Toxic Communities

Toxic Communities PDF Author: Dorceta E. Taylor
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479805157
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the OCypaths of least resistance, OCO there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience. Taking stock of the recent environmental justice scholarship, a Toxic Communities aexamines the connections among residential segregation, zoning, and exposure to environmental hazards. Renowned environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor focuses on the locations of hazardous facilities in low-income and minority communities and shows how they have been dumped on, contaminated and exposed. Drawing on an array of historical and contemporary case studies from across the country, Taylor explores controversies over racially-motivated decisions in zoning laws, eminent domain, government regulation (or lack thereof), and urban renewal. She provides a comprehensive overview of the debate over whether or not there is a link between environmental transgressions and discrimination, drawing a clear picture of the state of the environmental justice field today and where it is going. In doing so, she introduces new concepts and theories for understanding environmental racism that will be essential for environmental justice scholars. A fascinating landmark study, a Toxic Communities agreatly contributes to the study of race, the environment, and space in the contemporary United States."

Toxic Communities

Toxic Communities PDF Author: Dorceta E. Taylor
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479805157
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book Here

Book Description
From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the OCypaths of least resistance, OCO there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience. Taking stock of the recent environmental justice scholarship, a Toxic Communities aexamines the connections among residential segregation, zoning, and exposure to environmental hazards. Renowned environmental sociologist Dorceta Taylor focuses on the locations of hazardous facilities in low-income and minority communities and shows how they have been dumped on, contaminated and exposed. Drawing on an array of historical and contemporary case studies from across the country, Taylor explores controversies over racially-motivated decisions in zoning laws, eminent domain, government regulation (or lack thereof), and urban renewal. She provides a comprehensive overview of the debate over whether or not there is a link between environmental transgressions and discrimination, drawing a clear picture of the state of the environmental justice field today and where it is going. In doing so, she introduces new concepts and theories for understanding environmental racism that will be essential for environmental justice scholars. A fascinating landmark study, a Toxic Communities agreatly contributes to the study of race, the environment, and space in the contemporary United States."

Contaminated Communities

Contaminated Communities PDF Author: Michael Edelstein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429969945
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
In this wholly revised second edition, Michael Edelstein draws or iis thiffy years as a community activist tc provide a much-expanded theoretical foundation for understanding the psychosocial impacts of toxic contaminagtion. Informed by social psychological theory and an extensive survey of documented cases of toxic exposure, and enlivened by excerpts drawn from more than one thousand Interviews with victims, Contaminated Communities, Second Edition, presents, a candid portrayal of the toxic victim's experience and the key stages in the course of toxic disaster. The second edition introduces dozens of new cases and provvides expanded considerations of environmental justice, environmental racism, environmental turbulence, and environmental stigma, as well as a fully articulated theory of "lifescape." The new edition moves past the well-charted role of reactive environmentalism to explore issues for a proactivist approach that employs a "third path" of social learning, sustainable innovation, consensus building, and community empowerment.

Toxic Nation

Toxic Nation PDF Author: Fred Setterberg
Publisher: Jossey-Bass
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Personal accounts of ordinary people confronting the frightening spread of toxic contamination. Each year 22 billion pounds of toxic chemicals are spewed into our air, water, and soil. The authors explore political, environmental, medical, and economic sides of the issue and chronicle the growth of a grassroots movement for change.

The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s

The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s PDF Author: Dorceta E. Taylor
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822392240
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 641

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Book Description
In The Environment and the People in American Cities, Dorceta E. Taylor provides an in-depth examination of the development of urban environments, and urban environmentalism, in the United States. Taylor focuses on the evolution of the city, the emergence of elite reformers, the framing of environmental problems, and the perceptions of and responses to breakdowns in social order, from the seventeenth century through the twentieth. She demonstrates how social inequalities repeatedly informed the adjudication of questions related to health, safety, and land access and use. While many accounts of environmental history begin and end with wildlife and wilderness, Taylor shows that the city offers important clues to understanding the evolution of American environmental activism. Taylor traces the progression of several major thrusts in urban environmental activism, including the alleviation of poverty; sanitary reform and public health; safe, affordable, and adequate housing; parks, playgrounds, and open space; occupational health and safety; consumer protection (food and product safety); and land use and urban planning. At the same time, she presents a historical analysis of the ways race, class, and gender shaped experiences and perceptions of the environment as well as environmental activism and the construction of environmental discourses. Throughout her analysis, Taylor illuminates connections between the social and environmental conflicts of the past and those of the present. She describes the displacement of people of color for the production of natural open space for the white and wealthy, the close proximity between garbage and communities of color in early America, the cozy relationship between middle-class environmentalists and the business community, and the continuous resistance against environmental inequalities on the part of ordinary residents from marginal communities.

Toxic Town

Toxic Town PDF Author: Peter C. Little
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814770649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Shows the risks of high-tech pollution through a study of an IBM plant's effects on a New York town In 1924, IBM built its first plant in Endicott, New York. Now, Endicott is a contested toxic waste site. With its landscape thoroughly contaminated by carcinogens, Endicott is the subject of one of the nation’s largest corporate-state mitigation efforts. Yet despite the efforts of IBM and the U.S. government, Endicott residents remain skeptical that the mitigation systems employed were designed with their best interests at heart. In Toxic Town, Peter C. Little tracks and critically diagnoses the experiences of Endicott residents as they learn to live with high-tech pollution, community transformation, scientific expertise, corporate-state power, and risk mitigation technologies. By weaving together the insights of anthropology, political ecology, disaster studies, and science and technology studies, the book explores questions of theoretical and practical import for understanding the politics of risk and the ironies of technological disaster response in a time when IBM’s stated mission is to build a “Smarter Planet.” Little critically reflects on IBM’s new corporate tagline, arguing for a political ecology of corporate social and environmental responsibility and accountability that places the social and environmental politics of risk mitigation front and center. Ultimately, Little argues that we will need much more than hollow corporate taglines, claims of corporate responsibility, and attempts to mitigate high-tech disasters to truly build a smarter planet.

Sacrifice Zones

Sacrifice Zones PDF Author: Steve Lerner
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262518171
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
The stories of residents of low-income communities across the country who took action when pollution from heavy industry contaminated their towns. Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. Many of them reach a point at which they say “Enough is enough.” After living for years with poisoned air and water, contaminated soil, and pollution-related health problems, they start to take action—organizing, speaking up, documenting the effects of pollution on their neighborhoods. In Sacrifice Zones, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately high levels of chemical pollution. He calls these low-income neighborhoods “sacrifice zones.” And he argues that residents of these sacrifice zones, tainted with chemical pollutants, need additional regulatory protections. Sacrifice Zones goes beyond the disheartening statistics and gives us the voices of the residents themselves, offering compelling portraits of accidental activists who have become grassroots leaders in the struggle for environmental justice and details the successful tactics they have used on the fenceline with heavy industry.

Toxic Tourism

Toxic Tourism PDF Author: Phaedra C. Pezzullo
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817355871
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The first book length study of the environmental justice movement, tourism, and the links between race, class, and waste

Inevitably Toxic

Inevitably Toxic PDF Author: Brinda Sarathy
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 082298623X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Not a day goes by that humans aren’t exposed to toxins in our environment—be it at home, in the car, or workplace. But what about those toxic places and items that aren’t marked? Why are we warned about some toxic spaces' substances and not others? The essays in Inevitably Toxic consider the exposure of bodies in the United States, Canada and Japan to radiation, industrial waste, and pesticides. Research shows that appeals to uncertainty have led to social inaction even when evidence, e.g. the link between carbon emissions and global warming, stares us in the face. In some cases, influential scientists, engineers and doctors have deliberately "manufactured doubt" and uncertainty but as the essays in this collection show, there is often no deliberate deception. We tend to think that if we can’t see contamination and experts deem it safe, then we are okay. Yet, having knowledge about the uncertainty behind expert claims can awaken us from a false sense of security and alert us to decisions and practices that may in fact cause harm. In the epilogue, Hamilton and Sarathy interview Peter Galison, a prominent historian of science whose recent work explores the complex challenge of long term nuclear waste storage.

Unequal Protection

Unequal Protection PDF Author: Robert Doyle Bullard
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Sixteen contributions show how environmental laws have been inconsistently applied, so that low-income communities and people of color suffer disproportionately from public health hazards. The essays describe how abuses have flourished for lack of government action and organized resistance, and document the strategies of grassroots groups on building coalitions among traditional environmentalists and social justice groups. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Toxic Debt

Toxic Debt PDF Author: Josiah Rector
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469665778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
From the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, environmentally unregulated industrial capitalism produced outsized environmental risks for poor and working-class Detroiters, made all the worse for African Americans by housing and job discrimination. Then as the auto industry abandoned Detroit, the banking and real estate industries turned those risks into disasters with predatory loans to African American homebuyers, and to an increasingly indebted city government. Following years of cuts in welfare assistance to poor families and a devastating subprime mortgage meltdown, the state of Michigan used municipal debt to justify suspending democracy in majority-Black cities. In Detroit and Flint, austerity policies imposed under emergency financial management deprived hundreds of thousands of people of clean water, with lethal consequences that most recently exacerbated the spread of COVID-19. Toxic Debt is not only a book about racism, capitalism, and the making of these environmental disasters. It is also a history of Detroit's environmental justice movement, which emerged from over a century of battles over public health in the city and involved radical auto workers, ecofeminists, and working-class women fighting for clean water. Linking the histories of urban political economy, the environment, and social movements, Toxic Debt lucidly narrates the story of debt, environmental disaster, and resistance in Detroit.