Environmental Justice

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. 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.

This book is an endeavor to bridge competing perspectives about an issue central to basic human rights. Environmental justice is a theme that seeks to correct numerousinjustices placed on people who have been exploited and have not had substantivebacking by the rule of law to improve their living conditions. This work presents several domestic and international cases which offer insight about the gaps and measures involved in securing people’s basic rights.

Silicon Valley offers a sobering illustration of environmental inequality and other problems that are increasingly linked to the globalization of the world's economies. In The Silicon Valley of Dreams, the authors take a hard look at the high-tech region of Silicon Valley to examine environmental racism within the context of immigrant patterns, labor markets, and the historical patterns of colonialism.

Like many industrialized regions, the Philadelphia metro area contains pockets of environmental degradation: neighborhoods littered with abandoned waste sites, polluting factories, and smoke-belching incinerators. However, other neighborhoods within and around the city are relatively pristine. This eye-opening book reveals that such environmental inequalities did not occur by chance, but were instead the result of specific policy decisions that served to exacerbate endemic classism and racism. From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia's environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice.

In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Alabama, began a legal fight against the agrochemical company Monsanto over the dumping of PCBs in the city's historically African American and white working-class west side. Simultaneously, Anniston environmentalists sought to safely eliminate chemical weaponry that had been secretly stockpiled near the city during the Cold War. In this probing work, Ellen Griffith Spears offers a compelling narrative of Anniston's battles for environmental justice, exposing how systemic racial and class inequalities reinforced during the Jim Crow era played out in these intense contemporary social movements.

An in-depth analysis of infant nourishment issues, focusing on environmentally contaminated breastmilk.Tainted Milk provides an in-depth analysis of the debate about infant nourishment issues, with a particular focus on environmentally contaminated breastmilk. Maia Boswell-Penc asks why feminists and environmentalists have, for the most part, remained relatively quiet about the fact that environmental toxins have been appearing in breastmilk.

Health Disparities Among Under-served Populations: Implications for Research, Policy and Praxis', focuses on a topic of national concern. Both disparities in health status and in health care reflect the continuing power of race, social class, and gender as forces that define the social determinants of health and the social, biological, and physical environments where groups live. Chapters focus on key issues that include substance abuse, psychological coping, trauma, infant mortality, HPV, environmental hazards, teen pregnancy, homeless youth, racism, discrimination, and cultural competence

A systematic evaluation of the implementation of the federal government's environmental justice policies.In the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. Congress passed a series of laws that were milestones in environmental protection, including the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act