Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice

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.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction Part 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 Part 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 Part 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

About the Author :
Sylvia Hood Washington is Founder and Chief Environmental Research Scientist at Environmental Health Research Associates, LLC. Heather Goodall is associate professor in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Technology Sydney. Paul C. Rosier is assistant professor of history at Villanova University.

Review :
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. For scholars and activists alike, there is no more important task than to connect issues of environmental quality and degradation with the history of power and injustice. By inviting us to connect theory with practice, memory with history, and the local with the global, this volume illuminates the depth, complexity, and urgency of contemporary struggles for environmental justice. These essays help us think our way toward a better understanding of the past, while guiding us toward a more hopeful future. Work on environmental justice is a cutting edge area of scholarship in environmental studies. This edited book contributes to the new genre with its own distinctive take. It combines studies of the African-American environmental justice tradition — the best-known type — with consideration of class and gender issues and highlights research on indigenous peoples. It defines environmental justice broadly to include its basis in dispossession of land. Through a comparative dimension and inclusion of a wide range of essays, the book allows us to move beyond a North American focus to a variety of colonial environments in which indigenous issues can be explored. A timely and thought-provoking collection. These moving stories compel us to think about two interrelated questions: Why do societies seem perenially to require necessary victims? And, why have we proven unable to rein in our limitless, even mindless, lust for growth and gain, especially in light of the human costs? Either we heed the Echoes from the Poisoned Well or we will all soon drink its deadly draught. This immensely valuable and unprecedented collection demonstrates clearly that decisions to use the environment, and actions that abuse the environment, are too often decisions and actions that use and abuse people. The book ranges energetically across place and time to expose and explore that deeply human side of environmental issues, blending historical perspective with international relevance and sharp local topicality. And it points to the sorts of intellectual and practical capacities needed to deal with environmental injustice.