by Julie Sze
University of California Press
1/7/2020, paperback
SKU: 9780520300743
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.
Number 11 in the University of California Press series American Studies Now: Critical Histories of the Present.
Reviews:
"In these perilous times, when the fate of the planet hangs in the balance, the question arises: what are we to do? This book is the answer. As veteran activist and scholar Julie Sze makes clear, the environmental justice movement knows what to do because it understands the climate catastrophe as the consequence of long-term policies of racism, dispossession, class exploitation, asset-stripping, organized abandonment, and privatization. With clarity and urgency, she tells the story of a movement whose visionary politics are not merely defensive but transformative."--Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
"Once again, Julie Sze has written a book that will redefine the field and the way we see the world. She deftly draws on the tools of American Studies--literature, theory, art, and culture--to unpack and expose the driving forces behind our socioenvironmental crises. This is a hard-hitting and inspiring meditation on restorative environmental justice and radical hope in this moment when we need them most."--David Naguib Pellow, Dehlsen Chair of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara and author of What Is Critical Environmental Justice?