environmental
justice,
understandings
L 6/5/21 Online 40s F white
American
Editor Communication,
environment,
climate change,
understandings
M 6/5/21 Online 30s M White
European
Software
engineer
Diversity,
representation,
environmental
racism, exclusion
N 11/6/21 F2F 40s F Black
British
Logistics
manager
Diversity,
exclusion,
environmental
racism, climate
justice
O 7/5/21 Online 40s F white
British
Environmental
campaigner
Communication,
climate change,
environmental
justice, politics
P 16/7/21 Online 50s F Turkish
Cypriot
Councillor Environmental
justice, politics,

33
diversity,
class/deprivation,
exclusion,
immigration
Q 21/6/21 Phone 60s F Black
Caribbean
Retired Politics,
exclusion,
communication,
connections,
environmental
justice
R 15/7/21 F2F 80s M white
British
Retired Communication,
deprivation,
diversity,
understandings
S 8/5/21 Online 30s F white
British
Postgraduate
student
Diversity,
exclusion,
environment
T 9/5/21 Online 40s F white
British
Environmental
engineer
Climate change,
environmental
justice,
communication,
politics
3.3 INTERVIEWS
Interviews were semi-structured, which gave participants ample opportunity to expand on points
they felt were salient and we had rich and varied conversations. An interview typically began with
the participant’s memory of how they first heard about the incinerator if they had, and how either
they became involved in the campaign if they were, or whether they had heard of the resistance if
they were not involved. It is interesting to note that some of my interviewees were experienced

34
with media and interview-savvy while others had never spoken with media or researchers.
Questions revolved around the individual’s life and experiences in the location in which they live
(though they stopped short of eliciting full life histories) as well as their knowledge of both the
incinerator and the existence of a campaign to stop its expansion.
I also had several short, informal conversations with people in some of the digital sites into
which I was invited with people who voluntarily shared information about their experiences after
I had been announced by key informants and introduced. These helped to add nuance and context
to the overall narrative.
3.4 POSITIONALITY
Given that my research involved exploring issues of ethnic division, inclusion, and racial justice
within an environmental movement, my position within the research was, unsurprisingly, at the
forefront of my mind through each stage of this work. I am aware that my identities as a white,
English-speaking, cis-gender, educated, middle-class, mature woman inevitably colour my
interpretation, analysis, and communication of my experiences with these communities. It was
clear from the first online zero waste meeting I attended, indeed the first interview I conducted for
the magazine article as a writer, that I look, speak, and present as similar to the principal
campaigners. Although I also identify as an immigrant to the UK, that in no way put me on equal
terms with the people I spoke to who also identified as immigrants in terms of age, lived
experience, or socio-economic status.
My privilege as a white person is partly responsible for my gaining entry to these spaces
and people in the first place. As Laura Pulido succinctly noted, “Because whiteness is rarely
problematized by whites, white privilege is scarcely acknowledged” (Pulido 2000: 13). In this case

35
she meant within environmental campaign groups, but crucially, the problem also exists among
the throngs of social scientists that study environmental issues and assemblages. I have tried to
acknowledge my privilege stage by stage throughout this process.
Moreover, I acknowledge that I entered these physical and digital realms reflexively as an
outsider, no matter my identities, asking for help and information. This highlights the historical
conflict in anthropology over extractive practices and the uneven relational dynamics between
researcher and participants (Sundberg 2015). In large part because I could not live alongside any
of my participants, the dynamic between us was most often a typically binary
interviewer/interviewee relationship. I asked questions; they provided answers. I rarely could
contribute much, in the moment, by way of co-production of knowledge or co-development,
although as a superficial offering, I did give photos of the incinerator that I took to one of the
campaigners to use in campaign materials. Another invited me to present my findings in September
at an environmental awareness festival, and I accepted the invitation.
Because of my previous professional training, in which disinterest in the subject matter is
held as an ideal, it was difficult for me to answer the recurring question I got from my participants:
Did I have a stance on the expansion of the incinerator? Deeper than that question, however, was
the question I had for myself: Did I have an opinion on the fact that the campaigners in no way
reflected the ethnic and socio-economic composition of the people who lived closest to the
incinerator and were often those most affected by it? I have continually examined my ability to
treat the campaigners in a fair light. I keep hearing one key informant, a person of colour, in my
head admonishing, “don’t pull punches” in the writing of my findings.

36
3.5 PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION
Once I received my ethics approval in May, and because of Covid restrictions, I began attending
online meetings and webinars organized by the campaign leaders. In the eight-week period of
fieldwork, I attended four educational webinars about the topic of incineration broadly, the
Edmonton incinerator specifically, and waste streams and recycling. I was invited to one online
local union meeting wherein the members voted to adopt a resolution against the expansion of
Edmonton, and I attended (virtually) an NLWA general meeting wherein many of my participants
gave deputations (the word used among themselves to describe self-generated public statements).
Because the digital sites within the resistance are deeply layered, I also gained invitations to join
WhatsApp and Facebook groups. The STEIN WhatsApp group is where the majority of the actual
campaign strategizing and organizing takes place. In each instance, except the Waste Authority
meeting, where I was not able to do so, I was introduced, or introduced myself and got verbal
confirmation from meeting members that I had permission to take part.
I considered moving to Edmonton from the west side of London for the summer, however
I decided against it since aside from observing the neighborhoods near the incinerator daily, it
would not have given me more access to my participants in any meaningful way. Because nearly
every gathering was still online, it made little difference where I was located. Once UCL gave
permission to conduct face to face research, the ability to attend church services, speak informally
to residents in parks, and help leaflet Edmonton neighborhoods offered the chance to conduct true
participant observation, though admittedly in short bursts.

37
3.6 ETHICS
Relative to some environmental research that deals directly with groups who may be targeted by
authority for their involvement in resistance movements, such as David Graeber’s (2009) work
with the Occupy movement, or Nicola Saville’s (2020) dissertation research with XR activists, my
target groups and individuals comprised a low-risk category of campaigner and activist. The
leadership in STEIN had public-facing personas and several have given on-the-record interviews
to high-profile UK news media. The gatekeepers, those in positions of leadership within STEIN,
were happy to speak without the guarantee of anonymity though I have, as a matter of best practice,
chosen to keep their identities anonymous in this writing specifically because of the discussion of
race and ethnic identity. Although there are people within the STEIN coalition who do identify as
members of XR, including some of the principal organizers, they are not engaged in illegal or gray-
area direct action practices. The campaigners instead take the opposite approach, utilizing and
exploiting in their resistance the existing legal and political systems, of which they are quite savvy.
Their sites of resistance included council and Waste Authority meetings, and courtrooms, all
virtual due to the pandemic. As one campaigner said, “I can’t go out and get arrested on the
weekend. I’ll lose my visa and get deported.” Among the residents I interviewed who were not
involved directly with the resistance campaign no one self-identified as anything that would place
them in a high-risk category for the purposes of protection or heightened ethical consideration
unless “chartered accountant” has coded meaning of which I am unaware.
All that said, however, because I asked participants questions related specifically to
ethnicity and identity, we invariably had frank discussions about divisions and conflicts, racial and
otherwise, inside the resistance not only between various authorities and the campaigners, but also
those as perceived from the outside of these groups by residents who were not involved in either.

38
Therefore, in designing my research, I decided to anonymize everyone’s identity, although I will
be stating self-identifiers where appropriate, such as gender, approximate age, and ethnicity.
3.7 CONSENT AND DATA COLLECTION
My youngest participant was 18 and my oldest was 87. Everyone involved was informed of the
process both as we engaged in interviews, as well as before and after. I stressed that participants
were in no way obligated to speak to me and that, per the consent form, each was entitled to
withdraw what they shared with me until 1 August 2021. No one withdrew their consent or
information by the stated deadline. I employed consent forms, though because many of my
interviews were conducted online and the consent form was either emailed or sent through Teams
or WhatsApp attachments, many people simply typed their names in the signature field of the
document rather than inserting a handwritten signature. Where I dealt with gatekeepers, such as at
a church service where the pastor introduced me to multiple people and where I spoke to half a
dozen individuals, they also helped me by introducing me, explaining what I was doing, and
reiterating consent, non-obligation, and anonymity.
Interviews and notes were transcribed, and files were immediately moved to an external
hard drive kept in a secure location separate from my computer. Identifying details have been
expunged and voice recordings were deleted after transcription.
Interlude
The pastor was welcoming. When I started the sampling design, I called and emailed a
dozen faith-based groups within 4 km of the incinerator. One responded. The young leader was
enthusiastic and helpful. He invited me to Sunday service so I could chat to as many people as
wanted to chat with me over coffee in the courtyard between meetings, all under strict Covid

39
protocols. He introduced me to the congregation casually before and formally during the service.
Actually during the service. From the pulpit.
“We care about our environment in our community, don’t we?” he asked his flock.
We both made it clear, and he reiterated it from his literal and figurative position of
authority, that no one was under any obligation to speak to me, but he encouraged everyone to
welcome me and talk with me if they chose. I spoke with six people that day. As I stood sipping
coffee outside in the sunshine, listening to the energetic warbling of hymns, I took in the small
crowd. The pastor had told me it was an ethnically diverse group, and he wasn’t exaggerating. The
group gathered that morning on the south edge of Edmonton was about half Black and half white,
with three people who only spoke Turkish. They later listened to the service through headphones
while one man translated live from the back of the room. The sermon that day was on the theme
of love in all its divine aspects and shades.
Within pretty short order, the pastor’s interpretation of romantic love became clear: same
sex marriage did not fall within the Bible’s moral strictures on marriage and love. So, it followed,
that his parishioners should not support any other Christian authority if it said otherwise.
3.8 CHALLENGES
One of my identities is that of staunch ally of the LGBT+ world. In the realm of reflexivity and
relationality to my participants, I readily admit that it was difficult to sit through the pastor’s
sermon. It was the biggest challenge I faced in the course of my fieldwork, frankly. I sat and
weighed the benefit of access to so many community members against the anger and indignity I
felt listening to their pastor who had truly gone out of his way to invite me and welcome me. The
answer of course, is that I checked my own emotions and reminded myself why I had come, that

40
these people were people, that they were kind and curious and eager to talk about something in
their community that they very much cared about.
The more mundane challenges included the multi-sited aspect of the research and the
fragmentation that I sensed/felt in several ways. I found commuting to a field site
discombobulating which was precisely why I considered moving to Edmonton for the summer.
The act of taking a train over, taking photographs, speaking informally to people in parks, walking
the streets throughout the area around the incinerator helped situate myself, obviously physically,
but also mentally within the ideas and narratives that my participants shared with me. Getting back
on a train, removing myself, and heading home to my personal space across town felt like I was
shortchanging the process somehow. It made the action of fieldwork ephemeral in a way that felt
as if it were diet fieldwork, lacking legitimacy.
The next challenge revolved around the multilayered digital spaces that were the extension
of these sites – on any given day I would join a participant online using Microsoft Teams for an
interview or conduct one in person then continue conversations via email, WhatsApp, Facebook
messenger, or any combination of all of them.
The disjointed, patchwork process, while ultimately adequate, also highlighted the techno-
social aspect of relationality and the mechanisms by which people are either included in the
resistance to the incinerator or excluded by default because of the pathways of communication and
access to technology. I elaborate on these mechanisms and pathways in the following chapter.

41
From Edmonton Green, the 328-foot chimney of the Edmonton incinerator dominates the local skyline to
the east. Many residents have no idea it is a waste disposal facility.

42
Chapter 4
They Don’t Listen: The Political Ecology of Waste Incineration
Interlude
“Oh, is that what they’re doing there?”
It was an unseasonably hot June day in Edmonton Green, and I was standing near a
playground in a small park with a few residents who lived in the modest houses ringing the
unshaded patch of grass. The young woman with the dog stared at the smoke stack of the Edmonton
incinerator in the distance, a dominant, ever-present, but often mysterious fixture of the skyline to
the southeast. She had always seen it, she said, but never knew what it was.
Her companions resting on a bench beside us, a married retired couple and longtime
residents, nodded knowingly. They knew what it was and had been to meetings about it, the
consultations that the NLWA held in 2014 and 2015 to ask for public input. Waste management is
a hyperlocal issue for them. The gentleman pointed out how the council had been removing rubbish
bins from the area for some time, and how the authority didn’t come clean the park regularly. His
wife was unhappy with the fact that household rubbish wasn’t collected as often anymore, either.
On top of losing services, they had to contend with millions of people’s waste being brought to
their neighborhood to the incinerator.
“It’s fine when you don’t live here,” she said. He added, “because this is a poor area, they
send all the rubbish here.”
~

43
4.1 MECHANISMS OF EXCLUSION
In chapter one I summarized the fractal nature of diminishing political power as it related to
Vincent Béal’s theory of roll-back environmentalism. His argument that the “elite consensus”
developed around the narrative of urban sustainability has “marginalized grassroots actors and
groups” is particularly salient to the Edmonton case (2012: 406). Many of my participants spoke
of the “political elite” of Enfield and the NLWA board members and their “privileged middle-
class position” of power. Rucht further contributes to this argument in an important way. In
addition to urbanization and industrialization that Béal highlights as elements leading to the
formation of an elite consensus that consciously strips power from grassroots organisations and
citizens, Rucht (1990) highlights “the expansion of capitalism” as actively decreasing “the
significance of communal-based groups” (158). It is worth noting that many of the core group of
campaigners and some of the residents who were not involved stressed incineration as a profit-
making enterprise and business model as a major reason for its proliferation throughout the UK as
well as the expansion of Edmonton specifically. The political economy of the project therefore
turns the incinerator itself, following Robbins’ (2020) theory of political objects and actors, into a
politicised non-human actor, without which the pastiche of human actors, institutions and
geographies would have no reason to exist.
Continuing with theme of diminished political power, the most common thread of
discourse that my participants expressed when talking about the incinerator revealed the perception
that each set of actors has increasingly curtailed power – campaigners feel they are being
marginalized and ignored by power-laden regimes within the various authorities, not only the
NLWA but also the borough councils and council members who comprise the NLWA board. In
turn residents I spoke to who are not directly involved with STEIN (and some who are), but clearly

44
know about the campaign feel they are ignored and marginalized by both the governing entities
and the campaigners, with some exceptions. In an inverse, but perhaps not surprising relationality,
the closer to the incinerator that people live and work, the less power they feel they have to fight
its expansion or opportunity to be included in the fight. Although Gibson-Wood and Wakefield
(2013: 654) were writing about the Hispanic community in Toronto, they neatly summarize the
predominant political ecology problem in the resistance to the incinerator when they ask, “whose
participation and perspectives are given weight, and what kind of experiences and knowledge
about the environment are recognized (or not) in environmental discussion and decision-making?”
Nearly every one of my participants, regardless of identity or positionality within the network of
actors voiced the same opinion, no matter the other party about which they were speaking: “They
don’t listen.”
This most basic of human skills, or lack of it, was one of the most oft-cited mechanisms of
exclusion, to borrow from Gibson-Wood and Wakefield, to full participation by people of colour
who did know about the resistance coalition, as well as full representation by campaigners seeking
to pressure politicians to affect policy.
As to having the opportunity to join the coalition fighting Edmonton, collectively, my
participants (and I stress here that these responses come from those who are highly involved as
well as those who are not at all) identified the following as perceived mechanisms of exclusion:
homogeneity of campaign leadership, discomfort in white spaces for people of colour and feeling
unwelcome in these spaces (digital and physical), language and cultural barriers, transience and
attendant lack of emotional connection to a neighborhood, exclusion from discourse, lack of time
and capacity to do independent research on the issue (related to discursive exclusion), low levels
of education, class, immigrant status and lack of integration, lack of access to technology, public

45
trust in government narratives as reliable, and overly complicated informational messaging and
communication from campaigners. This last point mirrors a broader problem found in many
environmental movements: a “lack of attention to differences in income and education implicit in
ways” that organisations “communicate information” (Gibson-Wood and Wakefield 2013: 652).
These mechanisms can be classed broadly into three categories: comprehended whiteness
of the movement, economic disadvantage, and social status. To begin with the first category,
several participants told me the lack of diversity within the STEIN coalition was at least partly
attributable to the whiteness and privilege of the majority of those who identify as activists. One
key participant told me:
“White people need to check their privilege and listen. They don’t listen … The climate
justice movement needs to amplify Black voices and listen to what we have to say and
make an effort to include us and our issues. For my own capacity I have to measure the
amount of time I give to these predominantly middle-class white groups because I
constantly have to remind them to raise the issue of environmental and institutional
racism and it can be quite draining always having to be the one telling people to check
their privilege … The [Edmonton] movement isn’t diverse because black people or
people of colour don’t feel comfortable in white spaces.”
Another activist, a white middle-class, highly formally educated person who is deeply
involved in the campaign centered the observation on the perceived leadership of the coalition:
“And I think most of those campaign groups, also in our London group is not very
diverse. Um, they’re the core campaign group … So, that’s the starting point. If

46
that’s the starting point and it’s not a diverse group, then it’s not inviting for others
to join [if] they’re outside of that group. They just don’t have the same connections
and also there’s this, there are a lot of perceptions, there can be perceptions already
of racism just because of that and like, why would I join a group if I’m not, if it
doesn’t seem like they’re interested in [re]presenting me?”
I spoke with others, of various ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds who mirrored the
opinions expressed here. Although one high-profile activist in the national anti-incineration
movement told me, based on his decades of experience, the STEIN coalition was one of the more
ethnically diverse groups he had ever seen, which had much to do with Black Lives Matter
Enfield’s involvement. There are also longstanding BAME community groups that predate BLME
such as Residents of Edmonton Angel Coming Together (REACT) and Enfield Racial Equality
Council (EREC), at least one of which has been signatory to the campaign’s various deputations
to the NLWA. I spoke with members of both of these groups, however, and the level of personal,
direct involvement is low compared with that of BLME and the core campaigners in the coalition.
While none of the people of colour who granted me an interview accused anyone in the coalition
of blatant racism, one did speak of unconscious bias both in the resistance movement and the
concerned government entities.
The above observations reinforce Pulido’s (2000) argument that environmental racism is
not a collection of individual malicious acts, but a structural formation. Further, the intersection of
environmental justice and white privilege is also a spatial formation. That may seem obvious on
the face it, but in consequence of Covid-19 forcing so much of our lives and activisms online since
March of 2020, these sites of spatial racism have necessarily expanded. With rare exception, the

47
online meetings I joined were predominantly attended by people who presented as white, typically
middle-class, middle-age and older, a majority of whom were female.
While it is a challenge, not to mention reductive, to definitively link the digital siting of
this activism to bias, it is perhaps easier to link it to the second category drawn from the
mechanisms of exclusion: economic disadvantage.
“I probably won’t need to remind you that Edmonton has three of the highest deprivated
areas, deprived areas in the country.” The councillor speaking to me on the other side of a Teams
screen had been in office on the Enfield Council for 20 years representing the poorest parts of the
borough – those surrounding the historical industrial neighborhood in which the incinerator is
situated. She has lived in the Edmonton for decades, identified as an immigrant, middle-class and
presented as white. The incinerator sits just off the A406 in the Edmonton Green Ward. The ward
is among the 20% most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK, and the population is nearly 60%
Black and minority ethnic (2019) (2021). The minority ethnic category includes a large population
of Turkish and Eastern European immigrants.
“And of course,” the councillor continued, “some of these families, the higher proportion
of these families are very low income … So we have an area with poor housing, highest
concentration of people living in a small, cramped area conditions, highest proportion of temporary
accommodation, lack of open space and gardens in particular.”
The economic and the technological are deeply inextricable here. She described the
disproportionate number of immigrants without access to computers or internet service and the
difficulty and investment of time it takes to get to a library or other space with access. She
concluded:

48
“So you have families who are so destitute, so desperate to get quality housing, to
work really hard, some of them working two jobs, three jobs to support their
families. And you have all the other key factors, critical factors that they have to
make a decision on. And actually, to be honest with you an invisible presence like
air pollution, you know, like an incinerator that might bring about some sort of
future illness to them or to others, unless inequalities are directly linked to their
individual health needs, such as respiratory problems, asthma … and there is a
degree of understanding and educational awareness of this, I don’t know that people
would want to campaign against this entity.”
The councillor’s statements were reiterated by one of my youngest participants, a first-
generation British citizen whose parents emigrated from Eastern Europe and who still identifies
ethnically with her parents’ heritage. She also identifies strongly as an environmental activist.
Being active with both the STEIN coalition and her ethnic community group, she spoke of how
difficult it is for immigrants in Britain to “make a life” for themselves and how their time is
monopolized by trying to make a living and raise a family so there is room for little else.
The economic and racial elemental barriers that act to exclude average residents of
Edmonton from even being aware of the campaign, let alone allowing them to make the
autonomous decision to be a part of it, coalesce to reiterate and reify the third category: social
status.
Obviously, this is not a discrete category from the previous two, but based on my
conversations with participants, perceptions of social status act to hamper outreach to these
underserved communities in some cases. As one white core campaigner who lives outside

49
Edmonton said, “I don’t count on local residents. They’re busy, they have lives.” But what was
ostensibly revealed through other conversations with campaigners who identify as people of colour
and do live in Edmonton is that, in their opinion, there was very little outreach to these “locals,”
so who could say whether they could be relied upon? If they were not given the opportunity to join
the resistance to the incinerator’s expansion, how could they exercise agency and make the
decision?
Taken as an assemblage, all of the mechanisms of exclusion under these three categories
coalesce, directly or indirectly, to amplify the unequal distribution of political-environmental
power between Edmonton residents and the coalition fighting the incinerator’s expansion.
However, this dynamic does not necessarily imply that the core group of white, middle-class
campaigners hold significant power, either.
Although their specialist knowledge (the core members of the resistance have professional
experience in environmental engineering and environmental campaigning) is of the utmost
necessity and importance to the campaign – indeed is the campaign’s foundation – their levels of
experience, education, political savvy, and privileged ethnic and socio-economic status do not
necessarily translate into increased political power. They have taken significant legal action against
the project, made scores of deputations at multiple NLWA meetings, communicate regularly with
their respective councillors (two of whom from each of the seven borough councils sit on the
NLWA board), and have enlisted, and gained in some cases, the support of MPs, and the Mayor
of London, Sadiq Khan. One key participant told me:
“I mean the coalition against now is actually quite mind-boggling. Like, most of
the local Labour Party including in Edmonton have passed motions against it. Um,

50
the Conservative Party in the local area have come out quite strongly against it as
well. So has the Green Party. So it has, like, cross-political, all the political parties
have come out against it. Including the political parties in power you know in the
local area.”
But for all this, campaigners told me that they are summarily ignored or dismissed by the
NLWA. At least two of the women involved spoke of sexist, misogynistic treatment by the chair
of the board of directors during deputations at public meetings. So apparent was this treatment at
NLWA general meetings last year, that during the most recent meeting in June, which I attended,
one of these campaigners began her deputation by complimenting the chair on his “good
behaviour” this time around. They have collectively invested hundreds of hours of work in the
STEIN campaign, raised tens of thousands of pounds to fund legal challenges, forced judicial
reviews of the expansion, and crafted alternative policy proposals and customized action plans for
their respective councils. Given that this activity is carried out around the full-time jobs and
familial obligations of these people, one may see why outreach to residents outside their in-group
is not necessarily a priority. It is a near-daily occurrence to see a flurry of strategizing and
coordinating activity in private social media channels going on well into the late hours of the night.
But there was a point, early in the formation of this resistance, where there may have been
more opportunity to include local residents. A key participant detailed how, when she found out
about the incinerator and its expansion, she approached local environmental groups to assess the
level of knowledge about the project and share information but admitted that she did no faith-based
outreach or outreach to Black or ethnic minority civic organisations in the area around the
incinerator.

51
My critique here is not intended to place blame for perceived failures of outreach on the
part of the actors in the STEIN coalition. I spent hours with them in meetings, and have been
included in their strategizing groups. They produce an impressive amount of work and are gaining
influence over certain political actors. Although as one person involved with the campaign told
me:
“… there’s a difference between influence and power. Influence I think we have an
increasing impact on. Power has to be found in very skillful ways really because
direct links to the power elite in Enfield who wants to make everyone believe that
anything of value comes from them is a very, very difficult thing to do.”
Rather, my examination is intended to highlight participant-originated suggestions to make
urban environmental movements more inclusive, therefore bigger. Because as the councillor from
Edmonton (who is not one of the two Enfield councillors who sit on the NLWA board of directors)
I spoke with explained, if one wants politicians to act, their seats have to be threatened. It is only
when they feel they may well be voted out at the next election, she said, that they respond to the
pressures brought by their constituents. And that kind of pressure can only really be brought to
bear with larger numbers of voters coalescing around a desired outcome. This is why presenting
local residents with the opportunity to at least learn about an environmental campaign, and
facilitate the chance for people to operate under their own agency, is increasingly crucial.
Otherwise, as one Edmonton resident, a Black woman who knew of the planned expansion told
me, politicians will continue to hold lip-service consultations such as those the NLWA held in
2014 and 2015 simply to “tick a box” then disregard community feedback.

52
Because as one key participant told me, reaching out to people who live in the shadow of
the incinerator directly has had quantifiable effects that have boosted the profile of the campaign.
Whereas some campaigners do not “count on local residents,” others found that if they invested in
a few hours of old-fashioned door-to-door campaigning in Edmonton, “people came out of their
houses to talk to us in the street” about the incinerator.
4.2 FAULT LINES
When the discursive nature of environmentalisms dominates an issue, it often reduces what are in
reality complex heterogenous actors and networks to oversimplistic impressions at best and
stereotypes at worst. As an author it is tempting to use this discursive shorthand to create neat,
discrete categories – campaigners, residents, activists, white, Black, immigrant, deprived, wealthy,
middle class, working class. Even the word incinerator creates a political category as a non-human
actor. And in truth, my participants used the word incinerator as shorthand to signify a variety of
political, environmental, and social meanings embedded within the term.
These categories of identity, though sometimes overlapping, also act as fault lines within
the assemblage of actor/subjects. At these fault lines tension builds and friction increases.
Importantly, these fault lines exist within the various groups involved in the resistance to the
incinerator as well as between identity groups. Although I am perhaps guilty of casting the core
group of campaigners as the only actors who are highly educated professionals, and it is factually
accurate to state that the majority of Edmonton’s population is Black or minority ethnic, this is, of
course to ignore the heterogeneity and nuance and multitude of identities within these categories.
It is the honestly articulated perception of many of my participants from all backgrounds that
residents of Edmonton’s wards do not have the time to devote to an environmental campaign to

53
the same degree as the core campaigners, that perhaps immigrants are not as emotionally attached
to the neighborhood, that they do not have the capacity to research incineration. And perhaps this
is reflected from within these groups as well. Two of the Black women I spoke to reinforced this
narrative as in-group members. They both believe that they are unique in their group for being
educated professionals.
One of them, a resident of the Edmonton Angel neighbourhood, who self-identified as a
retired Black British woman and a longtime home owner and is connected to one of the civic
organisations that is a signatory to the NLWA deputations told me:
“I am an anomaly to the powers that be when I speak up, and I say things that they
do not expect. Because I have to say that there’s this stereotype of people that live
in poor areas who happen to be ethnic. They think that we’re lacking in any
intellectual appreciation of things. Or we are too slow to comprehend what’s
happening around us. And because we don’t really, we’re, some of us are insular
and we don’t express ourselves, we are all grouped together. And I try to explain to
them that by judging everybody and putting them together, it’s a disservice. To
those that are not the way you expect. So when I speak up sometimes, they’re taken
aback because they don’t expect me to live in this environment. Which I also think
it’s insulting. Because they’ve already dumbed down the environment as, that’s
what ‘the people that live there deserve it.’”
The second woman knew of the proposed expansion of the incinerator but not the campaign
against it. She is also an Edmonton resident, self-identifies as Afro-Cuban and is an attorney.

54
Questions of education and capacity therefore are not at issue here. Although the techno-social
issues are. She said that she uses no social media, which she thinks explains why she had not heard
about STEIN. She also echoed the older woman. “I don’t fit into the stereotypes. I’m quiet,” she
said. “And when you’re quiet, your voice doesn’t get heard.” Besides, she said, when it comes to
local authorities making decisions writ large, “They don’t ask. They tell.”
These internal fault lines also manifest in perceptions of and between Edmonton-based
community groups. One participant, a longtime member of an established community advocacy
group since well before the incineration campaign came along questioned whether another local
group could be effective as part of the coalition because it was relatively new. In turn, a member
of that newer organisation said that the other was ineffective because it was too easily placated
when politicians made what turned out to be empty promises.
Widening the view of this frame, the fault lines extend to the geographic. As I suggested
in chapter two, the distinct experiential narratives of my participants have historicised roots in the
broader social identities of Edmonton and Enfield as economic and political entities. These fault
lines developed in part, I believe, because those involved heavily with STEIN do not, on the whole,
live in Edmonton. Some do, but generally, those who are acknowledged as leaders within the
organisation do not; a point which raised some eyebrows among residents I spoke with who live
quite close to the incinerator. For some, the word Enfield has come to signify the outside,
manifested in top-down local governance that ignores the voices of what was once an independent
political economy. Some members of REACT were mystified when two Enfield councillors wrote
a public letter concerning the incinerator some years ago (at least one of these councillors was in
favor of the project at the time but has since changed positions). As my participant, a middle-class
Black woman who lives in one of Edmonton’s wards told me, the letter “was published in the local

55
newspaper and when we saw the letter, we wrote to the two councillors questioning how they could
have decided on an issue that affected us most. And they had excluded us from the discourse.”
This sort of exclusion serves to reify the fault lines between and within the various actor
groups involved. Some who are dispossessed of agency through the exclusionary constructs
detailed here exhibit a learned helplessness, a resignation to there being little, if anything they can
do. Others choose to join the coalition and do what they can because it provides a sense of
autonomy and identity. The fault lines that crack the landscape of resistance surrounding the
incinerator remind us of the importance of Latour’s insight: “Relating to one group or another is
an on-going process made up of uncertain, fragile, controversial, and ever-shifting ties” (2005:
28).

56
Visualizing the narrative:
The following word cloud illustrations highlight the discourse of several research participants. A sample of
vocabulary taken from three participant interview transcripts underscores the self-identities,
epistemological structures and knowledges of three people engaged with local environmental issues in
different capacities.
Illustration 4.1: The cloud above was produced from the transcript of an interview with a core
campaigner and Enfield resident who identifies as white British.

57
Illustration 4.2: The cloud above was produced from the transcript of an interview with a core campaigner
and Edmonton resident who identifies as Black British.

58
Illustration 4.3: The cloud above was produced from the transcript of an interview with an Edmonton
resident who identifies as Black Caribbean and is involved with social issues but not actively involved
with STEIN.
4.3 “IT GIVES ME PURPOSE”: IDENTITIES
“So do I think we’re going to stop it? No. And partly this is why I’m kind of despondent about the
whole thing. Do I think we might end up with a smaller incinerator than is currently planned?
Yes.” The woman speaking to me on the other end of the phone was an acknowledged leader in

59
the campaign, although she prefers the term “coalition” to remove the implication that there is a
top-down structure and to emphasize the collaborative nature of the resistance.
Her sentiment was one I encountered again and again in my conversations with all of my
participants. There is an acknowledgement that all of the time and effort will not stop the expansion
of the Edmonton incinerator. As of this writing they are pushing for a “pause and review” of the
plans and capacity for the project. My next question, for everyone who is already involved in the
campaign, necessarily was: Why do it, then? One Enfield resident who identified as a white British
woman of half-Arab descent articulated the most common response from within the core groups
of campaigners:
“I fundamentally believe it’s a bad idea. From a climate change perspective.
And it’s not even necessarily the local impacts that motivate me. It’s the overall
climate change impact that is my key driver. It gives me purpose, I think. Um, and
makes me feel like I’m doing something useful or productive.”
She went on to tell me that she never considered herself an activist until she began learning
about and working on the campaign just a few years ago, but she certainly identifies as one now.
Her position as an activist, which most of the other core campaigners I spoke with shared,
illustrates the validity of Arun Agrawal’s (2005) idea of people as environmental subjects, or
“those for whom the environment constitutes a critical domain of thought and action” (16). This
notion supports Robbins’ (2020) thesis that people’s actions and ideas influence their identities
and taken together these constitute a complex web woven “with the necessities … of power” (207)

60
and that “new environmental actions, behaviors, or rules systems lead to new kinds of people”
(19).
But as I pointed out in the previous section, none of these actor groups are homogenous. I
spoke with another woman who is also heavily involved in the campaign who said “I don’t really
think of myself as an activist. I think of myself as, I’m doing advocacy work … I don’t see it as
activism. I see it as advocacy for things you know.” This negation of self-identity which others in
the campaign so readily assume is a reminder that the term “activist” is often used as a sort of
shorthand signifying homogeneity and can be wielded reductively, thereby acting to dispossess
individuals of agency. It is also a reminder that though there are real fault lines between the actors
residing in this particular landscape of resistance, there are also substantive connections. As one
elderly Black Caribbean resident of Edmonton and member of EREC said, “well, I don’t regard
myself as an activist in its true sense; but I do support social issues or environmental ones.”
4.4 CONNECTIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES
So far, perhaps, so obvious. Divisions in socio-economic status and ethnic identities create conflict
within social environmental movements. Not in and of itself an earth-shattering academic
revelation. To conclude this paper at this point, however, would be both trite and do the participants
involved in my research a great disservice. For all the emphasis in my conversations with people
and in this dissertation on felt and perceived differences, I must revisit Robbins’ (2020) assertion
that large-scale projects that are perceived by affected actors as environmentally harmful have the
ability to unite disparate groups and communities “across class, ethnicity, and gender” (19) that
otherwise would remain discrete. As he succinctly states, “such linkages also make communities

61
potentially powerful, since they have the potential of acting in concert” (208), thus transforming
themselves into a novel form of political action.
For all the fault lines with their attendant points of tension, wariness, and struggle, many
of those who spoke with me are hopeful. This includes people from across the spectrum of
involvement. Collectively, they offered actionable suggestions and ideas to help the STEIN
campaign become ever more inclusive and broader. Some of these suggestions have been instituted
by campaigners. Others may be relatively uncomplicated to implement. They included: reaching
out to faith-based groups and existing civic organizations, expanding leafleting and street outreach
efforts, including native language news media (the Londra Gazete, for example, to reach thousands
of Turkish speakers and readers), and networking with cafés throughout Edmonton which “work
as a conduit” and are sites where immigrant life and sociality are focused.
The point about native language news media is particularly fertile ground. The suggestion
was made by my youngest participant, the young woman whose parents are East European
immigrants. She told me that she has never seen anything in the Londra Gazete, whereas she has
seen coverage of the incinerator expansion in multiple national and local English language news
outlets. For those who work on the campaign, whose time is already constrained, including native
language news outlets on a press release email list may prove especially effective for reaching new
audiences.
The very nature of siting MWIs is in itself an opportunity that brings together diverse
groups, according to one of my participants who has worked on anti-incineration campaigns
nationally. Unlike rural environmental conservation movements, he said, which have in Britain
always been white middle- and upper-class movements, waste incinerators are typically sited in

62
underserved areas such as Edmonton, although those areas may have simply been historically
industrial in nature without heavy populations around them.
And a number of my participants stressed the need for campaigners not to dismiss locals
based on preconceived notions of who is suitable for inclusion. For his organization’s part, the
participant I just described told me:
“… we speak to people within the environmental, sort of veterans of the
environmental movement who have more experience of planning and all the rest of
it. And we say to them well look, here are members of the community who are
interested in environmental issues. Don’t alienate them, educate them. Work
together with them to help them appreciate the set of arguments that they might not
otherwise draw upon, whether it’s to do with climate change impacts for example,
or to do with um, issues of overcapacity and other things that help them to frame
their arguments in a way that fits into what would be considered to be material, as
in, relevant planning objection[s].”
The councillor I spoke with said, in her informed opinion, the key to successfully getting
the varied immigrant communities interested to the point of voting or signing a petition, for
example, is to link the issues of the incinerator to their everyday lives. In this case, that means their
health and immediate wellbeing.
The coordinator of an umbrella organisation involved with many different issues of
environmental significance throughout the Borough of Enfield said a structure to facilitate
cooperation already exists. Sometimes it is simply a matter of actively creating the linkages. “… I

63
mean what we then help to do,” he told me, “is show the power of those groups by showing they
can work together instead of having one group who’s doing one thing and another group is doing
another – can talk to each other and learn from each other about things they didn’t know was
happening before. And that is a very powerful thing.”
A fault line I did not detail above is that of age. My youth activist highlighted the fact that
connections and opportunities to unite people around climate-related issues are easier for her
generation because they have a longer stake in the future, to say nothing of more awareness of the
issues than previous generations. Crucially, for her generation often the issue of environmental
racism and environmental justice are part and parcel of the overall platform used to frame
environmental campaign arguments, not something that has to be added after an argument has been
made. Her commitment to her identity and work as an “intersectional climate justice activist” was
apparent and should give us all reason to be optimistic while still pragmatic about the scale of the
work to be done.

64
Chapter 5
Conclusions
Within the community of practice that is political ecology there are several helpful strands to tease
out that which enables us to identify how urban environmentalisms and activisms have shaped and
are continuing to shape metropolitan environmental subjects and actors. Although much of what
Paul Robbins focuses on addresses political ecology in rural contexts, it is as applicable in urban
and peri-urban situations. This is especially so in the context of Béal’s roll-back environmentalism
frame.
The divisions I encountered in Edmonton are situated in a historicised environmentalism
and deeply ingrained historical geographical identity. The various actors and networks form,
dissolve, and regroup within the context of environmental activism and this long political history.
Centuries of legislation and the emergence and dissolution of governance structures that control
how and where London’s waste is processed and disposed of, in addition to socio-economic
disparity, provides the foundation for clashes and connections between actor networks. Many of
the campaigners who spend the most time at work trying to have the NLHPP paused cast their
arguments solely in the Western scientific-based language of climate change and environmental
knowledge. Environmental justice campaigners within the group speak in the language of
environmental racism, unconscious bias, and white privilege.
However, there are commonalities and opportunities for connection and collective action.
Some of these opportunities have already been exploited. Perhaps more of them can be in future.
That the coalition is already as diverse as it is should be reason to pursue inclusion even further.
As this happens, more identities will be forged, and more political formations will take shape. I
found that residents who did not know about the campaign against the expansion would generally

Identities and Exclusion in Urban Environmentalism: The Edmonton Waste Incinerator Case

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