Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference

Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference
Author: Nancy Tuana
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2023-01-10
Genre: Climate change mitigation
ISBN: 0197656609

"Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference offers a powerful intervention to the field of climate justice scholarship by addressing a neglected aspect of the field of climate justice, namely systemic racisms. Building on the work of Black feminist theorists, Tuana develops an ecointersectional approach designed to reveal the depth and complexities of racial climates overlooked even in the environmental justice literature. Tuana's conception of ecological indifference underscores the disposition of seeing the environment as a resource for human consumption and enjoyment, a resource that is as usable, fungible, disposable, and without intrinsic worth or standing. The many examples in the book offer new insights demonstrating that systemic racisms emerge out of and give rise to environmental degradation, that is, they are often mutually constitutive. The ecointersectional analyses provided throughout the book reveal that ecological indifference and climate injustice are two sides of the same coin. Tuana identifies three distinctive but interrelated domains in which the intersections between systemic racisms and ecological indifference are manifest: 1. Differential distribution of harms/benefits due to systemic racisms; 2. Racist institutions and practices fueling or causing environmental destruction; 3. The basic social structures that generate environmental destruction being the same ones that generate systemic oppression of certain groups of people. One of the aims of Racial Climates, Ecological Indifference is to underscore that any effort to protect the environment must also be a fight against systemic racisms and other forms of systemic inequity"--

Climate Change Is Racist

Climate Change Is Racist
Author: Jeremy Williams
Publisher: Icon Books
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2021-06-03
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1785787764

** LONGLISTED FOR THE JAMES CROPPER WAINWRIGHT PRIZE LONGLIST 2022 ** 'Really packs a punch' Aja Barber, author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism 'Will open the minds of even the most ardent denier of climate change and/or systemic racism. If there's one book that will help you to be an effective activist for climate justice, it's this one.' Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, author of This is Why I Resist 'Accessible. Poignant. Challenging.' Nnimmo Bassey, environmentalist and author of To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa When we talk about racism, we often mean personal prejudice or institutional biases. Climate change doesn't work that way. It is structurally racist, disproportionately caused by majority White people in majority White countries, with the damage unleashed overwhelmingly on people of colour. The climate crisis reflects and reinforces racial injustices. In this eye-opening book, writer and environmental activist Jeremy Williams takes us on a short, urgent journey across the globe - from Kenya to India, the USA to Australia - to understand how White privilege and climate change overlap. We'll look at the environmental facts, hear the experiences of the people most affected on our planet and learn from the activists leading the change. It's time for each of us to find our place in the global struggle for justice.

Is Racism an Environmental Threat?

Is Racism an Environmental Threat?
Author: Ghassan Hage
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 140
Release: 2017-05-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745692303

The ecological crisis is the most overwhelming to have ever faced humanity and its consequences permeate every domain of life. This trenchant book examines its relation to Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today, showing how both share roots in domination, colonialism, and the logics of capitalism. Ghassan Hage proposes that both racism and humanity’s destructive relationship with the environment emanate from the same mode of inhabiting the world: an occupying force imposes its own interest as law, subordinating others for the extraction of value, eradicating or exterminating what gets in the way. In connecting these two issues, Hage gives voice to the claim taking shape in many activist spaces that anti-racist and ecological struggles are intrinsically related. In both, the aim is to move beyond what makes us see otherness, whether human or nonhuman, as something that exists solely to be managed.

Toxic Communities

Toxic Communities
Author: Dorceta Taylor
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2014-06-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479861626

Uncovers the systemic problems that expose poor communities to environmental hazards 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 ‘paths of least resistance,’ 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, Toxic Communities examines 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, Toxic Communities greatly contributes to the study of race, the environment, and space in the contemporary United States.

Confronting Climate Coloniality

Confronting Climate Coloniality
Author: Farhana Sultana
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2024-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1040176550

This timely and urgent collection brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship and ideas from around the world to present critical examinations of climate coloniality. Confronting Climate Coloniality exposes how legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism co-produce and exacerbate the climate crisis, create disproportionate impacts on those who contributed the least to climate change, and influence global and local responses. Climate coloniality is perpetuated through processes of neoliberalism, racial capitalism, development interventions, economic growth models, media, and education. Confronting climate coloniality entails decolonizing climate discourses and governance, challenging the dominant framings and policies, interrogating material, geopolitical, and institutional arrangements for tackling the climate crisis, and centering Global South and Indigenous knowledge, experiences, strategies, and solutions. Confronting Climate Coloniality: Decolonizing Pathways for Climate Justice provides critical insights and strategies for transformative action and fosters deeper understandings of the structural injustices entangled with climate change in governance, framings, policies, responses, and praxis. This collection offers pioneering interdisciplinary research on alternative frameworks for decolonized approaches for more meaningful climate justice. With originality, scholarly rigor, and emphasis on amplifying marginalized voices, this collection is an indispensable resource for interdisciplinary scholars, policymakers, and activists committed to advancing climate justice.

Time, Climate Change, Global Racial Capitalism and Decolonial Planetary Ecologies

Time, Climate Change, Global Racial Capitalism and Decolonial Planetary Ecologies
Author: Anna M. Agathangelou
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2022-06-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000606767

This book probes the interconnections of time and ecology in order to spark our imagination and inspire us to re-think the planetary, ecology, and otherwise. It presents debates that interrogate and elucidate the anxieties of the known and the unknown of this world and the planetary beyond, sifting through temporal accounts of the Anthropocene, human beings, and climate change. The chapters in this edited volume spur conversations with different thought systems and their underlying assumptions about the composition of structures of time and contingent temporalities. The authors engage rising temperatures in the oceans and air, the consequences, intended and unintended, of investments in various forms of "development", and the potential catastrophe unfolding in real time. Recent temporal strategies such as mitigation and adaptation to the "climate crisis" are challenged as they further compound and commodify the inquiry, the understanding and responses to environmental degradations, extractions, and displacements. Anti-colonial and decolonial debates about the structures of time, the planetary, and ecology are crucial contributions of this volume. Further, privileging the vantage points of the colonized and enslaved, the authors of this volume challenge dominant universal, cyclical, and retrospective structures of time and the planetary. Through research, poetry, art, and popular cultural analyses, the authors attend to the ways that the struggles of the "submerged," indigenous and black communities for climate justice become coded as a global warming crisis. This volume grapples with how racial climate struggles and unrest become mobilized both as a source of paralysis and as an opportunity for further expropriation and expansion of data accumulation markets for settler planetary projects all in the name of global warming. Ultimately, the authors in this volume argue that conventional attempts at exploiting the planetary all depend upon ideas of conquest and the mastery and control of ecologies, global governance, and individual behaviors. In this sense, fears about the unknown future of our planet miss what is at stake in the structures of time, the question of creation and invention. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Globalizations.

Decolonizing Freedom

Decolonizing Freedom
Author: Allison Weir
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2024
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197507948

Freedom is celebrated as the definitive ideal of modern western civilization. Yet in western thought and practice, freedom has been defined through opposition to the unfreedom of most of the world's people. Allison Weir draws on Indigenous political theories and practices of decolonization in dialogue with western theories, to reconstruct a tradition of relational freedom as a distinctive political conception of freedom: a radically democratic mode of engagement and participation in social and political relations with an infinite range of strange and diverse beings perceived as free agents in interdependent relations in a shared world.

Historical Dictionary of Environmentalism

Historical Dictionary of Environmentalism
Author: Peter Dauvergne
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 377
Release: 2024-02-26
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 153819144X

Historical Dictionary and Environmentalism, Third Edition provides a balanced and wide-ranging overview of the most important events, issues, organizations, ideas, and people shaping the direction of environmentalism worldwide. This book is global in scope, covering a large range of perspectives and countries with a focus on the period since 1960. This book contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 400 cross-referenced entries on organizations, people, issues, events, and countries shaping environmentalism. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about environmentalism.

Ontology and Oppression

Ontology and Oppression
Author: Katharine Jenkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-03-20
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0197666779

The way society is organized means that we all get made into members of various types of people, such as judges, wives, or women. These 'human social kinds' may be brought into being by oppressive social arrangements, and people may suffer oppression in virtue of being made into a member of a certain human social kind; this much is obvious. In Ontology and Oppression, Katharine Jenkins goes further, arguing that we should pay attention to the ways in which the very fact of being made into a member of a certain human social kind can be oppressive. She supplies three conceptual tools needed to understand this phenomenon. The first tool is an analysis of this general form of wrong, termed 'ontic injustice'. The second tool is an account of 'ontic oppression', a kind of ontic injustice in which the wrong amounts to a form of oppression, in the sense of being structural and pervasive. The third tool is a pluralist account of race and gender kinds, according to which there is no single social kind that corresponds to a gender category such as 'woman', but rather, various social kinds, each of which is explanatory for different purposes. Jenkins argues that it would be a mistake to make the claim that race and gender kinds as such are ontically oppressive: some are, but others are not, and some are even conducive to emancipation. This analysis has benefits for anti-oppressive social movements, including efforts towards trans liberation. It enables us to understand the wrong that can be involved in the construction of race and gender kinds whilst also recognizing how people can reasonably value being members of these kinds and highlights the importance of working to change race and gender kinds for the better.