Echoes from the Poisoned Well: Global Memories of Environmental Injustice

These moving stories compel us to think about two interrelated questions: Why do societies seem perenially to require necessary victims? And, why have we proven unable to rein in our limitless, even mindless, lust for growth and gain, especially in light of the human costs? Either we heed the Echoes from the Poisoned Well or we will all soon drink its deadly draught.

This bold and broad-ranging book presents the pan-global phenomenon of environmental injustice from an historical perspective for the first time. In a volume of well-written and sophisticated analyses, expert authors explore the roots and effects of environmental inequity in societies as different as Finland, Zimbabwe, Australia, Martinique, Taiwan, and the United States. Covering a diversity of urban and rural communities in the developing and developed world, periphery and metropole, indigenous and academic voices are finely balanced. This ambitious collection is innovative in including wide variety and different scales of environmental impacts, including forestry, mining, housing and industrial development, water supply, the effects of pollution and much else. This thought-provoking and instructive book with its interesting mix of perspectives will have wide appeal.

This immensely valuable and unprecedented collection demonstrates clearly that decisions to use the environment, and actions that abuse the environment, are too often decisions and actions that use and abuse people. The book ranges energetically across place and time to expose and explore that deeply human side of environmental issues, blending historical perspective with international relevance and sharp local topicality. And it points to the sorts of intellectual and practical capacities needed to deal with environmental injustice.

Work on environmental justice is a cutting edge area of scholarship in environmental studies. This edited book contributes to the new genre with its own distinctive take. It combines studies of the African-American environmental justice tradition – the best-known type – with consideration of class and gender issues and highlights research on indigenous peoples. It defines environmental justice broadly to include its basis in dispossession of land. Through a comparative dimension and inclusion of a wide range of essays, the book allows us to move beyond a North American focus to a variety of colonial environments in which indigenous issues can be explored. A timely and thought-provoking collection.