Hum Ecol (2007) 35:257–258 DOI 10.1007/s10745-006-9093-2

BOOK REVIEW

Robert D. Bullard (ed): The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 2005, 393 pp Gerald Markowitz

Published online: 29 December 2006 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006

The environmental justice movement is just a generation old and the premier scholar of that movement, Robert Bullard, has edited an extraordinary collection of articles that seek to explore how far that movement has come as well as where it is headed. Just a decade ago, he offered a similar assessment in Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color, which was published shortly after the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The last 10 years have seen a virtual explosion of monographs, articles, reports, and books that demonstrate what has now become a truism: “people of color are disproportionately affected by environmental hazards in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces” (p. 4). The Quest for Environmental Justice, following upon the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held in October 2002, has a broad agenda: to examine the early environmental justice struggles; to explore the lives and struggles of people in what Bullard calls “sacrifice zones,” those areas of the country where especially severe pollution is found because of the high concentration of polluting industries; to analyze and explore new areas of struggle being pursued by environmental justice advocates, including land use, land rights, sovereignty, resource extraction, and sustainable development; and finally to bring the environmental justice discussion and debate to the international arena, and explore the ways that experiences in other countries affect our understanding of this concept and how environmental justice has, in turn, affected the World Social Forum, and other international conferences. Bullard provides an overview of

G. Markowitz (*) John Jay College and Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

environmental justice in the twenty-first century, showing how what started out as “local and often isolated communitybased struggles” evolved into a “multi-issue, multiethnic, and multiregional movement” (p. 20). This growth into a national force has not come at the expense of maintaining strong local and regional organizations: over the course of the 1990s the number of local groups grew from 300 to over 1,000. It has thus avoided one problem of so many other popular movements, achieving national visibility at the expense of popular participation at the grassroots level. Equally important, the book argues that the “environmental justice movement is made up largely of small, democratically run grassroots groups.” As important as this insight is, it is not followed up with a sustained analysis of how these associations have remained democratic, strong, and vibrant in such a conservative political atmosphere. Bullard and many other researchers have pointed to the critical role that African American, Latina, Asian, Native American and white women have played in the leadership at the local level in these struggles. As Bullard and Damu Smith show in their chapter on these “women warriors,” they “represent the heart and soul of the modern environmental justice movement and provide a vision for environmentalism in the new millennium” (p. 65). Through an examination of grass roots activists such as Emelda West of Convent, Louisiana, Bullard and Smith demonstrate how community residents organized and mobilized their fellow citizens to bring giant corporations to their knees. These case studies of women activists in African American, Latina, and Native American communities are as inspirational as they are enlightening, although it would have been informative to have more analysis of why, as they put it, this leadership was “a significant deviation from the leadership of national environmental and conservation organizations” (p. 84).

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Although the environmental justice movement began by attempting to redress existing health threats in specific minority communities, it has evolved and formed important alliances with other environmental activists who have been pushing the precautionary principle as a way to put the burden on industry to show the safety of new processes and chemicals rather than on community residents to prove danger. In this and other ways, as Bullard makes clear, the environmental justice movement has emerged as one of the preeminent movements for social change in the United States and in other parts of the world as well. One of the gems of the book for historians of the environmental justice movement is the chapter on the first lawsuit in the United States that challenged the siting of a garbage dump in Houston, Texas. Although the plaintiffs did not prevail in the 1979 trial this long-forgotten case set a precedent for other communities of color to challenge environmental racism. Indeed, one of the strengths of this book is its examination not just of success stories, but of failures as well, though it would have been instructive if there had been more sustained analysis of what made for success or failure. Another highlight of the book is a chapter that analyses an issue that critics of the environmental justice movement raise—do the inequalities in the distribution of toxic factories and waste facilities have an impact on the health of poor and minority communities? By looking at this issue within one region—metropolitan Los Angeles—Manuel Pastor, Jr., James Sadd and Rachel Morello-Frosch show that in fact there is a “consistent picture of disproportionate burdens borne by communities of color,” including the fact that “members of these communities have higher lifetime cancer risks associated with exposure to outdoor air toxic chemicals” (p. 121).

Hum Ecol (2007) 35:257–258

Several chapters of the book explore the nature of the environmental justice movement in the South, the focus of tremendous activity because white elites have built on a long tradition of racism to force communities of color to endure despoiled environments and added burdens of health risks. As Beverly Wright, Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and a stalwart of the movement, put it, the South was “our nation’s Third World, where ‘political bosses encourage outsiders to buy the region’s human and natural resources at bargain prices’” (p. 88). But the book devotes considerable attention to the ways that other regions of the country and the world—New Jersey, Los Angeles, Wisconsin, Colorado, New Mexico, the Philippines, the Niger Delta, South Africa, and Colombia have faced similar problems. What these voices have in common is their resistence to the attempt by large corporations to damage or destroy ways of life that people all across the country and the world have come to value. In the summary of the meaning of the struggle to reclaim Vieques from the United States navy, for example, Deborah Berman Santana argues that such struggles are not just against specific entities but are “also against the separation of communities from the environment that sustains them, which they must protect” (p. 237). The attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City brought home to millions of Americans the horrors of living in the midst of a toxic stew of chemicals, but, as Bullard points out, many Americans and others throughout the world were already subjected to “a form of toxic terror” as a result of their exposure to life threatening chemicals in the course of their everyday lives. This important book will inspire and enlighten not only people interested in environmental justice, but anyone interested in social movements and in the future of this planet.