Document Type
Review
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The editors of The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy (2002) chose to include at least five scholarly essays, comprising one third of the book's content, that directly address the theme of water, thus illuminating the importance of this topic in the realms of environmental and social justice. Contributors to the anthology, ranging from urban activists to literary and anthropological scholars, address a wide variety of national and international environmental disasters from the complex vantage point of the intersection among race, politics, and class, so that the inevitable blurring of the boundaries between traditionally distinct academic disciplines appears seamless. Environmental concerns pertaining to issues like sighting, clear cutting, conservation, and urban renewal are directly linked to the human realms of cultural memory, alternative ways of knowing, local governmental structures, and the savvy use of the media in gaining public support for under-the-radar battles. This dual emphasis of ecological and human concerns serves the editors' expressed purpose of moving the discourse on environmental justice "beyond an exclusive focus on documenting environmental racism" leading to a "politics of negativism" (12-13). The anthology is relevant to scholars and educators who are interested in better understanding the mechanisms whereby race and class collide to deny "equal access to natural resources that sustain life and culture" in disadvantaged populations (4). But the book goes a step further by offering hopeful models both of resistance and reform that can serve to galvanize effective activism.
Repository Citation
Ahearn, Katie. "Review of The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics & Pedagogy, Edited by Mei Mei Evans Admson and Rachel Stein." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 3, 2006, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss3/18