Environmental Racism
This booklist explores the topic of environmental racism or discrimination with books from researchers across Canada and the US. They focus on the environment through the lens of people, communities, health, safety, and justice and illustrate how discrimination can cause disproportionate impacts in everything from how we think of our environment and ourselves, to how we respond to disasters.
Get started with these carefully selected books from the UBC Library. If you would like to find more resources on this topic look for more tips at the bottom of this page. For more help, go to Ask Us or visit a UBC Library branch.
There’s Something in the Water: Environmental Racism in Indigenous and Black Communities
Author(s): Ingrid Waldron
Publication Year: 2018
In “There’s Something In The Water”, Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Nova Scotia as well as grassroots resistance movements. Also check out the film!
Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States
Author(s): Carl A. Zimmer
Publication Year: 2015
Clean and White offers a history of environmental racism in the United States focusing on constructions of race and hygiene. In the wake of the civil war, as the nation encountered emancipation, mass immigration, and the growth of an urbanized society, Americans began to conflate the ideas of race and waste.
Environmental Racism in the United States and Canada: Seeking Justice and Sustainability
Author(s): Bruce E. Johansen
Publication Year: 2020
From the 19th-century extermination of the buffalo in the American West, to Alaska’s Project Chariot, to the struggle for recovery and justice in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in 2017, this book examines the relationship between environmental discrimination, race, and class.
Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors
Author(s): Carolyn Finney
Publication Year: 2014
Why are African Americans so underrepresented when it comes to interest in nature, outdoor recreation, and environmentalism? Bridging the fields of environmental history, cultural studies, critical race studies, and geography, Carolyn Finney looks at how we understand the environment and how that understanding shapes who we think can and should have access to natural spaces.
The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities
Author(s): Robert D. Bullard, Beverly Wright
Publication Year: 2012
Comparing the government response to natural and human-induced disasters in historical context over the past eight decades, this book looks at how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, and bioterrorism threats, and shows that African Americans are disproportionately affected.
The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection
Author(s): Dorceta E. Taylor
Publication Year: 2016
Putting the focus on the U.S. conservation movement, Dorceta E. Taylor shows how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the movement, including the establishment of parks; campaigns to protect wild game, birds, and fish; forest conservation; outdoor recreation; and the movement’s links to nineteenth-century ideologies.
Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility
Author(s): Dorceta E. Taylor
Publication Year: 2014
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. Taking stock of the recent environmental justice scholarship, Toxic Communities examines the connections among residential segregation, zoning, and exposure to environmental hazards.
Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada
Author(s): Julian Agyeman, Peter Cole, Randolph Haluza-DeLay, Pat O’Riley
Publication Year: 2009
Speaking for Ourselves brings equity issues to the forefront by considering environmental justice in Canadian contexts from a variety of perspectives, including the perspectives of Indigenous writers, women, activists, and scholars.
Where the Waters Divide: Neoliberalism, White Privilege, and Environmental Racism in Canada
Author(s): Michael Mascarenhas
Publication Year: 2012
Using recent controversies in drinking water contamination and solid waste and sewage pollution, this book examines how notions of liberalism and common sense reform — neoliberalism — are woven through and shape contemporary racial inequality in Canadian society.
Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots
Author(s): Robert D. Bullard
Publication Year: 1993
This groundbreaking anthology grew out of the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit and brings together leading scholars, environmental leaders, and social justice activists of the emerging environmental justice movement.
Practicing New Worlds: Abolition & Emergent Strategies
Author(s): Andrea Ritchie
Publication Year: 2023
An exploration of how emergent strategies that go beyond traditional legislative and policy change can help us meet this moment, survive what is to come, and shape safer and more just futures.
Pollution is Colonialism
Author(s): Max Liboiron
Publication Year: 2021
Max Liboiron explores pollution, not as a symptom of capitalism, but as an enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.
For more help, go to Ask Us or visit a UBC Library branch.