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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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An important theme of the book is the use of imagined "pure" and "wild" environments to justify exploitation in the name of national development. Goodall's second chapter offers a moving analysis of the creation of racialized environments in an Australian river town. She reveals how European settlers used the river to segregate and control Aboriginal people and to create hierarchies between colonized and colonizer. Settlers used their ideas about the "naturalness" of the river, its presumed permanence as a border, and its imagined detachment from society as justifications for imposing racial segregation and controlling citizenship. Jane Bloodworth Rowe provides similar insights, exposing the conflicting views of nature that emerged in the struggle over Ferrell Parkway, a controversial road project in Virginia. |
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Another central theme of the book is the role of history and memory in environmental justice struggles. In what is perhaps the most poignant chapter, Jacqui Katona, an indigenous elder of the aboriginal Mirrar people of Australia, recounts the cultural genocide and human rights abuses her people have endured through decades of uranium mining on their lands. Rachael Selby and Pataka Moore offer another captivating historical account of the Maori experience told by indigenous authors. K. Animashaun Ducre Anya Bernstein's chapter asks a sophisticated set of questions about the construction of personalized history and collective memory in a Taipei neighborhood that is trying to preserve its historical buildings and oppose the expansion of an electric substation in its neighborhood. She provides an exquisitely nuanced and complex critique of memory as an organizing theme in community resistance, and reveals how the past is brought to bear on present environmental struggles. |
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A few unfortunate qualities must be mentioned. As with many edited volumes, the chapters are not uniformly interesting or enlightening and their quality varies significantly. Several chapters also appear to have been only partially edited, with multiple errors in grammar and usage on every page. This is not only distracting; it detracts from the book's effectiveness in the classroom. The volume also lacks a stand-alone bibliography, providing instead bibliographical references in notes at the end of each chapter. The addition of a complete reference list at the end of the book would increase its usefulness to scholars and students. |
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Echoes is accessible to a general audience and succeeds in broadening our understanding of environmental justice, which has been primarily associated with the siting of polluting facilities in communities of color and poverty in the United States. By framing environmental justice in global terms, critical postcolonial perspectives, indigenous voices, identity politics, and critiques of capitalism and globalization are brought to bear on environmental injustice, which is viewed inseparably from the political, social, and economic struggles of marginalized people around the planet. This reframing of environmental justice is the overwhelming strength of the volume and, despite the unevenness of the chapters, establishes Echoes as a significant contribution to the environmental justice literature. |
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Earthea Nance, an assistant professor of urban environmental studies at Virginia Tech and a board-licensed environmental engineer, is founder and director of the People's Environmental Center in New Orleans. Her current book project, Narrating Development: How Engineers Constructed Participatory Sanitation in Brazil, 1980–2005, is an analysis of grassroots involvement in urban sanitation during the democratization of Brazil. |
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