Julie Sze. Environmental justice in a moment of danger: An important addition to the body of environmental justice
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BOOK REVIEW
Julie Sze. Environmental justice in a moment of danger: An important addition to the body of environmental justice California: University of California Press, 2020 April Karen Baptiste 1
# AESS 2020
Sze (2020) focuses on the environmental justice movement in today’s context. Though she takes an American Studies perspective to the book, it is worth noting that the interdisciplinary nature of both American Studies and Environmental Justice (EJ) allows the work to be applicable to other fields that explore environmental justice. As a short read, it allows for students to get a good basis of some of the foundational principles of environmental justice, while also providing some applications that are helpful using contemporary cases. As I write this review, I will provide some of the key highlights of each chapter while also indicating a few areas of improvement or that needed clarity or expansion for future work. The introduction of the book really does a good job of providing some of the definitions of environmental justice and other associated terms. She raised some key underlying concepts that help to explain why environmental injustice persists within the society. Highlighting concepts like neoliberalism, racism, environmental violence, settler colonialism, and American exceptionalism were used as the grounding for the other chapters where she goes back to some of these concepts with the exception of the last one. Two things that were really poignant in this introduction were important to me. First, she provided in several places throughout the chapter the starting points of assumption for the validity of environmental justice and the associated movement. Two specific examples that she indicated are the following:
“My starting point is simple: environmental justice movements – what they are, who is involved and what * April Karen Baptiste [email protected] 1
Environmental Studies Program and Africana and Latin American Studies Program, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY, USA
they are fighting against and for – helped us to understand historical and cultural forces and resistance to violence, death and destruction of loves and bodies through movements, cultures and stories” (p.4). “…my starting premise is that unjust environments are rooted in racism, capitalism, militarism, colonialism, land theft from Native people and gender violence.” (p. 7). Raising these starting points is really important as it allows instructors to have some language to back up the premise on which EJ is based and pushes against the narrative that EJ is often one-sided. Second, her use of the analogy of “I can’t breathe” is really poignant in showing its connection to EJ. It continues to show the violence that persists against black bodies in the US society as we saw with the recent death of Dion Johnson, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Chapter 1 focuses on indigenous environmental worldviews. She focused on the case study of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and it speaks to what #DAPL revea
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