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WHO IS THE COMMUNITY?/WHAT IS THE COMMUNITY?
Phil Brown
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has been one of the most exciting developments in public health and social science research, while becoming an important practical feature for people facing environmental hazards. CBPR has highlighted the importance of community-based knowledge, community rights to control data and research, and community participation (Israel et al 1998; Quigley et al. 2000; Shepard et al. 2003; Minkler and Wallerstein 2003). Researchers in this field are aware of conflicting definitions of community (MacQueen et al. 2001), though much of the literature focuses on the identification of stakeholders and the protection of community rights in the research process. Far less has been written about the definition and nature of communities. Our widespread use of the term “community” often masks a multiple reality in which there are diverse types of communities, as well as differences within communities. By exploring different meanings of community, we can develop a fuller approach to this growing CBPR movement, with a focus on environmental justice and environmental health activism. For example, some definitions of community involve a geographic area, such as a neighborhood or a city, while others involve a group of people united by racial/ethnic/tribal identity, by a common social or political goal, or by a shared disease experience. These other, transgeographic, communities are central to much identity, awareness, and activism. This paper examine issues in both geographic and transgeographic communities. I am not discussing the benefits and drawbacks of geographic measures used in studying environmental inequality, since this is adequately discussed elsewhere (Greenberg 1993; Szasz and Meuser 1997; Krieg 1998; Mohai and Saha 2003), though I will discuss some recent work that points to historical differences as sometimes being more important than present geographic boundary differences.
Defining Communities The history of defining community is long and detailed. One scholar located 94 different definitions, and that was over a half-century ago (Hillery 1955, cited in Patrick and Wickizer 1995); there are doubtless many more definitions at present. I want to mention two recent studies that touch on interesting arrays of elements of the definition of community. MacQueen et al. (2001) conducted 113 qualitative interviews that asked people involved with community participation in HIV vaccine trials to say what community meant to them. The researchers used cluster analysis to examine the qualitative codes. Although this population is different than most environmental health and environmental justice populations, the rigorous methodology attached to these open-ended questions about the nature of community has important generalizability. MacQueen’s team found five core elements. 1) Locus, a sense of place , referred to a geographic entity ranging from neighborhood to city size, or a particular milieu around which people gathered (such as a church or recreation center). 2) Sharing, common interests and perspectives , referred to common interests and values that could cross geographic boundaries. 3) joint action, a sense of coherence and identity, included informal common activities such as sharing tasks and helping neighbors, but these were not necessarily intentionally designed to create community cohesion. 4) Social ties involved relationships that created the ongoing sense of cohesion. 5)
Diversity referred not primarily to ethnic groupings, but to the social complexity within communities in which a multiplicity of communities co-existed. MacQueen et al. note that the first four are similar to what numerous social scientists have previously found, but that the fifth element, diversity, was not previously identified. Perhaps more importantly, the researchers found that despite common identification of these core elements, respondents varied in how they perceived the importance of each. The chief implication of this is that community-based public health interventions need to operate on various levels, attending to varied definitions of community. Patrick and Wickizer (1995) examine a smaller set of three elements. 1) Community as place , notably a geographically bounded location; 2) Community as social interaction , in which social networks and social supports are crucial; 3) Community as political and social responsibility , involving political and social motives in the formation of communal groups. They apply an integrated definition that includes all three, thus maintaining a geographic status. Perhaps their necessary inclusion of a geographic element is driven by a concern that a broad community with unobserved boundaries may be less amenable to community-level public health interventions. This is true, if the intervention involves something like home visits to take air and dust samples. However, if we take a larger view, and consider as an intervention the placement of breast cancer activists on federal review panels, then the unbounded definition of community works well. Patrick and Wickizer are also concerned that non-bounded communities may be transitory and may lack sufficient connections and commitment to bring forth the social supports that we expect of communities. Again, we must look at this in terms of how transgeographic communities work in practice. Many disease support groups and health social movement organizations function at a high level of social support, and for some disease groups internet- based and other non-local connections are the primary source of support since people may not be near other people with the same disease. From my interpretation of MacQueen et al. (2001) and Patrick and Wickizer (1995), I take away several important elements of community: 1) Communities include a variety of geographic and transgeographic groupings, and sometimes involve a mixture of both types; 2) Whether bounded or un-bounded, communities only function effectively when they provide social support through social networks; 3) Communities generate collective social action, but are also formed as a result of such action; and 4) Community definitions change, even over a short time period. I now turn to examining how these concerns play out in both geographic and transgeographic communities.
Geographic Communities
Geographic Communities are More Than Geography Much of environmental justice research has been driven by geographical notions of community, e.g. census tracts, zip codes, counties. For some scholars, one of the drawbacks in environmental justice research is the wide variety of definitions of community. For others, the very diversity of measures of community attests to the widespread corroboration of environmental inequity. Still, there remain considerable methodological problems with much of this work, and recent developments promise more precise approaches to measurement (Mohai and Saha 2003). Even in the face of some problems in method and measurement, there is broad acceptance that environmental inequality is a common feature of American life. But the mere existence of such inequality does not tell us much about the nature of the area, nor its ability to
A burgeoning focus on the importance of place has piggybacked on that community paradigm shift, and has refocused much of our notions of health and the environment. Social ecological research shows that community characteristics are often more important than individual characteristics in predicting crime (Kennedy et al. 1998), disease (Link and Phelan 1995; Wilkinson 1996), and infant mortality (LaVeist 1992). For example, LaVeist’s work shows that large cities with higher numbers of elected black officials have lower infant mortality rates, controlling for other factors. A likely explanation for this is that people and communities have a higher degree of empowerment and self-esteem, therefore making life overall less stressful and hence leading to better health outcomes. This line of research leads us to focus on the geographic rather than personal characteristics as determinants of neighborhood quality and health and psychological well-being. A good deal of the burgeoning health inequalities research takes this line of conceptualization and measurement (Kawachi and Berkman 2000). Interestingly, this recent work on community-level factors is but the latest addition in a long stream of research that identified the benefits to health of social networks and social solidarity, a tradition that starts with Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology in the late 19th^ century. Leighton’s (1959) well-known Stirling County study of mental health found that areas which had less community integration and connection had worse rates of mental disorder. The community of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a town with extraordinarily high social cohesion and egalitarian relationships, was widely known for its low rates of heart disease in comparison to nearby towns with similar class status but less social integration (Bruhn and Wolf 1979). Recent social epidemiology work on community effects has burgeoned, though it has had to fight against criticisms that it falls into the trap of the “ecological fallacy,” a common worry that measuring aggregate levels tells us nothing reliable about individuals. In response, many supporters of social ecological research argue that community effects are, in fact, centrally important. The proponents of social ecology and social epidemiology are spearheading a paradigm shift in how we look at the relationship between society and health. The implications of such a shift are great: if income disparity is so significant in health inequalities (Wilkinson 1996), then social interventions will largely target overall income distribution, taxation, social welfare, and other broad-based policies. Macintyre et al.’s (2000) work on “place effects” provides an excellent review of issues in health and place. They note that social scientists have failed to incorporate the wealth of community studies, have worried excessively about the ecological fallacy, and have focused on individual health behaviors rather than community-level factors. In reviewing a number of studies on community-level factors, they point out that place effects are not meant to replace individuals’ sociodemographic status, but that both must be taken into account. Both levels often interact; for example, social class is based on occupation, which in turn is shaped by the local economy. Macintyre and colleagues use an organizing framework of five types of local area features that can affect health: 1) physical features (e.g. air quality, climate), 2) availability of healthy environments (e.g. good housing, safe play areas), 3) services (e.g. education, transportation), 4) sociocultural features of neighborhoods (e.g. community history, crime), and
- reputation of an area (e.g. how areas are perceived by residents and others). By focusing on people’s immediate sense of place, we can understand that the most important concerns may not be the larger crises that become powerful images in the media, but the more mundane environments that surround people. For example, while people are concerned with effects of “massive technology sites” (hazardous waste sites, factories, incinerators, landfills, superhighways, utility towers), those are not the only things that concern them. People
rate neighborhoods as being of low quality when they experience crime, poor lighting, abandoned and decrepit buildings, litter, trash, and disrepaired roads and sidewalks (Greenberg and Schneider 1996). To best understand such blight, a historical approach is necessary.
Community History Communities are not merely aggregations of people living in a specified geographic area. They are organically developing sets of relationships that have a history of development and change. We can best understand communities when we examine them over time. Too often, when an environmental crisis occurs in a community, the response, of necessity, focuses on the present state of the community. Even when we are not studying a crisis, we may focus on a cross-section of one or more communities. For example, much research documenting race and class inequalities examines only current data on Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) emissions or the location of toxic storage and disposal facilities. That makes some sense, because the data to show inequalities usually is fairly recent data. But it doesn’t allow us to understand the long-term development of the area. Environmental justice research is in the midst of exciting transitions. From an early focus that relied mainly on unequal exposures to toxics, scholars are now tackling intriguing theoretical issues and expanding to new empirical areas, often with a historical framework. Sociologists are engaging in historical perspectives on environmental racism and injustice, tracing the roots of current problems to earlier centuries. For instance, Dorceta Taylor (1999) shows how the creation of parks and recreation facilities impacted communities of color, their living conditions, and their exposure to wastes. Robert Bullard and Glenn Johnson (1997) examine the significance of transportation in the creation and perpetuation of environmental injustice. I briefly note here a few examples of what community history can tell us. David Pellow’s (2002) Garbage Wars situates the current disputes over recycling programs in Chicago by examining a century of politics concerning public sanitation services, resource management, and community resources. Through this historic lens, the modern environmental inequity appears as part of a continuum in which black neighborhoods were always underserved and were used as dumping grounds for others’ trash. From the early days of the horse and cart, to the compactor trucks and dumpsters, to the reduction plants, incinerators, landfills, and materials recovery facilities, Pellow follows the trash, the pollution, the hazards, and the human beings who face these by-products in homes, communities, and workplaces. Along the way we learn that some heroes of social welfare and labor rights, like Jane Addams, were also activists who worked to protect poor immigrants from the ill effects of waste pollution. Struggles over garbage are a long-term part of political, economic, and social conflict in our country, and indeed in nations throughout history. Any set of social actors that makes up a society is confronted with decisions on where they put waste, and where to build neighborhoods, parks, schools, and civic buildings. These actors always make trade-offs and agreements as to what will be where. Whether horse manure in the 19th^ century or dioxin in the 21st^ century, powerful groups will saddle subordinate groups with the burden. Eric Krieg’s (1998) study of environmental inequity in the metro Boston area employed a historical perspective to understand what might otherwise be an anomaly in environmental justice research. In the older urban parts of the area, inside the Route 128 ring highway, Krieg found traditional racial differences in environmental exposure. But outside that ring, class differences in exposure predominated. This is understandable by the post-1960s development of high-tech firms and suburbanization in the latter area. There were virtually no minorities to be
organizing, with lay discovery of the problem, intense popular investigation, cohesive litigation, and strategic alliances with university scientists and state legislators.
Communities of Denial In the absence of corrosiveness and division, some communities respond to hazards in what seems to be a serious denial of the problem. Even workers engaged in some of the most hazardous production, e.g. shipbuilding, have a high capacity for denial of risk. Workers exhibit notions of personal invincibility, lack of knowledge, and willing trade-offs for their families’ economic support (Nelkin and Brown 1984). At the least, communities engage in what Zavestoski et al 2003) term “consensual community responses,” a form of passive acceptance that leads to non-activism. This allows them to retain what they believe will be normalcy in the face of a potential crisis – in this case, a dioxin contamination in Providence, Rhode Island (Zavestoski et al. 2003). This is understandable, given the desire to minimize anxiety and to avoid trouble, as well as the likely awareness that such situations in other communities have led to long-term struggles. Devra Davis’ remarkable book, When Smoke Ran Like Water (Davis 2002), documents the ongoing denial in her home town of Donora, Pennsylvania, where a major air pollution crisis in 1948 killed 20, injured hundreds, and led to our modern air pollution laws. In the midst of the steel and zinc mills’ massive contamination crisis, football players carried on their game, and people went about ordinary activities, despite their inability to see more than a few feet away. Donora residents had so long been used to such conditions that they maintained a sense of normalcy in the face of disaster. At the extreme end of the spectrum, community identification with a primary or major employer can lead to boosterism, as seen in the film “Chemical Valley.” The setting is Institute, West Virginia, the location of Union Carbide’s only plant in the world other than Bhopal that produces methyl isocynate (MIC), the deadly poison that killed 8,000 and injured 500,000 in
- In the face of a leak at the Institute plant – not of MIC – community activist organize, and are met with a massive parade down the town’s main street, in which the workforce plays a central role in supporting the company. Despite the long history of safety malfeasance in both Bhopal and Institute, and Union Carbide’s callousness and intransigence to the Bhopal victims, local boosters extol the wages, taxes, and ballfields brought by the company. This Institute example does actually meet the criteria for inclusion as a corrosive community in that the activists critical of Carbide were pitted against a strong pro-company movement that was clearly spearheaded by the firm itself.
Silenced Communities We may also view communities of denial as “silenced communities.” They have been let down by state and federal agencies that fail to provide the public health and environmental protection they should. The “recreancy” (Freudenburg 1993) of government agencies that do not carry out their mandate leaves communities without adequate access to knowledge and resources. They are silenced because they do not have the material with which to make their voice heard. State agencies are often unhelpful, either intentionally or because of being understaffed. A survey of all 50 states' responses to lay cancer cluster reports found that there were an estimated 1,300-1,650 such reports in 1988, clearly a large number for agencies already short-staffed. Many state health departments discouraged informants, in some cases requesting extensive data before they would go further. Rather than deal specifically with the complaint,
many health departments gave a routine response emphasizing the lifestyle causes of cancer, the fact that one of three Americans will develop some form of cancer, and that clusters are a random occurrence (Greenberg and Wartenberg 1991). Even states with a strong record of public health, such as Massachusetts, have a hard time when it comes to environmental health crises. As a result of a large number complaints about the state's response to lay concerns over excess cancer rates in 20 communities led to state senate (Commonwealth of Massachusetts 1987) and university (Levy et al. 1986) investigations which found that the DPH studies were poorly conceived and methodologically weak. Most lacked a clear hypothesis, failed to mention potential exposure routes, and as a result rarely defined the geographic or temporal limits of the population at risk. Methods were presented erratically and inconsistently, case definitions were weak, environmental data were rarely presented, and statistical tests were inappropriately used (Levy et al. 1986). Frequently, exposed groups were diluted with unexposed individuals, and comparison groups were likely to include exposed individuals (Ozonoff and Boden 1987). The damaging effects of the poor studies and nonresponsiveness to the community led to the resignation of the public health commissioner, Bailus Walker, then head of the American Public Health Association (Brown 1992). More recently, citizens’ groups have complained that the DPH holds up releasing data for years, simply to avoid embarrassment. For such reasons, case studies of many contaminated communities highlight residents’ distrust of health studies (Levine 1982; Edelstein 1988; Brown and Mikkelsen 1990). And since health studies are seen as so crucial for scientific and social legitimation, communities are at a disadvantage. Apart from communities of denial, other communities are silenced (though these examples below are of transgeographical communities). Environmental health scientists have faced this from a variety of sources: their own academic settings, state public health and environmental departments, and federal agencies such as EPA and CDC. While one might view this as punishment of a number of isolated individuals, activists and scientists believe that this is a series of conservative attacks on an environmental health community that focuses on preventing environmental exposures and environmentally induced diseases. In recent years, James Huff of the National Toxicology Program was pressured to halt presentation of scientific papers, Richard Jackson was removed as head of the CDC’s Center for Environmental Health, and CDC and EPA purged from scientific review panels those scientists who supported stricter environmental regulation. Daubert challenges in courts are another part of this attack on scientists who provide testimony on environmental hazards.
TransGeographic Communities
Non-geographic communities are among our most important communities, especially in terms of activism. These can be a group of people united by racial/ethnic identity, a set of people and organizations bound by a political practice (e.g. the environmental justice community) or a group with a shared disease experience (e.g. the breast cancer activist community). It is very common to hear members of those communities refer very directly to them as such. In some cases, such an appellation may be largely one of identity politics – a person identifies with experiencing a certain social characteristic, a disease, a stigma, or other feature. To identify in this fashion is to “normalize” oneself and often to challenge the dominant social perceptions and institutions.
This fluidity makes eminent sense when we observe the multiple levels on which environmental health activists work. They do so in what I call their character as “boundary movements” (Brown et al. 2004). One boundary they cross is the gap between lay and expert, and this is central to the core development of environmental health and environmental justice groups. They also cross the boundaries of different types of activist organizations, mobilizing in concert with groups that may start out from different directions, but converge (such as breast cancer advocacy groups and environmental organizations). Another boundary bridge involved how groups engage in activism that includes researchers, government professionals, and foundation leaders. In that situation, researchers may function as “advocacy scientists” (Krimsky
- and government officials may be part of social movement “interpenetration” (Wolfson 2001).
Divided Communities There can be significant differences within transgeographic communities, even if they are not corrosive or divisive, as we see in some geographic communities. If we look at a non- geographic community, we find that the very large breast cancer community has within it a smaller, more radical environmental breast cancer movement that works towards four goals: 1) to broaden public awareness of potential environmental causes of breast cancer; 2) to increase research into environmental causes of breast cancer; 3) to create policy which could prevent environmental causes of breast cancer; and 4) to increase activist participation in research (McCormick et al. 2003). The general breast cancer movement has addressed issues of care for breast cancer patients, knowledge about treatment options, especially in regard to mastectomies, lumpectomies and radiation, support for those affected by the disease, and increased research funding. Current government action includes the partnership between government and non-government sectors in the National Action Plan on Breast Cancer, established by President Clinton in 1994, among other projects. Private sector action includes the first National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which promotes public awareness of breast cancer and usage of mammography as early detection, first held in 1985. Today, fundraising walks and runs during that month involve tens of thousands of people every year. The movement’s other successes include the production of a breast cancer stamp, whose additional cost above normal postage is given to governmental research institutions to further breast cancer research, and the Shop for the Cure campaign, whose merchants and credit card companies give a portion of the proceeds to breast cancer foundations. The general breast cancer movement’s success can also be seen in the amount of breast cancer research dollars, which have increased from $90 million in 1990 to $600 million in 1999 (Reiss and Martin 2000), and in the ability to win federal legislation, such as the Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment Act of 2000. The environmental breast cancer movement has reframed the successes of the broader breast cancer movement in order to focus on potential environmental causes and change how breast cancer is researched and publicly perceived. Some of those general movement successes are criticized by the environmental breast cancer movement. For example, for years people took for granted the position of the American Cancer Society, National Cancer Institute, and other parts of the “cancer establishment” that “mammography is the best form of prevention.” Environmental breast cancer activists argue that once a tumor is detected prevention has failed since the tumor now exists. This stance is assisted by the growing scientific awareness that
mammography is not very effective in women under 50. Activists also challenge the corporate control of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. They have additionally mounted a campaign to have breast cancer stamp revenues shifted to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences from the National Cancer Institute, which supports virtually no research on environmental factors. This movement’s “Think Pink” campaign is strongly critical of the larger movement’s reliance on shop-for-the-cure approaches, since they point out that the same firms that engage in corporate sponsorship also produce products that are known or suspected carcinogens (McCormick et al. 2003). There are enough differences that we can consider this a divided movement, even if not corrosive. Unlike corrosive movements, where organizations are likely to be pitted against each other, the general breast cancer movement serves as a recruiting ground for the environmental breast cancer movement, and many activities are jointly sponsored. Importantly, all participants would likely view themselves as part of a broad, non-geographic community. By tracing the differences, however, we are able to grasp the forward-looking development of an environmentally conscious sector, one that ultimately may alter the larger community.
In summary, we can see that there are many types of communities, some geographic and others transgeographic. Certain definitions refer to harmful aspects of community, others to positive elements. Importantly, we learn from this diversity that we cannot be satisfied with a single definition or perspective on community. Each setting where an environmental problem occurs needs to be viewed from varied vantage points to understand what single or multiple communities are involved. Our actions will be guided by this more complex awareness. Further, communities change over time, and hence our approach to environmental problems will possibly change, even for the same situation.
Communities of Knowing: Political Communities and Science Communities
Environmental activists, in their challenges to dominant paradigms, have created major new approaches to knowledge. Well-versed in health effects of environmental contaminants and non- sustainable development, activists have developed communities of knowing. In her book, Who Knows, Lynn Nelson offers us valuable lessons about the collective nature of knowledge: "What I know depends inextricably on what we know, for some we. My claims to know are subject to community criteria, public notions of what constitutes evidence, so that, in an important sense, I can know only what we know, for some we.” (Nelson 1990, p. 255). Nelson argues that that it is incorrect to see beliefs as private property. That is as much an illusion as the illusion that real private property is completely private, without public or governmental support. In Nelson's words, "it is communities or groups that acquire and possess knowledge, and that focusing on individuals in epistemology is inappropriate. Individuals "have" beliefs and they know, but only in a derivative sense. Their beliefs and their "knowing" depend on public language and the conceptual scheme it embodies, and what they know and believe is constrained by public standards of evidence. The primary epistemological agents are groups -- or more accurately, epistemological communities." (Nelson 1990, p.256). This meshes with "standpoint" theory of Nancy Hartsock that argues that an accurate perspective on social life can only stem from members of oppressed groups, or as I would phrase it, the accurate knowledge must include all or most of its knowledge base from affected communities. For Hartsock, knowledge from affected groups is not merely another voice in a
being termed the “environmental health movement,” and they offer a perspective on environmental health that incorporates concerns about the underlying industrial and governmental practices of our society. They often work in a multisectoral framework, arguing that fundamental change can only come if we reform and restructure industry, transportation, urban development, neighborhood renewal, public policy, scientific practice, and democratic participation. The legacy is, of course, a massive challenge to state status quo of corporate pollution and inadequate governmental regulation, but also a new definition of “community” that incorporates many elements of social change.
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