Ecosystem duties, green infrastructure, and environmental injustice in Los Angeles

• Main Author: RANDLE, Sayd
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: ecological labor; ecosystem services; infrastructure; water management; environmental justice; Environmental Sciences; Infrastructure
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/111; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/cis_research/article/1110/viewcontent/EcosystemDuties_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking when and how this work gets enrolled in networks of water management and circuits of value. I develop the term ecosystem duties to characterize these exertions and as a useful analytic for assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice.