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Short abstract:

Drawing from the co-theorizations of a university-community partnership, we examine how environmental justice activists trouble settler logics of science, regulation, and procedure in a series of public commentaries about industrialized bioenergy development in the southeastern United States.

Long abstract:

Eastern North Carolina (USA) is home to millions of hogs who generate billions of gallons of excrement annually in these lowland, inner coastal plains. Precariously contained in industrialized waste “lagoons,” the excrement contributes to negative human and environmental impacts that are disproportionately distributed among predominantly African-American, Indigenous, and low-wealth communities. In 2020 energy company, Align RNG, secured a contract to install methane-capture technology on industrial hog operations. A confluence of “big pork” and “big energy”, advocates champion industrialized biogas development as a “renewable” energy infrastructure that would mitigate climate emergency while making the toxic hog waste environmentally more palatable and economically profitable. The NC Department of Environmental Quality hosted a series of regulatory public meetings that mark the roll out of biogas development. Event ethnography of these meetings revealed settler logics of science, regulation, and procedure. Settler science relies on the allowance, rather than prevention, of pollution; settler regulation hinges on industry promises to install superior technologies – promises evaded for decades; and settler procedure turns to non-responsiveness when public comments are deemed beyond the scope of science and regulation. State agency meetings have been widely attended, however, by environmental justice activists who exposed and troubled these logics. In strictly-timed three-minute public commentaries, they introduced key touchstones for justice according to Black and Indigenous ecologies. Drawing from the co-theorizations of the Eastern North Carolina Environmental Justice Collaborative (“EJ Co-Lab”), we examine a series of “democratic encounters” between state regulatory logics and grassroots pursuits of rural environmental justice.