Synopses & Reviews
Review
"This collection of twelve articles provides a provocative profile of the environmental justice movement throughout the United States. These prominent contributors have produced a compelling narrative of how environmental injustice affects people of color and low-income groups. It reveals the questionable practice of market forces and how they impact human and nonhuman life. It chronicles culture, race and class issues and the critical role of women and their contribution to the movement. People are making a difference. It urges and supports the democratic participation of a broad spectrum of groups interested in making communities safe, nurturing, productive and just. This book is of utmost importance, and should be read by everybody who is concerned about these issues." --Bunyan Bryant, School of Natural Resources & Environment, University of Michigan
"This important book is essential reading for people who want to understand both the root causes of the U.S. environmental crisis, and the vigorous leadership of those fighting for environmental justice." --Joshua Karliner, TRAC--Transnational Resource & Action Center Corporate Watch, San Francisco, CA
Synopsis
Corporate America increasingly relies on environmentally unsustainable forms of production, and not all Americans bear their costs equally. People of color are 47 percent more likely than whites to live near a hazardous waste facility. Fifty-seven percent of whites live in areas with poor air quality, compared to 80 percent of Latinos. Nationwide, nearly a thousand farm workers die of pesticide poisoning each year.
Illuminating manifold connections between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of vulnerable communities, a new wave of grassroots environmentalism is building in the United States. Groups that have traditionally been at the periphery of mainstream environmentalism--poor people, working people, and people of color--are fusing the fight for a healthy environment with historical struggles for civil rights and social justice. This timely book brings together leading scholars and activists to provide an ecosocialist perspective on the goals, strategies, and accomplishments of the environmental justice movement, and to explore the emerging principles of ecological democracy that undergird it.
About the Author
Daniel Faber, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northeastern University and a co-founding editor of
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology. A longtime social and environmental activist, Dr. Faber has published widely on the Central and North American environmental crises. He is the author of
Environments Under Fire, CHOICE Magazine's 1993 Outstanding Academic Book of the Year on Latin America.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Carl Anthony
Introduction, Faber
1. The Political Ecology of American Capitalism: New Challenges for the Environmental Justice Movement, Faber
2. Dying for a Living: Workers, Production, and the Environment, Levenstein and Wooding
3. Risk and Justice: Capitalist Production and the Environment, Field
4. Environmental Justice from the Grassroots: Reflections on History, Gender, and Expertise, Di Chiro
5. Popular Epidemiology and the Struggle for Community Health in the Environmental Justice Movement, Novotny
6. The Network for Environmental and Economic Justice in the Southwest: An Interview with Richard Moore, Almeida
7. The Limits of Environmentalism without Class: Lessons from the Ancient Forest Struggle of the Pacific Northwest, Foster
8. Remapping North American Environmentalism: Contending Visions and Divergent Practices in the Fight over NAFTA, Dreiling
9. Earth First! in Northern California: An Interview with Judi Bari, Bevington
10. Racism and Resource Colonization, Gedicks
11. Ecological Legitimacy and Cultural Essentialism: Hispano Grazing in the Southwest, Pulido
12. The "Brown" and the "Green" Revisited: Chicanos and Environmental Politics in the Upper Rio Grande, Peña and Mondragon-Valdéz