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Recent critiques of environmental justice research emphasize its disengagement from theory and its political focus on liberal conceptions of distributional and procedural justice. Marxian urban political ecology has been proposed as an approach that can both contextualize environmental inequalities more productively and provide a basis for a more radical politics of environmental justice. Although this work takes its primary inspiration from historical materialism, it also adapts key concepts from actor-network theory (ANT)-in particular, the agency of nonhumans-while dismissing the rest of ANT as insufficiently critical and explanatory. This paper argues that ANT-specifically, the version articulated by Bruno Latour-provides a basis for an alternative critical approach to environmental justice research and politics. Instead of arguing for a synthesis of ANT and Marxism, I contend that ANT gives us a distinctive conception of the social and opens up new questions about the production and justification of environmental inequalities. Through the work of Swyngedouw and Heynen (2003) and others, Marxist UPE has not only laid out a clear theoretical and political agenda for addressing environmental injustice, but has also generated a rich and growing body of empirical research (see also Braun 2005a; Keil 2003). 2 Given the apparent promise of Marxist UPE, why propose actornetwork theory (ANT)-and specifically the version articulated by Bruno Latour-as an alternative critical approach to environmental justice studies? ANT, an orientation to social scientific research that developed within the field of science studies, has attracted considerable attention for its interest in the agency of nonhumans. ANT is already well established as an important influence on Marxist UPE, which prominently cites ANT scholars like Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law (eg, Swyngedouw 2004). Despite this growing influence, however, Latour's version of ANT has developed a reputation among critical scholars as a status quo approach that ignores inequalities, differences, and power relations; focuses its attention not on marginalized communities but on scientists and bureaucrats; produces only descriptions rather than powerful theoretical explanations; and remains stubbornly allergic to critique (eg, Haraway 1997;Hartwick 2000;Rudy 2005;Swyngedouw and Heynen 2003). 3 If critical geography has already taken the baby (attention to nonhumans) from ANT and thrown out the bathwater, then why make the case for ANT as an alternative approach to environmental justice research-and a critical one at that?

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