Recent scholarship on environmental justice highlights a concern about the relationship between the racial state and social movement strategy. This paper addresses the ingenuity of environmental justice organizing in the Proctor Creek and South River watersheds of Atlanta, Georgia, each home to predominantly Black communities and unjust flows of toxicants and sewage through urban creeks, streams, and rivers. We begin from critiques of the failure of institutionalized environmental justice and the state’s role in maintaining environmental racisms. To examine organizing responses to these circumstances, we analyze the improvisational politics of social movements in the context of the racial state, theoretically drawing from Charles Lee’s Ingenious Citizenship (2016). Empirically investigating the work of Atlanta community organizers, we emphasize pathways of strategic innovation among environmental justice organizers that improvise against the racial state even while negotiating with it. The article presents evidence of organizers challenging dominant modes of quantifying environmental injustice, appropriating and repurposing the language of environmental restoration, and improvising in the spaces of environmental governance. While state recognition has sought to contain or co-opt movements, we demonstrate the continuing vitality of mobilizations that simultaneously make demands of the state and rupture the governing forms of knowledge and practice that reinforce environmental racisms.

最近关于环境正义的奖学金突出了对种族国家与社会运动战略之间关系的关注。本文讨论了在佐治亚州亚特兰大的 Proctor Creek 和南河流域组织环境正义的独创性，每个流域都是以黑人为主的社区，以及有毒物质和污水通过城市小溪、溪流和河流的不公正流动。我们从对制度化环境正义的失败和国家在维护环境种族主义方面的作用的批评开始。为了检查对这些情况的组织反应，我们分析了种族国家背景下社会运动的即兴政治，理论上借鉴了查尔斯·李的巧妙公民身份(2016)。通过对亚特兰大社区组织者的工作进行实证调查，我们强调了环境正义组织者之间的战略创新途径，即使在与种族国家进行谈判时也即兴反对种族国家。本文展示了组织者挑战量化环境不公正、挪用和重新利用环境恢复语言以及在环境治理空间中即兴发挥的主导模式的证据。虽然国家承认试图遏制或拉拢运动，但我们展示了动员的持续活力，这些动员同时向国家提出要求，并打破强化环境种族主义的知识和实践的管理形式。