Race Class Gender And American Environmentalism

Examines the environmental experiences of middle & working class whites & people of color in the U.S. during the 19th & 20th cent. Race, class, & gender had profound effects on people's EV experiences, & consequently their activism. While some middle class whites fled the cities & their urban ills to focus on outdoor, wilderness & wildlife issues, some stayed in the cities to develop urban parks & help improve urban EV conditions. The white working class collaborated with white middle-class urban EV activists to improve public health & worker health & safety, whereas people of color developed activist agendas that linked racism & oppression to worker health & safety issues, loss or denial of land ownership, & infringement on human rights.

Historical snapshots of the Love Canal area -- Gender at Love Canal -- Race at Love Canal -- Class at Love Canal -- Historical implications of gender, race, and class at Love Canal

In The Environment and the People in American Cities, Dorceta E. Taylor provides an in-depth examination of the development of urban environments, and urban environmentalism, in the United States. Taylor focuses on the evolution of the city, the emergence of elite reformers, the framing of environmental problems, and the perceptions of and responses to breakdowns in social order, from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. She demonstrates how social inequalities repeatedly informed the adjudication of questions related to health, safety, and land access and use. While many accounts of environmental history begin and end with wildlife and wilderness, Taylor shows that the city offers important clues to understanding the evolution of American environmental activism. Taylor traces the progression of several major thrusts in urban environmental activism, including the alleviation of poverty; sanitary reform and public health; safe, affordable, and adequate housing; parks, playgrounds, and open space; occupational health and safety; consumer protection (food and product safety); and land use and urban planning. At the same time, she presents a historical analysis of the ways race, class, and gender shaped experiences and perceptions of the environment as well as environmental activism and the construction of environmental discourses. Throughout her analysis, Taylor illuminates connections between the social and environmental conflicts of the past and those of the present. She describes the displacement of people of color for the production of natural open space for the white and wealthy, the close proximity between garbage and communities of color in early America, the cozy relationship between middle-class environmentalists and the business community, and the continuous resistance against environmental inequalities on the part of ordinary residents from marginal communities.

Until recently, mainstream American environmentalism has been a predominantly white, middle-class movement, essentially ignoring the class, race, and gender dimensions of environmental politics. In this provocative collection of original essays, the environmental dimensions of the Chicana/o experience are explicitly expressed and debated. Employing a variety of genres ranging from poetry to autobiography to theoretical and empirical essays, the voices in this collection speak to the most significant issues of environmentalism and social justice, recognizing throughout the need for a pluralism of Chicana/o philosophies. The contributors provide an excellent basis for understanding how multiple Chicana/o views on the environment play out in the context of dominant social, political and economic views. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics examines a number of Chicana/o ecological perspectives. How can the ethics of reciprocity present in Chicana/o agropastoral life be protected and applied on a broader scale? How can the dominant society, whose economic structure is invested in "placeless mobility," take note of the harm caused to land-based cultures, take responsibility for it, and take heed before it is too late? Will the larger society be "ecologically housebroken" before it destroys its home? Grounded in actual political struggles waged by Chicana/o communities over issues of environmental destruction, cultural genocide, and socioeconomic domination, this volume provides an important series of snapshots of Chicana/o history. Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics illuminates the bridges that existÑand must be understoodÑbetween race, ethnicity, class, gender, politics, and ecology. CONTENTS Part 1: IndoHispano Land Ethics Los Animalitos: Culture, Ecology, and the Politics of Place in the Upper RÁo Grande, Devon G. Pe–a Social Action Research, Bioregionalism, and the Upper R’o Grande, RubŽn O. Mart’nez Notes on (Home)Land Ethics: Ideas, Values, and the Land, Reyes Garc’a Part 2: Environmental History and Ecological Politics Ecological Legitimacy and Cultural Essentialism: Hispano Grazing in Northern New Mexico, Laura Pulido The Capitalist Tool, the Lawless, and the Violent: A Critique of Recent Southwestern Environmental History, Devon G. Pe–a and RubŽn O. Mart’nez Ecofeminism and Chicano Environmental Struggles: Bridges across Gender and Race, Gwyn Kirk Philosophy Meets Practice: A Critique of Ecofeminism through the Voices of Three Chicana Activists, Malia Davis Part 3: Alternatives to Destruction The Pasture Poacher (a poem), Joseph C. Gallegos Acequia Tales: Stories from a Chicano Centennial Farm, Joseph C. Gallegos A Gold Mine, an Orchard, and an Eleventh Commandment, Devon G. Pe–a

Thirty years after the headlines, Love Canal remains synonymous with toxic waste. When this neighborhood of Niagara Falls, New York, burst upon the nation's consciousness, the media focused on a working-class white woman named Lois Gibbs, who gained prominence as an activist fighting to save families from the poison buried beneath their homes. Her organization, the Love Canal Homeowners Association, challenged big government and big business-and ultimately won relocation. But as Elizabeth Blum now shows, the activists at Love Canal were a very diverse lot. Blum reveals that more lurks beneath the surface of this story than most people realize-and more than mere toxins. She takes readers behind the headlines to show that others besides Gibbs played important roles and to examine how race, class, and gender influenced the way people-from African American women to middle class white Christian groups-experienced the crisis and became active at Love Canal. Blum explores the often-rocky interracial relationships of the community, revealing how marginalized black women fought to be heard as they defined their environmental activism as an ongoing part of the civil rights struggle. And she examines how the middle-class Ecumenical Task Force-consisting of progressive, educated whites-helped to negotiate legal obstacles and to secure the means to relocate and compensate black residents. Blum also demonstrates how the crisis challenged gender lines far beyond casting mothers in activist roles. Women of the LCHA may have rejected feminism because of its anti-family stance, but they staunchly believed in their rights. And the incident changed the lives of working-class men, who found their wives in the front lines rather than in the kitchen. In addition, male bureaucrats and politicians ran into significant opposition from groups of both men and women who pressed for greater emphasis on health rather than economics for solutions to the crisis. No previous account of Love Canal has considered the plight of these other segments of the population. By doing so, Blum shows that environmental activism opens a window on broader social movements and ideas, such as civil rights and feminism. Her book moves the story of Love Canal well beyond its iconic legacy-the Superfund Act that makes polluters accountable-to highlight another vital legacy, one firmly rooted in race, class, and gender.

In this thoughtful and highly readable book, Noël Sturgeon illustrates the myriad and insidious ways in which American popular culture depicts social inequities as “natural” and how our images of “nature” interfere with creating solutions to environmental problems that are just and fair for all. Why is it, she wonders, that environmentalist messages in popular culture so often “naturalize” themes of heroic male violence, suburban nuclear family structures, and U.S. dominance in the world? And what do these patterns of thought mean for how we envision environmental solutions, like “green” businesses, recycling programs, and the protection of threatened species? Although there are other books that examine questions of culture and environment, this is the first book to employ a global feminist environmental justice analysis to focus on how racial inequality, gendered patterns of work, and heteronormative ideas about the family relate to environmental questions. Beginning in the late 1980s and moving to the present day, Sturgeon unpacks a variety of cultural tropes, including ideas about Mother Nature, the purity of the natural, and the allegedly close relationships of indigenous people with the natural world. She investigates the persistence of the “myth of the frontier” and its extension to the frontier of space exploration. She ponders the popularity (and occasional controversy) of penguins (and penguin family values) and questions assumptions about human warfare as “natural.” The book is intended to provoke debates—among college students and graduate students, among their professors, among environmental activists, and among all citizens who are concerned with issues of environmental quality and social equality.

Women make up the vast majority of activists and organizers of grassroots movements fighting against environmental ills that threaten poor and people of color communities. [This] collection of essays ... pays tribute to the ... contributions women have made in these endeavors. The writers offer varied examples of environmental justice issues such as children's environmental-health campaigns, cancer research, AIDS/HIV activism, the Environmental Genome Project, and popular culture, among many others. Each one focuses on gender and sexuality as crucial factors in women's or gay men's activism and applies environmental justice principles to related struggles for sexual justice. Drawing on a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives, the contributors offer multiple vantage points on gender, sexuality, and activism.-Back cover.