Foundational Documents

The following is a listing of books and articles used in environmental justice (EJ) classes. Those documents in bold indicate that the resource was used in more than one EJ course. Some documents are also links you can follow for more information.

Click on the bookmarks below to navigate to your areas of interest:

Books used in their entirety as textbooks, by more than one EJ course

Bullard, Robert D., Rueben C. Warren, and Glenn S. Johnson, eds. The quest for environmental justice: Human rights and the politics of pollution. Counterpoint, 2005.

Cole, Luke W., and Sheila R. Foster. From the ground up: Environmental racism and the rise of the environmental justice movement. NYU Press, 2001.

Pellow, David and R. Brulle. Power, Justice and the Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2005.

Books from which several chapters are used individually by various universities

Easton, T. and T. Goldfarb. Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Environmental Issues. Guilford, Connecticut: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2003.

Pellow, David. Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. MIT Press. 2007. Ch. 3-6.  

I. Survey articles of broad interest/breadth of topics


Pulido, Laura. "Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90.1 (2000): 12-40. 

Taylor, Dorceta E. “Race, class, gender, and American environmentalism.” Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-GTR-534. Portland, OR: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, 2002. 

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II. Context resources 


Introduction and overview 

Bullard, Robert D., Mohai, P., Saha, R., & Wright, B. "Toxic wastes and race at twenty: Why race still matters after all of these years." Envtl. L. 38 (2008): 371. 

EPA (US) Definition of EJ 

Starhawk (2000). Hermana Cristina's Well. Web: http://www.starhawk.org/activism/activism-writings/hermana-well.html. 

Taylor, Dorceta E. "The rise of the environmental justice paradigm injustice framing and the social construction of environmental discourses." American behavioral scientist 43.4 (2000): 508-580. 

History  

Benford, Robert. "The half-life of the environmental justice frame: innovation, diffusion, and stagnation." in Pellow, David Naguib and Robert Brulle (eds) Power, Justice, and the Environment. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press (2005): 37-54. 

Bullard, Robert. "Environmental Racism and the EJ Movement," in Carolyn Merchant, ed. Ecology: Key Concepts in Critical Theory. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press (1994): 254–65. 

Cole, Luke V. and Sheila R. Foster. 2001. Preface: "We Speak for Ourselves" and Introduction, in From the ground up: Environmental racism and the rise of the environmental justice movement. NYU Press (2001): 1-33. 

EPA (US). History of EPA's Involvement with the Environmental Justice Movement. 

First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. Principles of EJ. 

Taylor, Dorceta E. "The rise of the environmental justice paradigm: Injustice framing and the social construction of environmental discourses." American behavioral scientist 43.4 (2000): 508-580.   

Philosophy & theory 

Perez-Pena, Richard. "State admits plants headed to poor areas. "The New York Times B 1 (2001). 

Schlosberg, David. “The Justice of Environmental Justice: Reconciling Equity, Recognition, and Participation in a Political Movement.” In Andrew Light and Avner de Shalit, eds., Moral and Political Reasoning in Environmental Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003: 77-106.

Future of EJ 

Brulle, Robert and David Pellow. “The Future of Environmental Justice Movements,” in D. Pellow and R. Brulle (eds.)Power, Justice, and Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005: 171-184.  

Goldman, Benjamin. "What is the Future of Environmental Justice?" Antipode 28.2 (1996): 122-141.  

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III. Resources for specific topics


Air quality

Harrison, J. Invisible People, Invisible Places: Connecting Air Pollution and Pesticide Drift in California. In: M. Dupuis (Editor), Smoke and Mirrors: The Politics and Culture of Air Pollution. NYU Press, New York, 2004.

Lerner, Steve. “Port Arthur, Texas: Public Housing Residents Breathe Contaminated Air from Nearby Refineries and Chemical Plants,” in Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States. MIT Press, 2010.  

Morales, E. (2008). Save the planet from capitalism." (Letter from President Evo Morales about Climate Change and the International crisis, Nov 28, 2008) Links: http://links.org.au/node/769.

Pearce. F and Tombs, S. US Capital versus the Third World: Union Carbide and Bhopal. In Pearce, Frank, and Michael Woodiwiss. Global crime connections: dynamics and control. Macmillan, 1993. 

Climate change 

Adger, W. N., Barnett, J., Chapin III, F. S., & Ellemor, H. “This must be the place: underrepresentation of identity and meaning in climate change decision-making. Global Environmental Politics, 11.2 (2011): 1-25.  

Chawla, Ambika. "Climate justice movements gather strength." State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World (2009): 119-121. 

Grineski, S. E., T. W. Collins, P. Ford, R. Fitzgerald, R. Aldouri, G. Velazquez-Angulo, M. D. R. Aguilar & D. J. Lu. "Climate change and environmental injustice in a bi-national context." Applied Geography 33 (2012): 25-35. 

Hoerner, J. Andrew, and Nia Robinson. "Just Climate Policy—Just Racial Policy." Race, Poverty & the Environment (2009): 32-35. 

Ikeme, Jekwu. "Equity, environmental justice and sustainability: incomplete approaches in climate change politics." Global Environmental Change 13.3 (2003): 195-206. 

Pachauri, R. K., & Reisinger, A., eds. Climate Change 2007 Synthesis Report: Summary for Policymakers. IPCC Secretariat. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007.  

Roberts J.T. and B. Parks. “Fueling Injustice: Emissions, Development Paths, and Responsibilities”. A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequalities, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy. Boston: MIT Press, 2007. Chapter 5, pp. 133-185.  

Stallworthy, Mark. "Environmental justice imperatives for an era of climate change." Journal of Law and Society 36.1 (2009): 55-74. 

Thomas, David SG, and Chasca Twyman. "Equity and justice in climate change adaptation amongst natural-resource-dependent societies." Global Environmental Change 15.2 (2005): 115-124. 

Communities & community resources

Corburn, Jason. Street science: Community knowledge and environmental health justice. The MIT Press, 2005. [Ch. 1] 

Corburn, Jason. "Community knowledge in environmental health science: co-producing policy expertise." Environmental Science & Policy 10.2 (2007): 150-161. 

Illsley, Barbara M. "Good Neighbour Agreements: the first step to environmental justice?" Local environment 7.1 (2002): 69-79. 

Minkler, Meredith, Victoria Breckwich Vásquez, Mansoureh Tajik, and Dana Petersen. "Promoting environmental justice through community-based participatory research: the role of community and partnership capacity." Health Education & Behavior 35.1 (2008): 119-137. 

Williams, Robert W. "The Contested Terrain of Environmental Justice Research: Community as a Unit of Analysis." The Social Science Journal 36, no. 2 (1999): 313-328. 

High-tech/information technology

Kellogg, Wendy A., and Anjali Mathur. "Environmental Justice and Information Technologies: Overcoming the Information-Access Paradox in Urban Communities." Public Administration Review 63, no. 5 (2003): 573-585. 

Pellow, David N., and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. The Silicon Valley of dreams: Environmental injustice, immigrant workers, and the high-tech global economy. NYU Press, 2002. 

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Indigenous/Native/First Peoples

Doxtater, Michael G. "Indigenous knowledge in the decolonial era." The American Indian Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2004): 618-633.

Kuletz, Valerie. The tainted desert: Environmental ruin in the American West. Psychology Press, 1998. [Intro, Ch. 2] 

Middleton, Beth Rose. Trust in the land: new directions in tribal conservation. University of Arizona Press, 2011. [Ch. 1-3] 

Page, Justin. "Salmon farming in First Nations' territories: A case of environmental injustice on Canada's West Coast." Local Environment 12, no. 6 (2007): 613-626. 

International 

General: 

Adeola, Francis. "Cross-national Environmental Injustice and Human Rights Issues: A Review of Evidence in the Developing World." The American Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 4 (2000): 686-706.

Clapp, Jennifer. "Hazard Transfer From Rich to Poor Countries." Chapter 1 in Toxic Exports: The Transfer of Hazardous Wastes from Rich to Poor Countries. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001, pp. 1-20. 

Morales, E. (2008). Save the planet from capitalism." (Letter from President Evo Morales about Climate Change and the International crisis, Nov 28, 2008) Links: http://links.org.au/node/769.  

Yang, Tseming. "Of Borders, Fences, and Global Environmentalism." Chicago Journal of International Law 4, no. 1 (2003): 237-244 

REDD (UN program: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation): 

General: 

Johns, T., Merry, F., Stickler, C., Nepstad, D., Laporte, N., & Goetz, S. "A three-fund approach to incorporating government, public and private forest stewards into a REDD funding mechanism." International Forestry Review (2008): 458-464. 

Brazil:  

Ezzine-de-Blas, D., J. Borner, A. L. Violato-Espada, N. Nascimento & M. G. Piketty. "Forest loss and management in land reform settlements: Implications for REDD governance in the Brazilian Amazon." Environmental science & policy 14.2 (2011): 188-200. 

Peru: 

Hajek, F., M. J. Ventresca, J. Scriven & A. Castro. "Regime-building for REDD+: Evidence from a cluster of local initiatives in south-eastern Peru." Environmental science & policy 14.2 (2011): 201-215. 

Regions/countries:

Africa

McDonald, David. “Environmental Racism and Neoliberal Disorder in South Africa,” in Robert Bullard, ed. The Quest for Environmental Justice, Sierra Club Books (2005): 255-278.   

Njeru, Jeremia. "The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya." Geoforum 37.6 (2006): 1046-1058. 

Tschakert, Petra. "Digging Deep for Justice: A Radical Re‐imagination of the Artisanal Gold Mining Sector in Ghana." Available as ch. 5 (p. p.118-152) in Holifield, Ryan, Michael Porter, and Gordon Walker, eds. Spaces of environmental justice. Vol. 25, John Wiley & Sons, 2011, or in Antipode 41, no. 4 (2009): 706-740. 

Costa Rica

Daniels, A. E., Bagstad, K., Esposito, V., Moulaert, A., & Rodriguez, C. M. "Understanding the impacts of Costa Rica's PES: Are we asking the right questions?" Ecological economics 69.11 (2010): 2116-2126. 

Latin America

Del Olmo, Rosa. "The ecological impact of illicit drug cultivation and crop eradication programs in Latin America." Theoretical Criminology 2.2 (1998): 269-278. 

Hecht, Susanna B. "From eco-catastrophe to zero deforestation? Interdisciplinarities, politics, environmentalisms and reduced clearing in Amazonia." Environmental conservation 39.01 (2012): 4-19. 

Sundberg, Juanita. "Placing race in environmental justice research in Latin America." Society and Natural Resources 21.7 (2008): 569-582. 

Wolford, Wendy. "Environmental justice and the construction of scale in Brazilian agriculture." Society and Natural Resources 21.7 (2008): 641-655. 

Mexico

Grineski, S. E., Collins, T. W., Aguilar, M. D. L. R., & Aldouri, R. "No safe place: environmental hazards & injustice along Mexico's northern border." Social Forces 88.5 (2010): 2241-2265. 

Ray, Sarah Jaquette. "Endangering the Desert: Immigration, the Environment, and Security in the Arizona–Mexico Borderland." Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2010): isq044.  

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Legal

Cole, Luke W. "Empowerment as the key to environmental protection: the need for environmental poverty law." EcologyLQ 19 (1992): 619. 

Pastor, Manuel, Jim Sadd, and John Hipp. "Which Came First? Toxic Facilities, Minority Move‐in, and Environmental Justice." Journal of Urban Affairs 23.1 (2001): 1-21.   

Movements, organizations, approaches to advocacy

Brulle, Robert J., and Jonathan Essoka. "Whose environmental justice?: An analysis of the governance structure of environmental justice organizations in the United States." In David Pellow and Robert Brulle, eds., Power, justice, and the environment: A critical appraisal of the environmental justice movement. MIT Press (2005): 205-218

Cable, Sherry, Tamara Mix, and Donald Hastings. "Mission impossible? Environmental justice activists’ collaborations with professional environmentalists and with academics." In Brulle, R. J., and Pellow, D., eds., Power, justice, and the environment: A critical appraisal of the environmental justice movement (2005): 55-75. 

Checker, Melissa A. "’It's In the Air’: Redefining the Environment as a New Metaphor for Old Social Justice Struggles." Human organization 61.1 (2002): 94-106. 

Cole, Luke V. and Sheila R. Foster. Preface: "We Speak for Ourselves" and Introduction", ln From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York University Press  (2001): 1-33.

Gottlieb, Robert. "Ethnicity as a Factor: The Quest for Environmental Justice." Chapter 7 in Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993, pp. 235-269. 

Kellogg, Wendy A., and Anjali Mathur. "Environmental Justice and Information Technologies: Overcoming the Information-Access Paradox in Urban Communities." Public Administration Review 63, no. 5 (2003): 573-585. 

McGurty, Eileen. Transforming environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the origins of environmental justice. Rutgers University Press, 2009. [Ch. 4, pp 81-110] 

Rios, Jo Marie. "Environmental Justice Groups: Grass-roots Movement or NGO Networks? Some Policy Implications." Review of Policy Research 17, no. 2‐3 (2000): 179-211. 

Taylor, Dorceta E. "The rise of the environmental justice paradigm injustice framing and the social construction of environmental discourses." American behavioral scientist 43.4 (2000): 508-580

Nature and conservation 

Brockington, Dan, R. Duffy and J. Igoe. “The Imperatives for Conservation.” In Nature Unbound: Conservation. Capitalism and the Future of Protected Areas. London: EarthScan (2008): 47-62. [Ch. 3]  

Di Chiro, Giovanna. "Nature as community: the convergence of environment and social justice." Uncommon ground: Rethinking the human place in nature(1996): 298-320. 

Dowie, Mark “Conservation Refugees: When Protecting Nature Means Kicking People Out.” Orion Magazine, November/December 2005.  

Zerner, Charles. "Toward a broader vision of justice and nature conservation." People, Plants, and Justice: The Politics of Nature Conservation, C. Zerner (ed.) (2000): 3-20. 

Politics, policy, and government

Clinton, William J. "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations: Executive Order 12898." Federal Register 59.32 (1994): 7629-7633.

EPA (US). “Plan EJ2014”

Peluso, Nancy Lee. "Coercing conservation?: The politics of state resource control." Global environmental change 3.2 (1993): 199-217. 

Peña, Devon G. "Structural violence, historical trauma, and public health: the environmental justice critique of contemporary risk science and practice." In Communities, Neighborhoods, and Health, pp. 203-218. Springer New York, 2011.

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Quantitative/analytical

Bowen, William. "An analytical review of environmental justice research: what do we really know?" Environmental management 29.1 (2002): 3-15. 

Corburn, Jason. "Combining Community-Based Research and Local Knowledge to Confront Asthma and Subsistence-Fishing Hazards in Greenpoint/Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York." Environmental Health Perspectives 110, no. 2 (2002): 241-248. 

Downey, Liam. "Assessing environmental inequality: How the conclusions we draw vary according to the definitions we employ." Sociological Spectrum25.3 (2005): 349-369. 

Fox, Mary A. "Evaluating cumulative risk assessment for environmental justice: a community case study." Environmental Health Perspectives110.Suppl 2 (2002): 203. 

Goldman, Benjamin A. "An environmental justice paradigm for risk assessment." Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 6.4 (2000): 541-548. 

Krieg, Eric J., and Daniel R. Faber. "Not so black and white: environmental justice and cumulative impact assessments." Environmental impact assessment review 24, no. 7 (2004): 667-694.

Larsen, Katarina, Ulrika Gunnarsson-Östling, and Erik Westholm. "Environmental scenarios and local-global level of community engagement: Environmental justice, jams, institutions and innovation." Futures 43.4 (2011): 413-423. 

Rechtschaffen, Clifford, and Eileen Guana. "Theories of Causation." Chapter 2 in Environmental Justice: Law, Policy, and Regulation. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2002, pp. 27-52. 

Williams, Robert W. "The Contested Terrain of Environmental Justice Research: Community as a Unit of Analysis." The Social Science Journal 36, no. 2 (1999): 313-328. 

Race – general 

Cole, Luke W., and Sheila R. Foster. From the ground up: Environmental racism and the rise of the environmental justice movement. NYU Press, 2001. [Ch. 3] 

Goldman, Benjamin, Laura J. Fitton. Toxic Wastes and Race Revisited. Washington, DC: Center for Policy Alternatives, 1994. 

Gottlieb, Robert. "Ethnicity as a Factor: The Quest for Environmental Justice." Chapter 7 in Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993, pp. 235-269. 

Mohai, Paul and Robin Saha. Racial inequality in the distribution of hazardous waste: a national-level reassessment. Social Problems (2007) 54: 343-370. 

Teelucksingh, Cheryl. "Environmental racialization: Linking racialization to the environment in Canada." Local Environment 12.6 (2007): 645-661.  

Racial, ethnic and cultural groups: US and Canada

African-American:  

Lawson, Bill E. "Racist Property Holdings and Environmental Coalitions." Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice (2006): 97. 

Lawson, Bill E. "The value of environmental justice." Environmental Justice1.3 (2008): 155-158.  

Lee, C. (1993). Beyond toxic wastes and race. Bullard, Robert, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. South End Press, Boston, 41-52. 

Asian-American: 

Leong, Andrew (2010). The Struggle over Parcel C: How Boston’s Chinatown Won a Victory in the Fight Against Institutional Expansionism and Environmental Racism. IN Asian American Studies Now: A Critical Reader. Edited and with an Introduction by Jean Yu-Wen Shen Wu and Thomas Chen, Rutgers U. Press, 2010. 

[also available at] Leong, Andrew. "The struggle over Parcel C: How Boston's Chinatown won a victory in the fight against institutional expansion and environmental racism." Amerasia Journal 21.3 (1995): 99-119. 

Park, Lisa Sun-Hee, and David N. Pellow. "Racial formation, environmental racism, and the emergence of Silicon Valley." Ethnicities 4.3 (2004): 403-424. 

Perera, Gihan. “Claiming the Right to the City: A Question of Power,” Race, Poverty, & the Environment (2008):15.1:12-13.  

Asian-Pacific 

Asian Pacific Environmental Network (CA/Bay area): http://apen4ej.org/ 

Latino/a: 

Figueroa, Robert Melchior. "Other faces: Latinos and environmental justice." Faces of environmental racism: Confronting issues of global justice. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Boston (2001): 167-186.

Gutierrez, Gabriel. "Mothers of East Los Angeles Strike Back." Unequal protection 220 (1994): 232. 

Loh, Penn. “Must it be Greens versus Browns: Population, Immigration, and Environment:,” Racefile (1995):3.5. Applied Research Center. Oakland, CA. September-October 1995.  

Muñiz, Brenda. In the eye of the storm: how the government and private response to hurricane Katrina failed Latinos. Washington, DC: National Council of La Raza, 2006. 

Puerto Rico: 

Dietrich, Alexa S. "Coercive Harmony, Deep Capture and Environmental Justice in Puerto Rico." Development and Change 42.6 (2011): 1441-1463.

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Toxics/body/health

Goldman, Benjamin, and Laura Fitton. "Toxic wastes and race revisited." Washington, DC: Center for Policy Alternatives (1994). 

Landrigan, Philip J., Virginia A. Rauh, and Maida P. Galvez. "Environmental justice and the health of children." Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine: A Journal of Translational and Personalized Medicine 77.2 (2010): 178-187. 

Wright, Beverly. “Living and Dying in Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley.’” In The Quest for Environmental Justice. Ed. Robert D. Bullard. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005. Ch. 4. 

Transportation

Race, Poverty, & the Environment (2005/2006). Issue on “Transportation Justice”, Vol. 12, No.1, Winter 2005/2006, pp. 6-31, 47- 58, 68-78.  

Rast, Joel. "Environmental justice and the new regionalism." Journal of planning education and research 25.3 (2006): 249-263. 

Urban issues

Brownlow, Alec. “An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia.” Geoforum 37.2 (2006): 227-245.

Lord, Charles, and Keaton Norquist. "Cities as emergent systems: Race as a rule in organized complexity." Envtl. L. 40 (2010): 551. 

Pulido, Laura. "Rethinking environmental racism: White privilege and urban development in Southern California." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90.1 (2000): 12-40.

Waste

Pellow, David N., and Lisa Sun-Hee Park. The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental injustice, immigrant workers, and the high-tech global economy. NYU Press, 2002. [Ch. 5, p. 85-111: The Political Economy of Work and Health in Silicon Valley]   

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