Overview

In the decades after World War II, the American economy entered a period of prolonged growth that created unprecedented affluence-but these developments came at the cost of a host of new environmental problems. Unsurprisingly, a disproportionate number of them, such as pollution-emitting factories, waste-handling facilities, and big infrastructure projects, ended up in communities dominated by people of color. Constrained by long-standing practices of segregation that limited their housing and employment options, people of color bore an unequal share of postwar America's environmental burdens. This reader collects a wide range of primary source documents on the rise and evolution of the environmental justice movement. The documents show how environmentalists in the 1970s recognized the unequal environmental burdens that people of color and low-income Americans had to bear, yet failed to take meaningful action to resolve them. Instead, activism by the affected communities themselves spurred the environmental justice movement of the 1980s and early 1990s. By the turn of the twenty-first century, environmental justice had become increasingly mainstream, and issues like climate justice, food justice, and green-collar jobs had taken their places alongside the protection of wilderness as ""environmental"" issues. Environmental Justice in Postwar America is a powerful tool for introducing students to the US environmental justice movement and the sometimes tense relationship between environmentalism and social justice. For more information, visit the editor's website: http://cwwells.net/PostwarEJ

Full Product Details

Author:   Christopher W. Wells ,  Paul S. Sutter
Publisher:   University of Washington Press
Imprint:   University of Washington Press
Weight:   0.612kg
ISBN:  

9780295743684

ISBN 10:   0295743689
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   16 July 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Foreword: The Age of Environmental Inequality / Paul S. Sutter Acknowledgments Introduction PART 1 THE NATURE OF SEGREGATION “WHERE WE LIVE” Russell Lee, Shack of Negro Family Farmers Living near Jarreau, Louisiana, 1938 John Vachon, Backed Up Sewer in Negro Slum District, Norfolk, Virginia, 1941 Carl Mydans, Kitchen of Negro Dwelling in Slum Area near House Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1935 Dorothea Lange, Migratory Mexican Field Worker’s Home on the Edge of a Frozen Pea Field, Imperial Valley, California, 1937 Home Owners Loan Corporation, Los Angeles Data Sheet D52, 1939 John Vachon, Negro Children Standing in Front of Half Mile Concrete Wall, Detroit, Michigan, 1941 Examples of Racially Restrictive Real Estate Covenants Arthur S. Siegel, Detroit, Michigan. Riot at the Sojourner Truth Homes, a New U.S. Federal Housing Project, Caused by White Neighbors’ Attempt to Prevent Negro Tenants from Moving In, 1942 Craig Thompson, “Growing Pains of a Brand-New City,” 1954 Norris Vitchek, “Confessions of a Block-Buster,” 1962 Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., 1963 Fair Housing Protest, Seattle, Washington, 1964 Fair Housing Act of 1968 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, “Understanding Fair Housing,” 1973 “WHERE WE WORK” Ruby T. Lomax, [Cotton Picking Scenes on Roger Williams Plantation in the Delta, New Drew, Mississippi], 1940 John Vachon, Steel Mill Workers, Bethlehem Company, Sparrows Point, Maryland, 1940 Help Wanted White Only Lloyd H. Bailer, “The Negro Automobile Worker,” 1943 Navajo Miners Work at the Kerr-McGee Uranium Mine at Cove, Ariz., 1953 Mildred Pitts Walter, “Biographical Sketch,” September 28, 2017 Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title VII: Equal Employment Opportunity Lyndon B. Johnson, Commencement Address at Howard University: “To Fulfill These Rights,” 1965“ Exhibit 1 in City of Memphis vs. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” 1968 “WHERE WE PLAY” Victor H. Green, ed., Introduction, The Negro Motorist Green Book: 1950 Lewis Mountain Entrance Sign, Shenandoah National Park Colored Only Sign Mayor and City Council of Baltimore City v. Dawson, 1955 Civil Rights Demonstration at Fort Lauderdale’s Segregated Public Beach, 1961 Jackson NAACP Branches to City and State Officials, May 12, 1963 PART 2 A MORE INCLUSIVE ENVIRONMENTALISM? FROM EARTH DAY TO ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE A NEW CIVIL RIGHTS CRITIQUE Indians of All Tribes, “The Alcatraz Proclamation,” 1969 Timothy Benally, “‘So a Lot of the Navajo Ladies Became Widows’” El Malcriado, “Growers Spurn Negotiations on Poisons,” 1969 Wilbur L. Thomas Jr., “Black Survival in Our Polluted Cities,” 1970 RACE, ENVIRONMENTALISM, AND ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE Edmund S. Muskie, Speech at the Philadelphia Earth Week Rally, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, April 22, 1970 EPA Task Force on the Environmental Problems of the Inner City, Our Urban Environment and Our Most Endangered People, 1971 John H. White, Chicago Ghetto on the South Side, 1974 Don Coombs, “The [Sierra] Club Looks at Itself,” 1972 TOXICS, WARREN COUNTY, AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISPARITIES Penelope Ploughman, Protest Signs in Front Yard Love Canal 99th Street Home, 1978 Protest Sign: Danger, Dioxin Kills, 1980 Robert T. Stafford, “Why Superfund Was Needed,” 1981 Jenny Labalme, Anti-PCB Protests in Warren County, North Carolina, 1982 “A Warren County PCB Protest Song,” 1982 General Accounting Office, “Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities,” 1983 Cerrell Associates, Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting, 1984 United Church of Christ, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” 1987 United Church of Christ, “Fifty Metropolitan Areas with Greatest Number of Blacks Living in Communities with Uncontrolled Waste Sites,” 1987 Marianne Lavelle and Marcia Coyle, “Unequal Protection,” 1992 BUILDING THE MOVEMENT Sam Kittner, The Great Louisiana Toxics March, 1988 Peggy Shepard and Chuck Sutton Protest New York City’s North River Sewage Treatment Plant, 1988 SouthWest Organizing Project, “Letter to Big Ten Environmental Groups,” March 16, 1990 Mark Gutierrez, From One Earth Day to the Next, 1990 Indigenous Environmental Network, “Unifying Principles,” 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit Press Conference, October 24, 1991 Dana Alston, “Moving beyond the Barriers,” 1991 “The Principles of Environmental Justice,” 1991 William K. Reilly, “Environmental Equity,” 1992 Melissa Healy, “Administration Joins Fight for ‘Environmental Justice’ Pollution,” 1993 William J. Clinton, Executive Order 12898, February 16, 1994 Dorceta E. Taylor, “Women of Color, Environmental Justice, and Ecofeminism,” 1997 Luz Claudio, “Standing on Principle” “Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing,” 1996 Public Citizen, “NAFTA’s Broken Promises,” 1997 PART 3 THE ENVIRONMENT AND JUSTICE IN THE SUSTAINABILITY ERA INSTITUTIONAL LEGACIES Richard Moore, “Government by the People” Christine Todd Whitman, “Memorandum,” August 9, 2001 Second People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, “Principles of Working Together,” 2002 Robert D. Bullard et al., “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty,” 2007 Marty Durlin, “The Shot Heard Round the West,” 2010 Environmental Protection Agency, “Plan EJ 2014,” 2011 Kristen Lombardi, Talia Buford, and Ronnie Greene, “Environmental Justice, Denied,” 2015 CONTINUING EJ ACTIVISM Tracy Perkins, Buttonwillow Park, CA, January 30, 2009 Tracy Perkins, Wasco, CA, January 30, 2009 Online Meme on #NoDAPL Amy Goodman, “Unlicensed #DAPL Guards Attacked Water Protectors with Dogs & Pepper Spray,” 2016 Brian Bienkowski, “2017 and Beyond: Justice Jumping Genres,” Environmental Health News FROM ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE TO JUSTICE AND THE ENVIRONMENT “Bali Principles of Climate Justice,” August 29, 2002 Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, “Rising Sea Levels,” 2016 Brentin Mock, “For African Americans, Park Access Is about More Than Just Proximity,” 2016 Norma Smith Olson, “Food Justice,” 2013 Van Jones, “Power Shift Keynote,” 2009 World Rainforest Movement, “‘For a Change of Paradigm’: Interview with Tom Goldtooth from the Indigenous Environmental Network,” 2016 Index

Reviews

[A]n important contribution to an EJ literature...it should be widely used there in courses on US environmental history, the history of race and environment, and even on social movements in the twentieth century. * Environmental History *

Author Information

Christopher W. Wells is professor of environmental history at Macalester College. He is the author of Car Country: An Environmental History.

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