Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice provides a comprehensive overview of the achievements and challenges confronting the environmental justice movement. Pressured by increased international competition and the demand for higher profits, industrial and political leaders are working to weaken many of America's most essential environmental, occupational, and consumer protection laws. In addition, corporate-led globalization exports many ecological hazards abroad. The result is a deepening of the ecological crisis in both the United States and the Global South. However, not all people are impacted equally. In this process of capital restructuring, it is the most marginalized segments of society -poor people of color and the working class-that suffer the greatest force of corporate environmental abuses. Daniel Faber, a leading environmental sociologist, analyzes the global political and economic forces that create these environmental injustices. With a multi-disciplinary approach, Faber presents both broad overviews and powerful insider case studies, examining the connections between many different struggles for change. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice explores compelling movements to challenge the polluter-industrial complex and bring about meaningful social transformation.

Environmental Injustice in the United States provides systematic insight into the social, economic, and political dynamics of environmental decision-making, and the impacts of those decisions on minority communities. The first part of the book examines closely the history of the environmental justice movement and the scholarly literature to date, with a discussion about how the issue made the public agenda in the first place. The second part of the book is a unique quantitative analysis of the relationship among race, class, political mobilization, and environmental harm at three levels-- state, county, and city. Despite the initial skepticism of the authors, their study finds both race and class to be significant variables in explaining patterns of environmental harm. The third part of the book then offers policy recommendations to decisionmakers, based on the book's findings. It was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 2001.

Provides systematic insight into the political, social, and economic dynamics of environmental decision making and how they effect minority communities. Includes a quantitative analysis of the relationship between race, class, and political mobilization and environmental harm at the city, state and county levels.

This book is an historical examination of environmental justice struggles across the globe from the perspective of environmentally marginalized communities. It is unique in environmental justice histography because it recounts these struggles by integrating the actual voices and memories of communities who grappled with environmental inequalities.

In the United States, few issues are more socially divisive than the location of hazardous waste facilities and other environmentally harmful enterprises. Do the negative impacts of such polluters fall disproportionately on African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian Americans? Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles discusses how political, economic, social, and cultural factors contribute to local government officials' consistent location of hazardous and toxic waste facilities in low-income neighborhoods and how, as a result, low-income groups suffer disproportionately from the regressive impacts of environmental policy. David E. Camacho's collection of essays examines the value-laden choices behind the public policy that determines placement of commercial environmental hazards, points to the underrepresentation of people of color in the policymaking process, and discusses the lack of public advocates representing low-income neighborhoods and communities. This book combines empirical evidence and case studies--from the failure to provide basic services to the "colonias" in El Paso County, Texas, to the race for water in Nevada--and covers in great detail the environmental dangers posed to minority communities, including the largely unexamined communities of Native Americans. The contributors call for cooperation between national environmental interest groups and local grassroots activism, more effective incentives and disincentives for polluters, and the adoption by policymakers of an alternative, rather than privileged, perspective that is more sensitive to the causes and consequences of environmental inequities. Environmental Injustices, Political Struggles is a unique collection for those interested in the environment, public policy, and civil rights as well as for students and scholars of political science, race and ethnicity, and urban and regional planning. Contributors. C. Richard Bath, Kate A. Berry, John G. Bretting, David E. Camacho, Jeanne Nienaber Clarke, Andrea K. Gerlak, Peter I. Longo, Diane-Michele Prindeville, Linda Robyn, Stephen Sandweiss, Janet M. Tanski, Mary M. Timney, Roberto E. Villarreal, Harvey L. White

“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.

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.