Examining citizenship through environmental autonomy: a response to President Goodwin’s address “to be a citizen: or what it means to be a person”

Abstract

This commentary is part of a series of responses to Michele Goodwin’s 2025 LSA presidential address.

Introduction

President Michele Goodwin has helmed the Association in a time of acute destabilization across both law and society. In my field, massive retrenchments in environmental law and sweeping policy changes are unwinding decades of public health protections and hard-won gains for environmental justice, dismantling the infrastructure of federal governance, and threatening subnational authority to mitigate environmental hazards. In this moment, Goodwin’s Address gifts us the opportunity and scaffolding to reflect on a core aspect of our democracy: what does “it mean[] to be a citizen as a question of law, rhetoric, and society”? (Goodwin 2026, 2). For Goodwin, citizenship remains unsettled across these dimensions. Tracing the contested history of “citizenship and belonging” from settler colonialism to slavery to modern times, she underscores how “wealth, sex, and race” have structured access to citizenship, excluding enslaved and free Black people, Indigenous Peoples, women, poor white men, and immigrants from full belonging (Goodwin 2026, 1–2). She emphasizes that, today, these forces still operate as levers of exclusion from, and inclusion in, the body politic: That “what it means to belong to a…country is being tested” through contemporary executive actions, immigration policies, reproductive restrictions, and other forces deepening the nation’s long struggle over legal and lived citizenship. (Goodwin 2026, 2–5).

Goodwin centers reproductive autonomy in her Address, casting it as a through-line for her evaluation of citizenship. Drawing on historical accounts of sexual exploitation under slavery, she examines reproductive servitude and courts’ roles in reifying patriarchal and racial hierarchies (Goodwin 2026, 5–11). Against this backdrop, she reads Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization as not only resurrecting the logics of coverture, but also “fundamentally alter[ing] women’s citizenship and constitutional freedom” (Goodwin 2026, 9–12). Goodwin argues that the resulting patchwork of “free” and “non-free” reproductive states echoes the legal geography of slavery (Goodwin 2026, 13–14). She ultimately finds that reproductive justice is constitutive of citizenship – that the two are “hand in hand” (Goodwin 2026, 12–14).

Exploring environmental autonomy and citizenship

My response takes this last assertion as a springboard to ponder what additional values, drawn from other fields, are likewise constitutive of citizenship. Here, I advance “environmental autonomy” as one such component of citizenship that parallels and extends Goodwin’s reproductive framework.¹ By “environmental autonomy” I mean a person or community’s capacity and right to shape the physical conditions sustaining their life and well-being, and to be informed about and influence decisions governing those conditions. It encompasses both substantive and procedural dimensions. This conception is grounded in the canonical 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, which affirm “political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples,” (Delegates to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit 1991), in Indigenous rights literature, and in scholarship linking environmental quality and participatory power with meaningful membership in a political community (e.g. Cole and Foster 2001, 16–17; 28–29; 103–121; Boyd 2012, 3–5; 20–21).²

Following Goodwin’s analytic template, I do not treat “citizenship” as a formal legal status, but rather a lived position in which individuals enjoy or are denied recognition under the law and a voice within governance structures. Goodwin traces how the structural inequalities that constrain reproductive autonomy are “not born out of thin air,” but are produced and maintained by laws, doctrines and judicial decisions (Goodwin 2026, 3–4; 6–9). An environmental autonomy-based analysis of citizenship echoes this insight. A rich body of literature establishes that aspects of administrative, environmental, zoning and land use law have sanctioned and concentrated the siting of environmental hazards in marginalized communities; preempted or tokenized the participation of affected residents in decision-making; and entrenched disparate environmental conditions by treating racialized land patterns as neutral baselines rather than products of segregation or dispossession (e.g. Baker 2019, 6; 10; 14; Foster 2018, 136–37; Rothstein 2017, 44–56; Cole and Foster 2001, 1–8; 34–36; 46–59; 65–79; see also Outka 2005; Been 1994).

The result is that the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits remains highly correlated to race and then secondarily to income across the country (e.g. Mohai and Saha 2015, 2–7; Taylor 2014, 35–37; 45–46; 148; Cole and Foster 2001, 54–55; 167–83). For example, people of color and those earning lower incomes are exposed to air pollution in their homes and schools at higher rates – pollution that impairs bodily integrity and autonomy by causing or exacerbating acute and long-term diseases and impairments, fetal and neonatal harms, cancers and premature death (e.g. Chakraborty and Zandbergen 2007, 1074). These populations are also more likely to have conditions such as asthma and chronic airway or cardiovascular disease, leading to heightened vulnerability to pollution-driven health harms (e.g. U.S. EPA 2023; Am. Lung Ass’n 2023). And they are more likely to live in locations and housing that are increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather exacerbated by climate destabilization (e.g. Tate et al. 2021, 453).

If, as Goodwin suggests, conditions affecting bodily integrity are central to belonging, then a government’s systemic failure to address environmental harms that threaten autonomy can be understood to undermine the lived experience of citizenship. Yet our laws do not fully reflect and respond to such risks. Domestic environmental, constitutional, civil rights, and tort law, have proven ill-equipped to remedy disparities in environmental quality and even – in certain instances – proven complicit in embedding those conditions (Colangelo and André 2023, 60–85; Foster 2004, 10). Doctrine and decisions within these fields have erected nearly insurmountable barriers to proving discriminatory intent, cabined remedies to statutory violations and fostered single-source analyses for permitting rather than accounting for the totality of pollution a population experiences (e.g. Colangelo and André 2023, 60–85; Outka 2005, 223–234; Foster 2004, 10).

Environmental autonomy also includes procedural dimensions that parallel Goodwin’s focus on self-determination as integral to belonging. As a metric for evaluating citizenship, environmental autonomy requires that people have informed, meaningful participation in government decisions impacting their environment. But participatory deficits abound. Communities most burdened by environmental risk often report that their knowledge is excluded or discounted and their consent ignored. Even today, municipal boards are overriding historically Black neighborhoods’ objections in permitting processes to “fast track” AI-related power sources (NAACP 2025) and the EPA’s risk assessments for toxic exposures from hazards like mine spills still fail to account for the extensive exposure pathways for Indigenous populations.³ Some state legislatures now bar their citizens from collecting and publicizing information about environmental conditions (Environmental Integrity Project 2025). For example, under a 2024 Louisiana law, residents face sanctions up to $1 million for monitoring the quality of their air, and then sharing that information publicly or using it to challenge polluting facilities.⁴ These contemporary examples elucidate who is treated as a legitimate conveyer of knowledge and as an admissible decision-maker in the eyes of the law, and whose expertise is shunted aside. Within the context of this Response, these omissions can be understood as symptomatic of broader exclusions from the polity.

Goodwin’s own vignettes support the notion that environmental deprivation is a core locus where belonging is tested. She recalls childhood summers in Mississippi with her relatives in a house that “lacked plumbing, running water, and basic utilities” and where “clear water… was…not part of their lived reality” (Goodwin 2026, 3). “[E]ven upon his death, at 94,” Goodwin shares, her “great grandfather had never been able to drink from his own tap” (Goodwin 2026, 3). That stark detail about water quality captures how the absence of fundamental infrastructure marks certain communities as seemingly less worthy of state investment in basic environmental services. Activist Catherine Coleman Flowers’ writing about sanitation injustice extends this insight. She has upended conventional notions of sanitation standards in America with descriptions of non-existent or dilapidated wastewater systems that proliferate diseases like hookworm and deny people the basic dignity of sewage collection (Flowers 2020). Flowers emphasizes how residents of the southern “Black Belt,” rural Appalachia, and Indigenous populations are routinely ignored by government officials, sidelined in infrastructure planning, and – in Lowndes, Alabama – even threatened with imprisonment for the inability to install septic systems the state will not provide (Flowers 2020, 9–21; 108–111). Accounts like these demonstrate that water infrastructure failures such as those endured by Goodwin’s family, and those still endured in places like Flint, Michigan, can signal broader environmental injustice and civic marginalization.

Ultimately, this Response suggests that environmental and reproductive autonomy are core commitments that structure access to citizenship, and that use of an environmental autonomy analytic frame is complementary to a reproductive-oriented one. In her Address, Goodwin highlights the heart-wrenching ways in which women have claimed reproductive and bodily agency. In the environmental context, marginalized individuals have similarly fought to exercise autonomy over their lands, resources and communities (e.g. Warner et al. 2020, 1159–1178; NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc 2023). Indeed, elsewhere I have more broadly described the intersection between these fields, including how environmental injustices undermine key principles of reproductive justice such as the right to have children and raise them in healthy communities (Colangelo 2024).⁵ That work explained how climate-exacerbated events such as flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and heat jeopardize pregnancy outcomes and access to medical services, increase risks to infants and children, and subvert people’s ability to raise the next generation in life-affirming conditions.

I hope this scholarly exchange inspires those outside the reproductive, civil rights, and environmental fields to think critically about identifying additional essential constituents of citizenship.⁶ We might read Goodwin’s request for us to consider what “it mean[s]…[t]o belong under a nation’s flag or a community’s embrace” as an invitation for researchers across disciplines to think about civic status and identify their own indicia of belonging (Goodwin 2026, 1). Of course, there is a significant cohort of scholars writing about citizenship theory; but this Response invites those of us not typically engaged in that dialogue to the conversation in moment when belonging is fundamental and fleeting.

What work could this multi-disciplinary examination do from a scholarly and practical perspective? From a theoretical standpoint, it could advance a more comprehensive understanding of citizenship and identify key barometers of belonging across different communities within the United States. It could spur individual research and inform academics’ collaborative efforts to build off of Goodwin’s indicia of race, sex and wealth as proxies for belonging. Research from disparate fields might also surface institutional actors that affect lived experiences of citizenship other than those foregrounded in Goodwin’s address and this response (such as the zoning boards, utilities, and permitting agencies that can compound environmental injustices).

In addition, an exploration of citizenship through a variety of disciplines can illuminate distinct aspects of belonging. Environmental autonomy, for example, exposes how ostensibly science-based legal regimes can mask significant distributive and participatory inequities. Environmental governance is often cloaked in technical expertise, giving it a veneer of neutrality (McGarity and Wagner 2019, 1726–33; 1740–45; 1753–56) that this lens helps to pierce. Multiple analytic frames for citizenship, including environmental autonomy, can also help assess whether certain components of citizenship are susceptible to rupture but then capable of repair. For example, physical environmental conditions and participation deficits can – at least in theory – be mitigated, whereas other lenses through which to examine citizenship such as race, involve immutable characteristics.

For advocates, inquiries through disparate disciplines can help identify locations where formal citizenship is least aligned with lived experience. For example, disparities in access to educational opportunities, healthcare, housing, and more might not only illuminate the contours of lived citizenship, but also reliably predict where exclusions from civic belonging will appear (e.g. Cannon 2024, 310–315). Identifying other ways citizenship is under threat for various segments of the population could validate lived experiences and inform future advocacy regarding regulatory design, and legislative, legal and political strategies.

Conclusion

Goodwin’s presidential address intimates a task for scholars that I have tried to take up in this response – to interrogate forms of injustice not as peripheral regulatory failures but central questions about who counts as a full member of America’s political community. Goodwin’s Address substantiates her conception of citizenship as an experience bound up in dignity and self-determination, and shaped by whether laws function to protect one’s body and community. Her remarks reveal the unfinished project of civil rights (Goodwin 2026, 2) by mining a query central to the democratic vision for our nation: what does and should it mean to be a citizen in the United States. Goodwin’s answers offer a vision of belonging in which bodily autonomy and self-determination are predicates of lived citizenship. I am grateful for this opportunity to explore environmental autonomy within Goodwin’s framing, and in doing so, conclude that citizenship is tethered to our ability to safely inhabit, shape, and ultimately thrive in the places and nations we aspire to belong.