Gregory Hooks

When examining environmental justice and injustice, surprisingly few studies have examined the experiences of Native Americans. In filling this gap, we criticize and build on environmental and political sociology. We make the case and provide evidence that the U.S. military pursues a pattern of environmental “bads” that cannot be reduced to capitalism and that coercive state policies can mold the spatial distribution of people relative to environmental dangers. Our contribution, then, is both theoretical and substantive. First, we recast the environmental sociology literature by specifying the scope conditions under which a “treadmill of production” and a “treadmill of destruction” are applicable. Specifically, we argue that a “treadmill of destruction” is driven by a distinct logic of geopolitics that cannot be reduced to capitalism. Second, we provide empirical evidence of the “treadmill of destruction” by examining the environmental inequality endured by Native Americans at the hands of the U.S. military. We have collected data on a large number of military bases that have been closed but remain dangerous due to unexploded ordnance. We provide evidence that Native American lands tend to be located in the same county as such hazardous sites. In the twentieth century, the United States fought and won two global wars and prevailed in a sustained Cold War. The geopolitical demands of remaining the world's leading military power pushed the United States to produce, test, and deploy weapons of unprecedented toxicity. Native Americans have been left exposed to the dangers of this toxic legacy.

According to conventional wisdom, American policy has always been exceptional - exceptionally stingy and backwards. But Edwin Amenta reminds the reader that 60 years ago the US led the world in provision. He combines historical and political theory to account for this fact - and to explain why the country's leading role was short-lived. The orthodox view is that American policy began in the 1930s as a two-track system of miserly welfare for the unemployed and generous social for the elderly. However, Amenta shows that the New Deal was in fact a bold programme of relief, committed to providing jobs and income support for the unemployed. Social security was, by comparison, a policy afterthought. By the late 1930s, he shows, the US pledged more of its gross national product to relief programmes than did any other major industrial country. Amenta develops and uses an institutional politics theory to explain how policy expansion was driven by northern Democrats, state-based reformers, and political outsiders. And he shows that retrenchment in the 1940s was led by politicians from areas where beneficiaries of relief were barred from voting. He also considers why some programmes were nationalized, why some states had far-reaching little New Deals, and why Britain adopted more generous programmes.

The treadmill of production has identified and examined an inherent dynamic that results in the inexorable expansion of capitalism. Although it is argued that a number of benefits accompany this economic expansion, the treadmill of production literature has focused on the environmental costs. The treadmill of production embraces the legacy of C. Wright Mills with a focus on the entangled relationships between two aspects of Mills’s “power elite”—politics and economics. Building on Mills’s inclusion of militarism as one of the three pillars of the power elite, it is argued that there exists a treadmill of destruction that maintains a distinct logic relating to geopolitics and arms races that cannot be reduced to capitalism. The 20th century has witnessed unprecedented growth in the research, testing, storage, and employment of both conventional weaponry and weapons of mass destruction. In focusing on this development, the distinctive role the state plays in creating a treadmill of destruction is stressed.