Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice provides a comprehensive overview of the achievements and challenges confronting the environmental justice movement. Pressured by increased international competition and the demand for higher profits, industrial and political leaders are working to weaken many of America's most essential environmental, occupational, and consumer protection laws. In addition, corporate-led globalization exports many ecological hazards abroad. The result is a deepening of the ecological crisis in both the United States and the Global South. However, not all people are impacted equally. In this process of capital restructuring, it is the most marginalized segments of society -poor people of color and the working class-that suffer the greatest force of corporate environmental abuses. Daniel Faber, a leading environmental sociologist, analyzes the global political and economic forces that create these environmental injustices. With a multi-disciplinary approach, Faber presents both broad overviews and powerful insider case studies, examining the connections between many different struggles for change. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice explores compelling movements to challenge the polluter-industrial complex and bring about meaningful social transformation.

This handbook defines the contours of environmental sociology and invites readers to push boundaries in their exploration of this important subdiscipline. It offers a comprehensive overview of the evolution of environmental sociology and its role in this era of intensified national and global environmental crises. Its timely frameworks and high-impact chapters will assist in navigating this moment of great environmental inequality and uncertainty. The handbook brings together an outstanding group of scholars who have helped redefine the scope of environmental sociology and expand its reach and impact. Their contributions speak to key themes of the subdiscipline—inequality, justice, population, social movements, and health. Chapter topics include environmental demography, food systems, animals and the environment, climate change, disasters, and much more. The emphasis on public environmental sociology and the forward-thinking approach of this collection is what sets this volume apart. This handbook can serve as an introduction for students new to environmental sociology or as an insightful treatment that current experts can use to further their own research and publication. It will leave readers with a strong understanding of environmental sociology and the motivation to apply it to their work.

This innovative Handbook provides a comprehensive treatment of the complex relationship between inequality and the environment and illustrates the myriad ways in which they intersect. Featuring over 30 contributions from leading experts in the field, it explores the ways in which inequality impacts three of the most pressing contemporary environmental issues: climate change, natural resource extraction, and food insecurity.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice presents an extensive and cutting-edge introduction to the diverse, rapidly growing body of research on pressing issues of environmental justice and injustice. With wide-ranging discussion of current debates, controversies, and questions in the history, theory, and methods of environmental justice research, contributed by over 90 leading social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and scholars from professional disciplines from six continents, it is an essential resource both for newcomers to this research and for experienced scholars and practitioners. The chapters of this volume examine the roots of environmental justice activism, lay out and assess key theories and approaches, and consider the many different substantive issues that have been the subject of activism, empirical research, and policy development throughout the world. The Handbook features critical reviews of quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodological approaches and explicitly addresses interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and engaged research. Instead of adopting a narrow regional focus, it tackles substantive issues and presents perspectives from political and cultural systems across the world, as well as addressing activism for environmental justice at the global scale. Its chapters do not simply review the state of the art, but also propose new conceptual frameworks and directions for research, policy, and practice. Providing detailed but accessible overviews of the complex, varied dimensions of environmental justice and injustice, the Handbook is an essential guide and reference not only for researchers engaged with environmental justice, but also for undergraduate and graduate teaching and for policymakers and activists.

Environmental justice has increasingly become part of the language of environmental activism, political debate, academic research and policy making around the world. It raises questions about how the environment impacts on different people’s lives. Does pollution follow the poor? Are some communities far more vulnerable to the impacts of flooding or climate change than others? Are the benefits of access to green space for all, or only for some? Do powerful voices dominate environmental decisions to the exclusion of others? This book focuses on such questions and the complexities involved in answering them. It explores the diversity of ways in which environment and social difference are intertwined and how the justice of their interrelationship matters. It has a distinctive international perspective, tracing how the discourse of environmental justice has moved around the world and across scales to include global concerns, and examining research, activism and policy development in the US, the UK, South Africa and other countries. The widening scope and diversity of what has been positioned within an environmental justice ‘frame’ is also reflected in chapters that focus on waste, air quality, flooding, urban greenspace and climate change. In each case, the basis for evidence of inequalities in impacts, vulnerabilities and responsibilities is examined, asking questions about the knowledge that is produced, the assumptions involved and the concepts of justice that are being deployed in both academic and political contexts. Environmental Justice offers a wide ranging analysis of this rapidly evolving field, with compelling examples of the processes involved in producing inequalities and the challenges faced in advancing the interests of the disadvantaged. It provides a critical framework for understanding environmental justice in various spatial and political contexts, and will be of interest to those studying Environmental Studies, Geography, Politics and Sociology.

Many people of all ages today continue to be attracted to sociology and other social sciences because of their promise to contribute to better political, social, and moral understandings of themselves and their social worlds-and often because they hope it will help them to build a better society. In a world of new movements and deepening economic inequality following the Great Recession, this new edition is vital. It features dozens of new examples from the latest research, with an emphasis on the next generation of liberation sociologists. The authors expand on the previous edition with the inclusion of sections on decolonisation paradigms in criminology, critical speciesism, and studies of environmental racism and environmental privilege. There is an expanded focus on participatory action research, and increased coverage of international liberation social scientists. Work by psychologists, anthropologists, theologians, historians, and others who have developed a liberation orientation for their disciplines is also updated and expanded.

Utilizing a model derived from literature on environmental justice overlaid with multiple scales of agriculture, Environmental Justice and Farm Labor provides key insights about laborers in agriculture in the United States. It addresses three main topics: (1) justice-related issues facing farmers and laborers on farms; (2) how history and policy have impacted them; and (3) the opportunities and leverage points for change in improving justice outcomes. It explores who labors in US agriculture and the justice-related issues facing these workers, including occupational injury and illness, lack of access to healthcare, substandard housing, hunger, low wages, issues pertaining to immigration, and the inability to organize. In addition, it assesses the impacts of labor safety, immigration and international policy, and in particular the effects of organic and fair trade certification. Two detailed case studies, one based on conventional agriculture in Florida and the other on organic agriculture in the Northeast, highlight the interrelated but unique challenges facing those who labor in the different sectors of this complex agricultural system. Finally, it touches on justice claims and the role of grassroots activism in improving justice outcomes by highlighting organizations operating at multiple scales to contribute to the livelihood of farmers and laborers in the different areas of agriculture.

An examination of why government agencies allow environmental injustices to persist. Many state and federal environmental agencies have put in place programs, policies, and practices to redress environmental injustices, and yet these efforts fall short of meeting the principles that environmental justice activists have fought for. In From the Inside Out, Jill Lindsey Harrison offers an account of the bureaucratic culture that hinders regulatory agencies' attempts to reduce environmental injustices. It is now widely accepted that America's poorest communities, communities of color, and Native American communities suffer disproportionate harm from environmental hazards, with higher exposure to pollution and higher incidence of lead poisoning, cancer, asthma, and other diseases linked to environmental ills. And yet, Harrison reports, some regulatory staff view these problems as beyond their agencies' area of concern, requiring too many resources, or see neutrality as demanding “color-blind” administration. Drawing on more than 160 interviews (with interviewees including 89 current or former agency staff members and more than 50 environmental justice activists and others who interact with regulatory agencies) and more than 50 hours of participant observation of agency meetings (both open- and closed-door), Harrison offers a unique account of how bureaucrats resist, undermine, and disparage environmental justice reform—and how environmental justice reformers within the agencies fight back by trying to change regulatory practice and culture from the inside out. Harrison argues that equity, not just aggregated overall improvement, should be a metric for evaluating environmental regulation.

This book is a ground-breaking transnational study of representations of the environment in Asian American literature. Extending and renewing Asian American studies and ecocriticism by drawing the two fields into deeper dialogue, it brings Asian American writers to the center of ecocritical studies. This collection demonstrates the distinctiveness of Asian American writers’ positions on topics of major concern today: environmental justice, identity and the land, war environments, consumption, urban environments, and the environment and creativity. Represented authors include Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Ruth Ozeki, Ha Jin, Fae Myenne Ng, Le Ly Hayslip, Lan Cao, Mitsuye Yamada, Lawson Fusao Inada, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Milton Murayama, Don Lee, and Hisaye Yamamoto. These writers provide a range of perspectives on the historical, social, psychological, economic, philosophical, and aesthetic responses of Asian Americans to the environment conceived in relation to labor, racism, immigration, domesticity, global capitalism, relocation, pollution, violence, and religion. Contributors apply a diversity of critical frameworks, including critical radical race studies, counter-memory studies, ecofeminism, and geomantic criticism. The book presents a compelling and timely "green" perspective through which to understand key works of Asian American literature and leads the field of ecocriticism into neglected terrain.

'The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Environmental Politics' explores some of the most important environmental issues through the lens of comparative politics, including energy, climate change, food, health, urbanization, waste, and sustainability. The chapters delve into more traditional forms of comparative environmental politics (CEP) - the political economy of natural resources and the role of corporations and supply chains - while also showcasing new trends in CEP scholarship, particularly the comparative study of environmental injustice and intersectional inequities.