A landmark citizen’s lawsuit against Formosa Plastics Corporation in Seadrift, Texas resulted in funds for environmental monitoring, clean-up, research, and education. $20 million is set aside for “creating a cooperative that will revitalize depleted marine ecosystems and develop sustainable fishing, shrimping, and oyster harvesting.” It is an exciting project for many reasons, exemplifying what the work of “just transition” looks like on the ground. Work toward just transition in Seadrift will be multifaceted and extensive in both space and time. In what follows, we describe the contexts and contours of this work, highlighting developments before, within and after the Waterkeeper’s historic legal win, and the different kinds of work required at each stage. These sequential labors of law, we argue, are usefully conceptualized as a far-from-straightforward relay, with many runners, and many detours. Our goal is to convey the especially complex challenge of environmental advocacy and just transition in late industrial contexts.
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Once a month, more than 60 men in Seadrift, Texas meet to envision and plan a new harbor, docks, a fish processing house and other infrastructure to support the local fishing industry—an industry once a mainstay of their small community, but no longer. The men work with an organizer from the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, an organization known for innovative work supporting Black farmers, landowners, credit unions, and agricultural cooperatives across the US South. Funds to support the fishermen’s plans were garnered from a landmark citizen’s lawsuit against Formosa Plastics Corporation under the US Clean Water Act, settled in 2019. None of the settlement funds will go to the plaintiffs, who filed the suit as “Waterkeepers.” Instead, the funds have been deposited in a trust that will support environmental monitoring, clean-up, research, and education. $20 million is set aside for “creating a cooperative that will revitalize depleted marine ecosystems and develop sustainable fishing, shrimping, and oyster harvesting.”Footnote1 It is an exciting project for many reasons, exemplifying what the work of “just transition” looks like on the ground.
Articulations of just transition first emerged in the industrial labor movement in the 1980s to counter claims that high-paying industrial jobs were at odds with workplace and environmental protections (Stevis Citation2023; Stevis et al. Citation2020). After decades of detours, a growing concert of voices today is calling for and trying to figure out just transitions in diverse settings around the world. Environmental protection and inclusive prosperity is the goal. Lingering specters of fossil-fuel capitalism don’t fully undercut alternatives, but they do continue to shape them (Adams Citation2023; Adams and Fortun Citation2021). Seadrift—literally and figuratively—is at the center of the storm.
