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Book Review
| Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice. Edited by Sylvia Hood Washington, Paul C. Rosier, and Heather Goodall. Lanham, MD, Boulder, CO, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Lexington Books, 2006. xxiii + 433 pages. Bibliographical references, index. Cloth $85.00, paper $29.95.
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| Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice combines writings from scholars and activists on the multiple forms of environmental injustice. The cumulative impact of the book's twenty-six chapters leaves readers with at least two inescapable conclusions: that environmental injustice is a widespread, not an isolated, phenomenon; and that the perspectives, voices, and realities of its victims are not only systematically marginalized, but silenced and belittled as part and parcel of the injustice. There are too many good chapters to comment on in this review, but the following chapters merit special attention because of the insightfulness of the argument, the strength of the evidence, and the quality of the writing. |
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Julie Sze recounts the blatantly unjust urban planning practices of New York City, and the decades of community resistance to the race and class-based siting of wastewater treatment plants, waste transfer facilities, incinerators, and concentrated transportation infrastructures. Quoting the sentiments of longtime community organizers, Sze finds that "the city is either a force of neglect or active destruction that must be counterbalanced by community activism" (p. 176). Heather Goodall persuasively describes how indigenous peoples have expressed their environmental concerns along five narrative themes: dispossession, displacement, entrapment and control, invisibility, and globalization. She shows that in addition to protesting immediate threats to people and land (for example, from toxic dumps, polluting facilities, and mining activities), indigenous demands are expressed in terms of loss—of land ownership, rights, an economic base, and status—and as a critique of exploitive capitalism and inappropriate technology that ignore indigenous place-based knowledge. |
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