241 20 STORYTELLING ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE Cultural studies approaches Donna Houston and Pavithra Vasudevan Introduction In early 2012, community members in Warrenton, North Carolina, were busy planning the commemoration of an event that profoundly shaped the town’s local environmental history. Facilitated by Rev. William Kearney, long-time residents, activists, representatives from local churches, local government, and not-for-profit organizations met to discuss how best to com- memorate the thirty-year anniversary of the community protest over the siting of a PCB landfill in Warren County – now widely acknowledged as the spark that ignited the Environmental Justice Movement in the United States (Bullard 2007; McGurty 2009). The community discus- sions leading up to the thirtieth anniversary were imbued with hopeful socio-ecological imaginings for the future, as well as the residual social impacts of the PCB toxic legacy. For some, mobilizing the “birthplace of environmental justice” story as a cultural resource had transformative possibility for local community development; while for others, the anniversary brought up sedimented feelings of anger and distrust over the siting of the PCB landfill and its later remediation (Vasudevan 2013). The public commemoration of environmental justice in Warren County was both unsettling and cathartic. It highlights the significant long-term impacts that environmental injustice can have on local communities, long after the contaminated site is cleaned up. Environmental injustice does not just leave material “scars” on the landscape; it leaves cultural scars too, the legacies of which evoke a range of memories, emotions, affects, values and practices (Storm 2014). The commemoration event highlights the complex interplay of culture and environ- mental justice – where local activists employ heritage practices to narrate the local and global consequences of historical and ongoing injustices, and to mobilize communities in struggling for change (Banerjee and Steinberg 2015). The legacies of the PCB landfill in Warren County – material and storied – highlight the ways in which culture, history and place are entangled with environmental justice (Houston 2013; Vasudevan 2013). Circulating within and between structural inequities and the politics of legal recognition in environmental justice struggles are meanings, memories, practices and values – cultural phenomena that help individuals, communities, activists, and advocates make sense of and communicate with each other about the social impacts and underlying causes of pollution and unwanted land uses – often in the absence of officially recognized evidence and