A look at how the environmental justice movement has often harmed and alienated ingenuous communities in what is now the United States. ( )

this might reflect more on my mental state but i found this a very choppy read. some of it felt really academic and hard to process, and some of it was easy to understand and really interesting. i don't know if that's more topics that were more digestible for me personally or my head space or the book itself, but i had trouble with it.

still, there is some interesting and important information here (probably much more than what i got from it). the things that struck me the most were:

"The findings revealed, among other things, the smoking gun: while socioeconomic status was implicated in siting hazardous waste facilities, race was the most significant variable, and three of every five black and Hispanic Americans and approximately half of all Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites."

"To be a person of direct Indigenous descent in the US today is to have survived a genocide of cataclysmic proportions. Some Native people have described the experience of living in today's world as post apocalyptic."

"The national park system has long been lauded as 'America's greatest idea,' but only relatively recently has it begun to be more deeply questioned. In his 1999 book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Mark David Spence delivered a long-overdue critique that linked the creation of the first national parks with the federal policy of Indian removal. Spence points out that the first so-called wilderness areas that had been deemed in need of preserving were not only and in actuality Indigenous-occupied landscapes when the first national parks were established, but also that an uninhabited wilderness had to first be created. He examines the creation of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite National Parks in particular to illustrate the way the myth of uninhabited virgin wilderness has for more than a century obscured a history of Native land dispossession in the name of preservation and conservation and serves as the foundation of the environmental movement."

"The idea of wilderness as conceived by preservationists and conservationists was a white-settler social construct. It imagined an unpeopled, wild landscape as pristine, pure, and unspoiled, and as the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant asserts, reflected values that equated wilderness with whiteness and, after postbellum black urban migration, cities with darkness and depravity. These tropes, rooted in policies of removal and segregation, she argues, led to the idea of an American 'colonized Eden,' a 'controlled managed garden' from which colonized Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people of color were systematically excluded and which led to patterns of toxic waste dumping in communities of color." ( )

A powerful reminder of the utterly deplorable way the government of the United States has treated the indigenous people, the true owners of the land cla8med and still held by outside usurpers. Many of the events and examples in this book have been described elsewhere, but seeing them all gathered and linked to the ongoing environmental crisis, is a powerful statement.

While it is commonly understood that undesirable land uses have historically (and still) been located near/in poor communities, which are often of color. In this book Gilio-Whitaker looks at how that has affected Native Americans in ways that are different than other poor/black/brown communities--and what they have tried and are continuing to try to remedy these situations.

This book is full of information about Environmental Justice--what it means and how it applies to whom, with lots of examples and lots of legal information. It was much more academic than I was expecting. This is not narrative nonfiction.

She gives some excellent explanations focused around several key points:
• North American Native peoples are living in a post-apocalyptic world. In the last 500 years their populations were wiped out, their land stolen, and they were the victims of genocides and are the victims of continued abuse at the hand of governments and settlers.
• Native peoples have lost most of their land, and have thus lost the ability to live their life traditionally. Reservations are actually held in Trust by the US government, to be managed for the Natives' benefits. But they have always been managed in the best interests of corporations and the government itself, as reservations have been sold off to setters (Oklahoma), used for corporate interests such as uranium mining (desert Southwest), and, as DAPL/Standing Rock show, this is still going on today. This loss of land and places has affected food sovereignty and traditional medicine, health, and spirituality.
• Natives have a fundamentally different worldview than those of European descent. Their sacred spaces are in the place--they cannot be moved as a church or synagogue can be moved. Natives traditionally see themselves as part of nature, with nature having agency as well. But laws and the trusts are written in and run by the Euro-American way of seeing time and a linear line. She discusses the method of getting "Rights of Nature" written into laws, as has been done in several other countries--giving Nature "person" status as the US has given it to corporations.
• Why environmentalists and Native activists so often don't see eye-to-eye, historically and currently. In California the two groups successfully worked together to save Pahne and Trestles from a freeway, but the camps at Standing Rock had issues between the two groups and how they saw their own purpose of being there and what they were trying to do, and how they behaved. Historically, Natives were removed from National Parks because of the European way of seeing people as not part of nature and of Natives as not been agents in nature.
• Methods of moving forward: land purchases, gaining recognition of specific sacred sites, fighting--as at Standing Rock--for consultations required by treaty. How groups with different world views can work together and use the legal tools that each has to improve environmental justice for all.

Thank you to Beacon Press and LibraryThing for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. ( )