The Datafication of Environmental Injustice

This paper discusses the contradictory effects of geography and environmental justice research on state administrative processes. Drawing on the siting of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on the Tideflats of Tacoma Washington, we argue that research that fails to consider the limitations of administrative violence becomes complicit in it. Through datafication, scientific research has repeatedly documented the harms of industrial development while taking the violence that made the Tideflats as a given. The Puyallup Tribe and environmental organizations’ lawsuit reveal the complicity of science in understanding landscape through a narrow political lens, ignoring the context of settler colonialism and the settler state’s responsibility to Indigenous nations. In this way, academic researchers facilitate administrative violence by participating in drawn out regulatory and legal processes while the environmental injustice in question continues.