Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States by
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene When Joe Biden attempted to compliment Barack Obama by calling him "clean and articulate," he unwittingly tapped into one of the most destructive racial stereotypes in American history. This book tells the history of the corrosive idea that whites are clean and those who are not white are dirty. From the age of Thomas Jefferson to the Memphis Public Workers strike of 1968 through the present day, ideas about race and waste have shaped where people have lived, where people have worked, and how American society's wastes have been managed. In the wake of the civil war, as the nation encountered emancipation, mass immigration, and the growth of an urbanized society, Americans began to conflate the ideas of race and waste. Certain immigrant groups took on waste management labor, such as Jews and scrap metal recycling, fostering connections between the socially marginalized and refuse. Ethnic "purity" was tied to pure cleanliness, and hygiene became a central aspect of white identity. Carl A. Zimring here draws on historical evidence from statesmen, scholars, sanitarians, novelists, activists, advertisements, and the United States Census of Population to reveal changing constructions of environmental racism. The material consequences of these attitudes endured and expanded through the twentieth century, shaping waste management systems and environmental inequalities that endure into the twenty-first century. Today, the bigoted idea that non-whites are "dirty" remains deeply ingrained in the national psyche, continuing to shape social and environmental inequalities in the age of Obama.
Environmental Justice and the Rights of Unborn and Future Generations by
The traditional concept of social justice is increasingly being challenged by the notion of a humankind that spans current and future generations. This book, with a foreword by Roger Brownsword, is the first systematic examination of how the rights of the unborn and future generations are handled in common law and under international legal instruments. It provides comprehensive coverage of the arguments over international legal instruments, key legal cases and examples including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, industrial disasters, clean water provision, diet, HIV/AIDS, environmental racism and climate change. Also covered are international agreements and objectives as diverse as the Kyoto Protocol, the Millennium Development Goals and international trade.The result is the most controversial and thorough examination to date of the subject and the enormous ramifications and challenges it poses to every aspect of international and domestic environmental, human rights, trade and public health law and policy.
Environmental Racism and the Environmental Justice Movement by 
Faces of Environmental Racism: Confronting Issues of Global Justice by
Racial minorities in the United States are disproportionately exposed to toxic wastes and other environmental hazards, and cleanup efforts in their communities are slower and less thorough than efforts elsewhere. Internationally, wealthy countries of the North increasingly ship hazardous wastes to poorer countries of the South, resulting in such tragedies as the disaster at Bhopal. Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South. The second edition of this unique volume further explores the ongoing problem of environmental racism. With a new introduction and preface, and new chapters by such experts as Charles W. Mills, Robert Melchior Figueroa, and Segun Gbadegesin, the second edition of Faces of Environmental Racism carries on the work of the first.
Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference: An Ecointersectional Analysis by 
Racial Ecologies by
From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people's lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world. Grounded in an ethnic-studies perspective, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how race intersects with Indigeneity, colonialism, gender, nationality, and class to shape our understanding of both nature and environmental harm, showing how and why environmental issues are also racial issues. Indeed, Indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial frameworks are crucial for comprehending and addressing accelerating anthropogenic change, from the local to the global, and for imagining speculative futures. This forward-looking, critical intervention bridges environmental scholarship and ethnic studies and will prove indispensable to activists, scholars, and students alike.
A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the American Mind by
A "powerful and indispensable" look at the devastating consequences of environmental racism (Gerald Markowitz) -- and what we can do to remedy its toxic effects on marginalized communities. Did you know... Middle-class African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than those of very poor white households with incomes below $10,000. When swallowed, a lead-paint chip no larger than a fingernail can send a toddler into a coma -- one-tenth of that amount will lower his IQ. Nearly two of every five African American homes in Baltimore are plagued by lead-based paint. Almost all of the 37,500 Baltimore children who suffered lead poisoning between 2003 and 2015 were African American. From injuries caused by lead poisoning to the devastating effects of atmospheric pollution, infectious disease, and industrial waste, Americans of color are harmed by environmental hazards in staggeringly disproportionate numbers. This systemic onslaught of toxic exposure and institutional negligence causes irreparable physical harm to millions of people across the country-cutting lives tragically short and needlessly burdening our health care system. But these deadly environments create another insidious and often overlooked consequence: robbing communities of color, and America as a whole, of intellectual power. The 1994 publication of The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. She takes apart the spurious notion of intelligence as an inherited trait, using copious data that instead point to a different cause of the reported African American-white IQ gap: environmental racism - a confluence of racism and other institutional factors that relegate marginalized communities to living and working near sites of toxic waste, pollution, and insufficient sanitation services. She investigates heavy metals, neurotoxins, deficient prenatal care, bad nutrition, and even pathogens as chief agents influencing intelligence to explain why communities of color are disproportionately affected -- and what can be done to remedy this devastating problem. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.
There's Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities by
In "There's Something In The Water", Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities. Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi'kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova Scotia and Canada, Waldron opens a space for a more critical dialogue on how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context. Waldron also illustrates the ways in which the effects of environmental racism are compounded by other forms of oppression to further dehumanize and harm communities already dealing with pre-existing vulnerabilities, such as long-standing social and economic inequality. Finally, Waldron documents the long history of struggle, resistance, and mobilizing in Indigenous and Black communities to address environmental racism.
Toxic Heritage: Legacies, Futures and Environmental Justice by
Toxic Heritage addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue. Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars from around the world, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises. Toxic Heritage is useful and relevant to scholars and students working across a range of disciplines, including heritage studies, environmental science, archaeology, anthropology, and geography.
A Case for Environmental Justice by
Issues of the environment and its sustainability are linked to those of global warming, climate change and loss of biodiversity. This is so because there is a general consensus in the scientific community that the long-term shift or alteration of temperature and weather patterns both locally and globally are the result of human activities not the least those of burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, agricultural practices, land-use changes, pollution. Accordingly, questions of environmental justice arise because of the threat that anthropogenic climate change pose to our planet. This book examines these issues using as its point of departure environmental justice, where environmental justice is concerned with environmental sustainability and the equitable treatment and involvement of people of all races, cultures, incomes, and educational levels in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental programs, laws, rules, and policies. The book discusses, among other things, the population and consumption debate with regard to resource depletion and loss of biodiversity, problems of global policing of environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by nation-states in the context of the tragedy of the commons and possible solutions to some of these problems from African and Native American philosophies and worldviews.
Climate Change Justice by
A provocative contribution to the climate justice debate Climate change and justice are so closely associated that many people take it for granted that a global climate treaty should--indeed, must--directly address both issues together. But, in fact, this would be a serious mistake, one that, by dooming effective international limits on greenhouse gases, would actually make the world's poor and developing nations far worse off. This is the provocative and original argument of Climate Change Justice. Eric Posner and David Weisbach strongly favor both a climate change agreement and efforts to improve economic justice. But they make a powerful case that the best--and possibly only--way to get an effective climate treaty is to exclude measures designed to redistribute wealth or address historical wrongs against underdeveloped countries. In clear language, Climate Change Justice proposes four basic principles for designing the only kind of climate treaty that will work--a forward-looking agreement that requires every country to make greenhouse-gas reductions but still makes every country better off in its own view. This kind of treaty has the best chance of actually controlling climate change and improving the welfare of people around the world.
Climate Justice by
The antidote for your climate change paralysis. --Sierra Magazine An urgent call to arms by one of the most important voices in the international fight against climate change, sharing inspiring stories and offering vital lessons for the path forward. Holding her first grandchild in her arms in 2003, Mary Robinson was struck by the uncertainty of the world he had been born into. Before his fiftieth birthday, he would share the planet with more than nine billion people--people battling for food, water, and shelter in an increasingly volatile climate. The faceless, shadowy menace of climate change had become, in an instant, deeply personal. Mary Robinson's mission would lead her all over the world, from Malawi to Mongolia, and to a heartening revelation: that an irrepressible driving force in the battle for climate justice could be found at the grassroots level, mainly among women, many of them mothers and grandmothers like herself. From Sharon Hanshaw, the Mississippi matriarch whose campaign began in her East Biloxi hair salon and culminated in her speaking at the United Nations, to Constance Okollet, a small farmer who transformed the fortunes of her ailing community in rural Uganda, Robinson met with ordinary people whose resilience and ingenuity had already unlocked extraordinary change. Powerful and deeply humane, Climate Justice is a stirring manifesto on one of the most pressing humanitarian issues of our time, and a lucid, affirmative, and well-argued case for hope. "As advocate for the forgotten and the ignored, Mary Robinson has not only shone a light on human suffering, but illuminated a better future for our world." -Barack Obama
Climate Justice and Disaster Law by
Climate disasters demand an integration of multilateral negotiations on climate change, disaster risk reduction, sustainable development, human rights and human security. Via detailed examination of recent law and policy initiatives from around the world, and making use of a capability approach, Rosemary Lyster develops a unique approach to human and non-human climate justice and its application to all stages of a disaster: prevention; response, recovery and rebuilding; and compensation and risk transfer. She comprehensively analyses the complexities of climate science and their interfaces with the law- and policy-making processes, and also provides an in-depth analysis of multilateral climate change negotiations under the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justice by
Feminist Frontiers in Climate Justiceprovides a compelling demonstration of the deeply gendered and unequal effects of the climate emergency, alongside the urgent need for a feminist perspective to expose and address these structural political, social and economic inequalities. Taking a nuanced, multidisciplinary approach, this book explores new ways of thinking about how climate change interacts with gender inequalities and feminist concerns with rights and law, and how the human world is bound up with the non-human, natural world. With contributions from leading scholars in law, feminism, human rights and politics, this book considers how equality is conceptualised experienced and used in policies, law and practice that are integral to climate justice. Chapters reveal how international and national policy and legal frameworks fall short on gender equality and climate justice. Overall, the book demonstrates that the climate crisis demands an ambitious and transformative approach to equality, including developing feminist ideas of care and social reproduction, to reconstruct law and policy towards a more just world for all. This ground-breaking book will be essential reading for scholars across many areas of law including environmental law, human rights, public international law, law and gender, and law and development. Its discussion of the international framework alongside in-depth casestudies and assessments of women's mobilization strategies will also be highly relevant to social scientists, officials in international organizations, policymakers, lawyers and activists.
Indigenous Peoples and Climate Justice by
​This book provides a new interpretation of international law specifically dedicated to Indigenous peoples in the context of a climate justice approach. The book presents a critical analysis of past and current developments at the intersection of human rights and international environmental law and governance. The book suggests new ways forward and demonstrates the need for a paradigmatic shift that would enhance the meaningful participation of Indigenous peoples as fundamental actors in the conservation of biodiversity and in the fight against climate change. The book offers guidance on a number of critical intersecting and interdependent issues at the forefront of climate change law and policy - inside and outside of the UN climate change regime. The author suggests that the adoption of a critical perspective on international law is needed in order to highlight inherent structural and systemic issues of the international law regime which are all issues that ultimately impede the pursue of climate justice for Indigenous peoples.
The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society by
Climate change presents perhaps the most profound challenge ever confronted by human society. This volume is a definitive analysis drawing on the best thinking on questions of how climate change affects human systems, and how societies can, do, and should respond. Key topics covered include the history of the issues, social and political reception of climate science, the denial of that science by individuals and organized interests, the nature of the social disruptions caused by climate change, the economics of those disruptions and possible responses to them, questions of human security and social justice, obligations to future generations, policy instruments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and governance at local, regional, national, international, and global levels.
Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice by
The term "climate justice" began to gain traction in the late 1990s following a wide range of activities by social and environmental justice movements that emerged in response to the operations of the fossil fuel industry and, later, to what their members saw as the failed global climate governance model that became so transparent at COP15 in Copenhagen. The term continues to gain momentum in discussions around sustainable development, climate change, mitigation and adaptation, and has been slowly making its way into the world of international and national policy. However, the connections between these remain unestablished. Addressing the need for a comprehensive and integrated reference compendium, The Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice provides students, academics and professionals with a valuable insight into this fast-growing field. Drawing together a multidisciplinary range of authors from the Global North and South, this Handbook addresses some of the most salient topics in current climate justice research, including just transition, urban climate justice and public engagement, in addition to the field's more traditional focus on gender, international governance and climate ethics. With an emphasis on facilitating learning based on cutting-edge specialised climate justice research and application, each chapter draws from the most recent sources, real-world best practices and tutored reflections on the strategic dimensions of climate justice and its related disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice will be essential reading for students and scholars, as well as being a vital reference tool for those practically engaged in the field.
Threatened Island Nations: Legal Implications of Rising Seas and a Changing Climate by
Rising seas are endangering the habitability and very existence of several small island nations, mostly in the Pacific and Indian oceans. This is the first book to focus on the myriad legal issues posed by this tragic situation: if a nation is under water, is it still a state? Does it still have a seat at the United Nations? What becomes of its exclusive economic zone, the basis for its fishing rights? What obligations do other nations have to take in the displaced populations, and what are these peoples' rights and legal status once they arrive? Should there be a new international agreement on climate-displaced populations? Do these nations and their citizens have any legal recourse for compensation? Are there any courts that will hear their claims, and based on what theories? Leading legal scholars from around the world address these novel questions and propose answers.
 |  |  |  |
© The Regents of the University of California. UCLA School of Law. All Rights Reserved.
