Reimagining Environmental Justice: Religion and Creative Responses to Crisis in the Matanza–Riachuelo River Basin

Industrial pollution, global-warming-intensified natural disasters, and ineffective governmental policy have converged to produce enduring environmental injustices in Buenos Aires’ Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, presenting both ethical and political. Drawing on scientific, economic, ethnographic, and journalistic sources, as well as political analyses, I argue that ongoing attempts to meaningfully improve the lives of marginalized residents have been ineffective because they fail to sufficiently (re-)imagine and innovate both in activist strategies and in policy proposals. Religion(s) can serve as (a) resource(s) for guiding responses and policymaking in the Matanza-Riachuelo, reflecting their potential to support environmental justice movements more generally. Rather than abandoning existing efforts in the Matanza-Riachuelo, this paper suggests that a strategy that both builds on their successes and drawing on religions’ cosmological creativity could best support the imagination and implementation of new political, social, environmental and economic responses.