Introduction

Introduction Simi Kang (bio) and Lisa Sun-Hee Park (bio) A note from the editors: The contents of this issue are inevitably shaped by the editors' engagements with these fields. As two people approaching this work with significant privileges as well as specific experiences of marginalization based on our education, relationship to communities, and personal identities, we know that our subject positions contribute to how we assembled and framed the work you find here. We also recognize that this special issue addresses a limited scope of environmental injustices and responses thereto. We know that many voices are missing and go unacknowledged, particularly those of frontlines communities. We hope that in recognizing these gaps and omissions, we can encourage you, our readers, to view the materials with this context in mind and, further, can nudge others to foster more accessible platforms for highlighting practitioner expertise at the intersections of environmental justice work and Asian American studies. It is therefore our hope that you will see these pages as a place to continue your engagement with environmental justice work and that this issue offers some tools for you in the work to come. [End Page 303] the worldbriefly sees usonly afterthe eyeof a stormsees us –Craig Santos Perez, "Disaster Haiku, after cyclone winston" after typhoon yutu after hurricane maria after …," in Habitat Threshold1 This special issue on 'Environmental Entanglements in Asian America' brings together central frameworks within Asian Americanist, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous critiques to bear on our understanding of the environment and environmentalism. Each of the articles brings together complex analytical and experiential threads—be they multi-species, trans- and intranational, ancestral and intergenerational, polytemporal, and post/colonial—that bind us and yet have largely been ignored or denied. Refusing these linkages prevents us from seeing how solidarities might be configured not merely around an allegiance to a species, identity, or nation, but also through shared and often vexed histories of extraction, access, movement, suppression, scarcity, privilege, abundance, and erasure. Organizers and scholars of the global majority have advanced communitycentered work on environmental in/justice for generations. However, bringing those modes of resistance and inquiry into the discipline of Asian American studies is a relatively recent project. While we recognize that we are writing at an important moment of expansion in this area, the goal of this issue is not to predetermine a bordered subfield called Asian American and Pacific Islander environmental justice studies. Rather, we wish to "write to you from the middle of something"2 by highlighting five contributions to this critical conversation. Recognizing our "from-the-middle-ness," we argue that "the call for environmental justice is part of a broader call to revisit our covenant to the world, our relationships to it, and our responsibilities to one another."3 We began writing this introduction in the days following four SCOTUS rulings4 that emphasized the United States' continued investment in protecting whiteness and wealth. As the Supreme Court rejected the Navajo Nation's request for a federal assessment of its water needs, the continent experienced the deadliest heat wave in history and wildfire smoke exceeded borders, making the air unsafe for all beings across Canada and the northern US.5 While SCOTUS wrote opinions against Black, Latinx, and Indigenous youth,6 hundreds of refugees of Pakistan's 2022 floods perished at the hands of smugglers and [End Page 304] Greece's coast guard in the Mediterranean. That small business owners were reassured they could discriminate against queer and trans people as Biden greenlit the construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline through Appalachia says a great deal about whose lives matter to the state. These actions are deeply political, particularly when interrogated through the lens of environmental justice, which is a Black, Indigenous, and POC-driven movement that "affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction."7 To achieve environmental justice, we must see our personal, communal, ecosystem-level, and cultural health as intimately interdependent with our larger communities, which always includes racialized folks, more-than-human beings, and the lands and waters we all rely on...

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