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Book Review
| Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. By David Naguib Pellow. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2002. ix + 234 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95.
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| David Pellow has succeed in producing a book that finally addresses, although in a limited sense, environmental inequalities that have occurred and are occurring in the heart of America's industrial complex, Chicago. This is a critical achievement since much of the environmental justice literature published to date has focused on African Americans living in rural Southern communities or Latino communities in the West, like Robert Bullard's seminal work, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality (3rd ed., Westview, 2000) or Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster's From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York University Press, 2001). |
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Pellow elucidates clearly and succinctly the historical, political, economic, technological, and sociological basis for the occurrence of environmental racism and environmental justice in Chicago and the United States. This monograph goes farther than any other published works in discussing the recent historical relationship of solid waste management using incineration with the environmental quality of life for Northern urban African-American communities. He also provides a long overdue acknowledgement of the emergence of the environmental justice group, People for Community Recovery (PCR) that Hazel Johnson, known as the "Black Mother of the Environmental Movement," developed in Chicago's notorious Altgeld Gardens. PCR and Altgeld Gardens eventually became involved in environmental justice struggles over some of the largest garbage and recycling facilities ever devised. |
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What is intellectually refreshing in Pellow's work is his own perspective, based on the contemporary plight of African Americans suffering from environmental racism in Chicago. This work reflects what might be for some, the controversial findings of his research and field experience. Pellow provides several case studies arguing that African American communities and their politicians can sometimes be complicit in environmental racism. His most poignant example is of the economically predominantly African American community of Robbins, Illinois, that sought to attract land waste management facilities beginning in the 1970s. By 1986, "while a major incinerator battle was raging in Los Angeles, the Illinois Senate approved a measure to acquire land for an incinerator in the village of Robbins" (p. 91). Robbins' motivation was its economic depression that resulted from "a mass exodus of both businesses and residents (one third) during the period between 1970 and 1990" that prompted each mayoral administration to court any and all types of businesses to keep the village afloat financially (p. 91). Robbins is significant because it clearly illustrates the heterogenic forces within African American communities that come into conflict when they must choose between environmental quality and economics. A chief opponent to the Robbins incinerator was PCR, which aligned itself with several other environmental groups (e.g. Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and Citizens for a Better Environment) to halt this project. |
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This book should be read by environmental, and African American and ethnic studies scholars since it adds tremendously to the discussion of the role that African Americans and other environmentally disenfranchised ethnic groups play in contributing to (and/or ameliorating) the continuing phenomena of environmental racism and environmental inequalities in their own communities. |
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Reviewed by Sylvia Hood Washington, a visiting scholar at Northwestern University and a formally trained environmental engineer and environmental historian. Her research focuses on the historical interrelationships of race, class, technology, and environmental inequalities. |
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