Echoes from the Poisoned Well

Global Memories of Environmental Injustice

Foreword by Martin Melosi Edited by Sylvia Hood Washington, Heather Goodall, Paul Rosier Other Jeffrey Stine

Not available to order

Publication date:

07 March 2006

Length of book:

458 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739154472

The emerging environmental justice movement has created greater awareness among scholars that communities from all over the world suffer from similar environmental inequalities. This volume takes up the challenge of linking the focussed campaigns and insights from African American campaigns for environmental justice with the perspectives of this global group of environmentally marginalized groups. The editorial team has drawn on Washington's work, on Paul Rosier's study of Native American environmentalism, and on Heather Goodall's work with Indigenous Australians to seek out wider perspectives on the relationships between memories of injustice and demands for environmental justice in the global arena. This collection contributes to environmental historiography by providing 'bottom up' environmental histories in a field which so far has mostly emphasized a 'top down' perspective, in which the voices of those most heavily burdened by environmental degradation are often ignored. The essays here serve as a modest step in filling this lacuna in environmental history by providing the viewpoints of peoples and of indigenous communities which traditionally have been neglected while linking them to a global context of environmental activism and education. Scholars of environmental justice, as much as the activists in their respective struggle, face challenges in working comparatively to locate the differences between local struggles as well as to celebrate their common ground. In this sense, the chapters in this book represent the opening up of spaces for future conversations rather than any simple ending to the discussion. The contributions, however, reflect growing awareness of that common ground and a rising need to employ linked experiences and strategies in combating environmental injustice on a global scale, in part by mimicking the technology and tools employed by global corporations that endanger the environmental integrity of a diverse set of homelands and ecologies.

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 Foundations and Origins of Environmental Injustice
Chapter 4 1.Class and Environmental Justice
Chapter 5 2.Gendered Approaches to Environmental Justice: An American Sampler
Chapter 6 3.Fond Memories and Bitter Struggles: Concerted Resistance to Environmental Injustices in Post-War Native America
Chapter 7 4.My Soul Looked Back: Environmental Memories of the African in America, 1600-2000
Chapter 8 5.Indigenous Peoples, Colonialism and Memories of Environmental Injustice
Chapter 9 6.Racist Property Holdings and Environmental Coalitions: Addressing Memories of Environmental Injustice
Chapter 10 7.Racialized Spaces & the Emergence of Environmental Injustice
Chapter 11 North American Memories of Environmental Injustice
Chapter 12 8.Wadin' in the Water: African American Migrant Struggles for Environmental Equality in Cleveland, Ohio, 1928-1970
Chapter 13 9.Memories of (no)Place: Homelessness and Environmental Justice
Chapter 14 10.Citizens Against Wilderness: Environmentalism and the Politics of Marginalization in the Great Smoky Mountains
Chapter 15 11.Urban Renewal and Environmental Justice in New York City
Chapter 16 12.Ferrell Parkway: Conflicting Views of Nature in a Mixed Use Community
Chapter 17 13.We Come this Far by Faith: Memories of Race, Religion and Environmental Disparity
Chapter 18 Indigenous Memories of Environmental Injustice
Chapter 19 14.Suttesája - From a Sacred Sami Site and Natural Spring to a Water Bottling Plant? The Effects of Colonization in Northern Europe
Chapter 20 15.What Lies Beneath? Cultural Excavation in Neocolonial Martinique
Chapter 21 16.Plight of the Rara'muri: Crises in Our Backyard
Chapter 22 17.Main Streets and Riverbanks: The Politics of Place in an Australian River Town
Chapter 23 18.Taking Us For Village Idiots: Two Stories of Ethnicity, Class and Toxic Waste from Sydney, Australia
Chapter 24 The Mirrar Fight for Jabiluka: Uranium Mining and Indigenous Australians to 2004
Chapter 25 20.Guardians of the Land: A Maori Community's Environmental Battles
Chapter 26 21.Local History and the Legitimation of Protest in Taipei
Chapter 27 22.Remembering the Mother River: The Impact of Environmental Injustice on National Identity in Contemporary China
Chapter 28 23.Environmental Justice and Popular Protest in Thailand
Chapter 29 Aiee, our fields will be destroyed: Dubious Science and Peasant Environmental Practices in Madziwa, Zimbabwe
Chapter 30 25.Shell International, the Ogoni People and Environmental Injustice in the Niger Delta, Nigeria: The Challenge of Securing Environmental Justice in an Oil-based Economy
Chapter 31 26.The Community, Industry and the Quest for a Clean Vaal River 1997-2004
Chapter 32 Epilogue

This bold and broad-ranging book presents the pan-global phenomenon of environmental injustice from an historical perspective for the first time. In a volume of well-written and sophisticated analyses, expert authors explore the roots and effects of environmental inequity in societies as different as Finland, Zimbabwe, Australia, Martinique, Taiwan, and the United States. Covering a diversity of urban and rural communities in the developing and developed world, periphery and metropole, indigenous and academic voices are finely balanced. This ambitious collection is innovative in including wide variety and different scales of environmental impacts, including forestry, mining, housing and industrial development, water supply, the effects of pollution and much else. This thought-provoking and instructive book with its interesting mix of perspectives will have wide appeal..