Environmental Humanities: Just Environments Symposium

This book brings together key essays that seek to make visible and expand our understanding of the role of government (policies, programs, and investments) in shaping cities and metropolitan regions; the costs and consequences of uneven urban and regional growth patterns; suburban sprawl and public health, transportation, and economic development; and the enduring connection of place, space, and race in the era of increased globalization. Whether intended or unintended, many government policies (housing, transportation, land use, environmental, economic development, education, etc.) have aided and in some cases subsidized suburban sprawl, job flight, and spatial mismatch; concentrated urban poverty; and heightened racial and economic disparities. Written mostly by African American scholars, the book captures the dynamism of these meetings, describing the challenges facing cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions as they seek to address continuing and emerging patterns of racial polarization in the twenty-first century. The book clearly shows that the United States entered the new millennium as one of the wealthiest and the most powerful nations on earth. Yet amid this prosperity, our nation is faced with some of the same challenges that confronted it at the beginning of the twentieth century, including rising inequality in income, wealth, and opportunity; economic restructuring; immigration pressures and ethnic tension; and a widening gap between 'haves' and 'have-nots.' Clearly, race matters. Place also matters. Where we live impacts the quality of our lives and chances for the 'good life.'

The connection between racism and environmental quality is increasingly visible. People of color in urban and rural areas are the most likely victims of industrial dumping, toxic landfills, uranium mining, and dangerous waste incinerators. This groundbreaking anthology grows out of the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and brings together leading scholars, environmental leaders, and social justice activists of the emerging environmental justice movement.

To be poor, working-class, or a person of color in the United States often means bearing a disproportionate share of the country's environmental problems. Starting with the premise that all Americans have a basic right to live in a healthy environment, Dumping in Dixie chronicles the efforts of five African American communities, empowered by the civil rights movement, to link environmentalism with issues of social justice. In the third edition, Bullard speaks to us from the front lines of the environmental justice movement about new developments in environmental racism, different organizing strategies, and success stories in the struggle for environmental equity.

From the Father of Environmental Justice comes, Environmental Health and Racial Equity, a first-rate account of events, individuals, and organizations that have shaped the environmental justice movement over the past two decades. The struggles chronicled are both instructive and inspirational to anyone who wants to make a difference.

The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and mixed land use. But, as this book documents, smart growth has largely failed to address issues of social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. Growing Smarter is one of the few books to view smart growth from an environmental justice perspective, examining the effect of the built environment on access to economic opportunity and quality of life in American cities and metropolitan regions. The contributors to Growing Smarter -- urban planners, sociologists, economists, educators, lawyers, health professionals, and environmentalists -- all place equity at the center of their analyses of "place, space, and race." They consider such topics as the social and environmental effects of sprawl, the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty, and community-based regionalism that can link cities and suburbs. They examine specific cases that illustrate opportunities for integrating environmental justice concerns into smart growth efforts, including the dynamics of sprawl in a South Carolina county, the debate over the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and transportation-related pollution in Northern Manhattan. Growing Smarter illuminates the growing racial and class divisions in metropolitan areas today -- and suggests workable strategies to address them.

Highway Robbery dispels a major myth that conceals enduring divisions in American life. While many people view the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as the end of government-sponsored discrimination in the United States, Highway Robbery confirms the obvious and ignored truth: equality in transportation has been established in name only. Case by case, Highway Robbery shows howâ__a half-century after the Montgomery bus boycottsâ__chronic inequality in public transportation is firmly and nationally entrenched.Coast to coast, equal access to healthy, reliable, and practical transportation eludes many people, the majority of them poor people and people of color. The effects of this injustice are broad and deep. Access to transportation, public and private, determines the physical and social mobility necessary for admission to larger social, economic, and civic worlds. For millions of people, exclusion from transportation networks means drastically compromised life choices. Their jeopardized health and limited economic opportunities are then compounded by the day-to-day indignities and feelings of frustration and isolation resulting from publicly funded segregation. Highway Robbery asserts that staying the current course will further polarize communities on the basis of class and color, and the powerful evidence marshaled by the authors in this anthology demands that cities and states revisit their public transportation agendas.Drawing on legal precedents, voices from the grassroots, and academic research, Highway Robbery bridges intellectual disciplines and activist movements by linking the national inequalities in transportation to larger economic, health, environmental justice, and quality of life issues. The authors illustrate the insidious contributions of transportation policy and urban planning to the establishment and enforcement of racial and economic inequality. Written in recognition of activists like Ella Baker and Rosa Parks, Highway Robbery lays the groundwork for future transit rights organizers.

Dedicated to the struggling Third World people in America, In Search of the New South explores the extent to which blacks have shared in the growth and prosperity attributed to the area known as the "New South". A timely and insightful analysis of the changes that have occurred in the Old South, a broad belt that stretched from Virginia to Texas, this volume focuses on case studies of six large southern cities--Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, Memphis, Birmingham, and Tampa. Focusing specifically on the 1970s throughout the mid-1980s, Bullard and his colleagues have delineated the changes that have affected the black population in the South, as a distinct part of the larger transformation of America, and they challenge the reality of the "New South". The editor and contributors are black social scientists who live and work in the South and bring to their research special insights on the southern black experience.

Environmental activists and academics alike are realizing that a sustainable society must be a just one. Environmental degradation is almost always linked to questions of human equality and quality of life. Throughout the world, those segments of the population that have the least political power and are the most marginalized are selectively victimized by environmental crises. Just Sustainabilities argues that social and environmental justice within and between nations should be an integral part of the policies and agreements that promote sustainable development. The book addresses many aspects of the links between environmental quality and human equality and between sustainability and environmental justice more generally. The topics discussed include anthropocentrism; biotechnology; bioprospecting; biocultural assimilation; deep and radical ecology; ecological debt; ecological democracy; ecological footprints; ecological modernization; feminism and gender; globalization; participatory research; place, identity, and legal rights; precaution; risk society; selective victimization; and valuation.

From Harlem to Los Angeles and the cities in between, this book reveals the distribution of transportation benefits to the wealthy and educated to be disproportionately high compared to people of colour and those at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum. Essays by a wide range of environmental and transportation activists, lawyers, and scholars trace the historical roots of transportation struggles in US civil rights history from Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders to modern-day unjust transportation equity are examined as well as the impact of transportation policy on inner city environments.

A new collection of essays that capture the voices of frontline warriors who are battling environmental injustice.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast counties. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs. Questions linger: What went wrong? Can it happen again? Is our government equipped to plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural and manmade disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Does race matter?   Racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. Race plays out in natural disaster survivors' ability to rebuild, replace infrastructure, obtain loans, and locate temporary and permanent housing. Generally, low-income and people of color disaster victims spend more time in temporary housing, shelters, trailers, mobile homes, and hotels--and are more vulnerable to permanent displacement. Some "temporary" homes have notproved to be that temporary. In exploring the geography of vulnerability, this book asks why some communities get left behind economically, spatially, and physicallybefore andafter disasters strike.

"A serious but often overlooked impact of the random, unplanned growth commonly known as sprawl is its effect on economic and racial polarization. Atlanta, Georgia, one of the fastest growing areas in the country, offers a striking example of sprawl-induced stratification." "Sprawl City uses a multidisciplinary approach to analyze and critique the emerging crisis resulting from urban sprawl in the ten-county Atlanta metropolitan region. Local experts including sociologists, lawyers, urban planners, economists, educators, and health care professionals consider sprawl-related concerns as core environmental justice and civil rights issues."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

When the images of desperate, hungry, thirsty, sick, mostly black people circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, it became apparent to the whole country that race did indeed matter when it came to government assistance. In The Wrong Complexion for Protection, Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright place the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades. They compare and contrast how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, bioterrorism threats and show that African Americans are disproportionately affected. Bullard and Wright argue that uncovering and eliminating disparate disaster response can mean the difference between life and death for those most vulnerable in disastrous times.