While Michael Pollan and others have popularized ideas about how growing one's own food can help lead to environmental sustainability, environmental justice activists have pushed for more access to gardens and fresh food in impoverished communities. Now, Robert S. Emmett argues that mid-twentieth-century American garden writing included many ideas that became formative for these contemporary environmental writers and activists. Drawing on ecocriticism, environmental history, landscape architecture, and recent work in environmental justice and food studies, Emmett explores how the language of environmental justice emerged in descriptions of gardening across a variety of literary forms. He reveals early egalitarian associations found in garden writing, despite a popular focus on elite sites such as suburban lawns and formal southern gardens. Cultivating Environmental Justice emphasizes the intergenerational work of gardeners and garden writers who, from the 1930s on, asserted increasingly radical socioeconomic and ecological claims to justice. Emmett considers a wide range of texts by authors including Bernard M'Mahon, Scott and Helen Nearing, Katharine S. White, Elizabeth Lawrence, Alice Walker, and Novella Carpenter.
Documents how racial and social inequalities are built into our food system, and how communities are creating environmentally sustainable and socially just alternatives.
A powerful movement is happening in farming today—farmers are reconnecting with their roots to fight climate change. For one woman, that’s meant learning her tribe’s history to help bring back the buffalo. For another, it’s meant preserving forest purchased by her great-great-uncle, among the first wave of African Americans to buy land. Others are rejecting monoculture to grow corn, beans, and squash the way farmers in Mexico have done for centuries. Still others are rotating crops for the native cuisines of those who fled the “American wars” in Southeast Asia. In Healing Grounds, Liz Carlisle tells the stories of Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Asian American farmers who are reviving their ancestors’ methods of growing food—techniques long suppressed by the industrial food system. These farmers are restoring native prairies, nurturing beneficial fungi, and enriching soil health. While feeding their communities and revitalizing cultural ties to land, they are steadily stitching ecosystems back together and repairing the natural carbon cycle. This, Carlisle shows, is the true regenerative agriculture – not merely a set of technical tricks for storing CO2 in the ground, but a holistic approach that values diversity in both plants and people. Cultivating this kind of regenerative farming will require reckoning with our nation’s agricultural history—a history marked by discrimination and displacement. And it will ultimately require dismantling power structures that have blocked many farmers of color from owning land or building wealth. The task is great, but so is its promise. By coming together to restore these farmlands, we can not only heal our planet, we can heal our communities and ourselves.
Human societies have always been deeply interconnected with our ecosystems, but today those relationships are witnessing greater frictions, tensions, and harms than ever before. These harms mirror those experienced by marginalized groups across the planet. In this novel book, David Naguib Pellow introduces a new framework for critically analyzing Environmental Justice scholarship and activism. In doing so he extends the field's focus to topics not usually associated with environmental justice, including the Israel/Palestine conflict and the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. In doing so he reveals that ecological violence is first and foremost a form of social violence, driven by and legitimated by social structures and discourses. Those already familiar with the discipline will find themselves invited to think about the subject in a new way. This book will be a vital resource for students, scholars, and policy makers interested in transformative approaches to one of the greatest challenges facing humanity and the planet.
This is a wonderful book rich in empirical detail, full of theoretical insights, offering hope in a bleak world, altogether inspiring. . . a tremendous achievement of having helped to create the disciplines of ecological economics and political ecology, bringing them alive in this book, and making their insights available to the developing worldwide movement for environmental justice. Pat Devine, Environmental Values Any book by the ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier is a Big Publishing Event. . . this is a book by a writer who loves his subject, knows it well, respects its history, and is driven by the desire to do justice. These are qualities enough to send you to the bookshop or the library in search of The Environmentalism of the Poor. Andrew Dobson, Environment Politics The book is a worthy and in-depth contribution to debates about political ecology and ecological economics. It should be read by all environmental and ecological economists who wish to make their analysis more relevant. Tim Forsyth, Progress in Development Studies A marvellous combination of insight, research and activism. . . A must-read for policymakers, practitioners and academics alike, and for anyone concerned with sustainable development, environmentalism or poverty alleviation. Human Ecology Journal . . . one of the most important environmental books to have been published recently. Martinez-Alier integrates two of the most significant areas of environmental theory political ecology and ecological economics. Eurig Scandrett, Friends of the Earth Scotland The book has three main strengths: its bibliography, which is extensive; the global perspective on the environmental movement and the relationship with poverty; and the general theme of this interdisciplinary work, which is not so much to provide new information, but to consider the existing information in a new light. Martinez-Alier is to be commended for taking such a step in the literature . . . the writing style is extremely approachable . . . Recommended. B.J. Peterson, Choice [Joan] Martinez-Alier combines the honest discipline of a scholar with the passionate energy of an activist. The result, The Environmentalism of the Poor, is highly recommended! Herman E. Daly, University of Maryland, College Park, US The Environmentalism of the Poor has the explicit intention of helping to establish two emerging fields of study political ecology and ecological economics whilst also investigating the relations between them. The book analyses several manifestations of the growing environmental justice movement , and also of popular environmentalism and the environmentalism of the poor , which will be seen in the coming decades as driving forces in the process to achieve an ecologically sustainable society. The author studies, in detail, many ecological distribution conflicts in history and at present, in urban and rural settings, showing how poor people often favour resource conservation. The environment is thus not so much a luxury of the rich as a necessity of the poor. It concludes with the fundamental questions: who has the right to impose a language of valuation and who has the power to simplify complexity? Joan Martinez-Alier combines the study of ecological conflicts and the study of environmental valuation in a totally original approach that will appeal to a wide cross-section of academics, ecologists and environmentalists.
The environmental justice movement is a kind of socio-environmentalism which reacts when corporate or government business negatively and simultaneously impacts on marginalized human groups and nature. Twenty-three essays by James O'Connor, Ynestra King, Winona LaDuke, Cesar Chavez, Mary Mellor and other activists explore topics such as the polluting plunder and pillage of resources in developing countries, the dangers to farm workers from agribusiness, environmental racism, grassroots ecofeminism, dangerous workplaces, blue collar women protesters of toxic waste, native peoples' objections to the conquest of nature, and the most encompassing topic, the capitalist juggernaut against nature. Appended is the Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit (1991), calling for, among other things, "the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to insure the health of the natural world for present and future generations." Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A concise overview of this multidisciplinary field, presenting key concepts, central issues, and current research, along with concrete examples and case studies. The emergence of the environmental humanities as an academic discipline early in the twenty-first century reflects the growing conviction that environmental problems cannot be solved by science and technology alone. This book offers a concise overview of this new multidisciplinary field, presenting concepts, issues, current research, concrete examples, and case studies. Robert Emmett and David Nye show how humanists, by offering constructive knowledge as well as negative critique, can improve our understanding of such environmental problems as global warming, species extinction, and over-consumption of the earth's resources. They trace the genealogy of environmental humanities from European, Australian, and American initiatives, also showing its cross-pollination by postcolonial and feminist theories. Emmett and Nye consider a concept of place not synonymous with localism, the risks of ecotourism, and the cultivation of wild areas. They discuss the decoupling of energy use and progress, and point to OECD countries for examples of sustainable development. They explain the potential for science to do both good and harm, examine dark visions of planetary collapse, and describe more positive possibilities—alternative practices, including localization and degrowth. Finally, they examine the theoretical impact of new materialism, feminism, postcolonial criticism, animal studies, and queer ecology on the environmental humanities.
A People’s Curriculum for the Earth is a collection of articles, role plays, simulations, stories, poems, and graphics to help breathe life into teaching about the environmental crisis. The book features some of the best articles from Rethinking Schools magazine alongside classroom-friendly readings on climate change, energy, water, food, and pollution—as well as on people who are working to make things better. A People’s Curriculum for the Earth has the breadth and depth ofRethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World, one of the most popular books we’ve published. At a time when it’s becoming increasingly obvious that life on Earth is at risk, here is a resource that helps students see what’s wrong and imagine solutions. Praise for A People's Curriculum for the Earth "To really confront the climate crisis, we need to think differently, build differently, and teach differently. A People’s Curriculum for the Earth is an educator’s toolkit for our times." — Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate "This volume is a marvelous example of justice in ALL facets of our lives—civil, social, educational, economic, and yes, environmental. Bravo to the Rethinking Schools team for pulling this collection together and making us think more holistically about what we mean when we talk about justice." — Gloria Ladson-Billings, Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison "Bigelow and Swinehart have created a critical resource for today’s young people about humanity’s responsibility for the Earth. This book can engender the shift in perspective so needed at this point on the clock of the universe." — Gregory Smith, Professor of Education, Lewis & Clark College, co-author with David Sobel of Place- and Community-based Education in Schools
In the tradition of Octavia Butler, here is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want. Change is constant. The world, our bodies, and our minds are in a constant state of flux. They are a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, Emergent Strategy teaches us to map and assess the swirling structures and to read them as they happen, all the better to shape that which ultimately shapes us, personally and politically. A resolutely materialist spirituality based equally on science and science fiction: a wild feminist and afro-futurist ride! adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.
