Seeking Environmental Justice

From Flint, Michigan, to Standing Rock, North Dakota, minorities have found themselves losing the battle for clean resources and a healthy environment. This book provides a modern history of such environmental injustices in the United States and Canada. From the 19th-century extermination of the buffalo in the American West to Alaska's Project Chariot (a Cold War initiative that planned to use atomic bombs to blast out a harbor on Eskimo land) to the struggle for recovery and justice in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017, this book provides readers with an enhanced understanding of how poor and minority people are affected by natural and manmade environmental crises. Written for students as well as the general reader with an interest in social justice and environmental issues, this book traces the relationship between environmental discrimination, race, and class through a comprehensive case history of environmental injustices. Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada: Seeking Justice and Sustainability includes 50 such case studies that range from local to national to international crises.

Based on presentations made at the conference entitled Environmental Justice and Global Citizenship held in July 2006 at Oxford, UK, 14 papers consider environmental concerns against their social contexts. Contributors address theories in environmental management as they pertain to society and to orientations in "perverse" ecologies, the framework of sustainability, including voluntary agreements and incentives, class and conflict in environmental governance, including the uses of effective conflict, information management including the public debate on genetic modification and the differences between experts and laymen, environmental activism, education, including environmental education in a course on ethics and international development, and the effects of free trade, corporate capitalism, and empowerment of professionals, on sustainability and international environmental law.

From Flint, Michigan, to Standing Rock, North Dakota, minorities have found themselves losing the battle for clean resources and a healthy environment. This book provides a modern history of such environmental injustices in the United States and Canada. From the 19th-century extermination of the buffalo in the American West to Alaska's Project Chariot (a Cold War initiative that planned to use atomic bombs to blast out a harbor on Eskimo land) to the struggle for recovery and justice in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017, this book provides readers with an enhanced understanding of how poor and minority people are affected by natural and manmade environmental crises. Written for students as well as the general reader with an interest in social justice and environmental issues, this book traces the relationship between environmental discrimination, race, and class through a comprehensive case history of environmental injustices. Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada: Seeking Justice and Sustainability includes 50 such case studies that range from local to national to international crises.

A new collection of essays capturing the voices of frontline warriors who are battling environmental injustice and human rights abuses at the grassroots level around the world.

Post-truth politics have threatened science itself. Drawing on case studies from around the world, Toxic Truths examines enduring issues and new challenges for tackling environmental injustice in a post-truth age.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Debates over science, facts, and values are pivotal in the struggle for environmental justice. For decades, environmental justice activists have campaigned against the misuse of science, engaging in community-led citizen science that champions knowledge produced by and for ordinary people living with environmental risks and hazards. However, post-truth politics have threatened science itself. Toxic truths examines the relationship between environmental justice and citizen science, focusing on enduring issues and new challenges in a post-truth age. The volume features a range of community-based participatory environmental health and justice research projects that seek to establish different ways of sensing, witnessing, and interpreting environmental injustice. From struggles in American hog country and contaminated indigenous communities, to local environmental controversies in Spain and China, this volume examines political strategies for seeking environmental justice. With international, interdisciplinary contributions from distinguished authors, emerging scholars and community activists, Toxic truths is essential reading for those seeking to understand the cutting edge of citizen science and activism around the world.

Conceptualizing Environmental Justice evolved from an ethnographic study of an environmental justice movement in a rural community called Land Between the Rivers in Kentucky. The environmental movement emerged as a result of collective displacement for the construction of two dams and an environmental refuge over a period of sixty years. This book explores the historical and contemporary efforts to mobilize the community and asks what specific strategies and tools were adopted and how these tools coalesced into four justice themes: cultural injustices, economic deprivation, institutional fairness, and political agency. It explores how each theme shaped and informed the displaced residents’ efforts to protect their rights and seek justice. This book argues that expanding the conceptual foci of environmental justice theory and identifying both distributive and non-distributive themes of justice allows us to understand the complexities of environmental movement narratives and examine what shape environmental justice movements will take in the future.

The concept of environmental justice has offered a new direction for social movements and public policy in recent decades, and researchers worldwide now position social equity as a prerequisite for sustainability. Yet the relationship between social equity and environmental sustainability has been little studied in Canada. Speaking for Ourselves draws together Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal scholars and activists who bring equity issues to the forefront by considering environmental justice from multiple perspectives and in specifically Canadian contexts.