Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline

Abstract

Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline, first published in 1991, provides a rare glimpse of the environmental justice movement as it plays out in four landmark struggles at the end of the twentieth century. The book describes the stories of everyday people who have decided to take to the streets to battle what they perceive as injustice: the unequal exposure of minorities and the poor to the 'bads' produced by our industrial society. In these struggles residents and local, state, and national environmental and social justice groups are on one side pitted against local and state government representatives and industry on the other. By employing historical and theoretical lenses in viewing these struggles, the book reveals how situations of environmental injustice are created and how they are resolved. These cases bear great similarity to battles occurring across the nation, and are setting precedents for national and state agencies as they handle these cases.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Human Health and Environmental Inequalities

“…Recently, critical and scholarly analyses of environmental justice have been undertaken in a number of areas, including the impacts of various strategies employed by environmental justice organizations (89,99); the nature of this social movement's discourse and its impact on the efficacy of the environmental movement (7, 43, 51, 84); the governance structure of the environmental justice movement (15); the role of globalization and the distribution of environmental inequality on a global scale (44,50,91); and the relationship and impact of foundation funding on the environmental justice movements (16,43). It is important to build more significant links between research on environmental justice and the theoretical and empirical sociological literatures on social movements and environmental sociology to advance our understanding of the origins of and responses to environmental inequality.…”

Qualitative methods in environmental health research.

“…Most of these accounts are voices from the grassroots, as many of the contributors are narrating the struggles of these environmental justice groups from a participant's perspective. Other sociologists have provided analyses of environmental justice organizing efforts, using community voices extensively, though written by the scholars rather than the activists (e.g., Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss 2001).…”

A Bridge to Challenging Environmental Inequality: Intersectionality, Environmental Justice, and Disaster Vulnerability

“…EJ research has also developed critically and spatially, analyzing rural dimensions of environmental disparities (Malin 2015;Malin and DeMaster 2016;Pellow 2016;Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss 2001), the concept of community as an organizing principle for environmental controversies and injustices (Gunter and Kroll-Smith 2006), and utilizing EJ to understand environmental inequities transnationally (Faber 2008;Mohai et al 2009). EJ's advancement across these spatial dimensions creates an opening in the literature for a more contextual, intersectional understanding of the distribution of environmental goods and bads, such as sustainability, climate impacts, natural resource extraction, and waste and e-waste disposal (Agyeman et al 2016;Anand 2004;Carruthers 2008;Jamieson 2001;Pellow 2007;Schlosburg 2004;Smith, Sonnenfeld, and Pellow 2006).…”