Book picks similar to
New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism by Rachel Stein
environmental-justice
environment
nonfiction
feminism
Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six
Jordan Flaherty - 2010
In the tradition of Howard Zinn this could be called 'The People's History of the Storm.' Jordan Flaherty was there on the front lines."Eve Ensler, playwright of "The Vagina Monologues" and activist and founder of V-Day"Jordan Flaherty brings the sharp analysis and dedication of a seasoned organizer to his writing, and insightful observation to his reporting. He unfailingly has his ear to the ground in a city that continues to reveal the floodlines of structural racism in America."Tram Nguyen, author of "We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11""Floodlines" is a firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans. The book weaves the stories of gay rappers, Mardi Gras Indians, Arab and Latino immigrants, public housing residents, and grassroots activists in the years before and after Katrina. From post-Katrina evacuee camps to torture testimony at Angola Prison to organizing with the family members of the Jena Six, "Floodlines" tells the stories behind the headlines from an unforgettable time and place in history.Jordan Flaherty is a writer and community organizer based in New Orleans. In addition to his award-winning post-Katrina journalism, he was the first journalist with a national audience to write about the Jena Six case and played an important role in bringing the story to theattention of the world. He has produced news segments for Al-Jazeera, TeleSur, and "Democracy Now!" and appeared as a guest on a wide range of television and radio shows, including CNN's "American Morning," "Anderson Cooper 360," "CNN Headline News," "GRITtv," "Keep Hope Alive with Reverend Jesse Jackson," and both local and nationally syndicated shows on National Public Radio.
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
Lester R. Brown - 2003
This book highlights how in ignoring nature's deadlines for dealing with these issues we risk the disruption of economic progress.
Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning
George Monbiot - 2006
The question is no longer Is climate change actually happening? but What do we do about it? George Monbiot offers an ambitious and far-reaching program to cut our carbon dioxide emissions to the point where the environmental scales start tipping back—away from catastrophe. Though writing with a "spirit of optimism," Monbiot does not pretend it will be easy. The only way to avoid further devastation, he argues, is a 90% cut in CO2 emissions in the rich nations of the world by 2030. In other words, our response will have to be immediate, and it will have to be decisive. In every case he supports his proposals with a rigorous investigation into what works, what doesn’t, how much it costs, and what the problems might be. He wages war on bad ideas as energetically as he promotes good ones. And he is not afraid to attack anyone—friend or foe—whose claims are false or whose figures have been fudged.After all, there is no time to waste. As Monbiot has said himself, "we are the last generation that can make this happen, and this is the last possible moment at which we can make it happen." George Monbiot is the best-selling author of The Age of Consent and Captive State, as well as the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows, Amazon Watershed, and No Man’s Land. In 1995, Nelson Mandela presented him with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. He has held visiting fellowships or professorships at the universities of Oxford (environmental policy), Bristol (philosophy), Keele (politics), and East London (environmental science). Currently visiting professor of planning at Oxford Brookes University, he writes a weekly column for the Guardian newspaper.
Feminist, Queer, Crip
Alison Kafer - 2013
Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world.
Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality
Helen Joyce - 2021
In just ten years, laws, company policies, school and university curricula, sport, medical protocols, and the media have been reshaped to privilege self-declared gender identity over biological sex. People are being shamed and silenced for attempting to understand the consequences of redefining ‘man’ and ‘woman’. While compassion for transgender lives is well-intentioned, it is stifling much-needed inquiry into the significance of our bodies.
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Rob Nixon - 2011
Using the innovative concept of slow violence to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode.In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations
Eugene Linden - 2006
Climate has been humanity's constant, if moody, companion. At times benefactor or tormentor, climate nurtured the first stirrings of civilization and then repeatedly visited ruin on empires and peoples. Eugene Linden reveals a recurring pattern in which civilizations become prosperous and complacent during good weather, only to collapse when climate changes -- either through its direct effects, such as floods or drought, or indirect consequences, such as disease, blight, and civil disorder. The science of climate change is still young, and the interactions of climate with other historical forces are much debated, but the evidence mounts that climate loomed over the fate of societies from arctic Greenland to the Fertile Crescent and from the lost cities of the Mayans in Central America to the rain forests of Central Africa. Taking into account the uncertainties in both science and the historical record, Linden explores the evidence indicating that climate has been a serial killer of civilizations. The Winds of Change looks at the present and then to the future to determine whether the accused killer is on the prowl, and what it will do in the future. The tragedy of New Orleans is but the latest instance in which a region prepared for weather disasters experienced in the past finds itself helpless when nature ups the ante. In the closing chapters, Linden explores why warnings about the dangers of climate change have gone unheeded and what is happening with climate today, and he offers perhaps the most explicit look yet at what a haywire climate might do to us. He shows how even a society prepared to absorb such threshold-crossing events as Katrina, the killer heat wave in Europe in 2003, or the floods in the American Midwest in the 1990s can spiral into precipitous decline should such events intensify and become more frequent. The Winds of Change places climate change, global warming, and the resulting instability in historical context and sounds an urgent warning for the future.
Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters Along the World's Coasts and Beneath the Seas
Carl Safina - 1998
Scientist and fisherman Carl Safina takes readers on a global journey of discovery, probing for truth about the world's changing seas, deftly weaving adventure, science, and political analysis.
Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century
Barbara Ransby - 2018
. . how to make social change.”—Publishers Weekly The breadth and impact of Black Lives Matter in the United States has been extraordinary. Between 2012 and 2016, thousands of people marched, rallied, held vigils, and engaged in direct actions to protest and draw attention to state and vigilante violence against Black people. What began as outrage over the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin and the exoneration of his killer, and accelerated during the Ferguson uprising of 2014, has evolved into a resurgent Black Freedom Movement, which includes a network of more than fifty organizations working together under the rubric of the Movement for Black Lives coalition. Employing a range of creative tactics and embracing group-centered leadership models, these visionary young organizers, many of them women, and many of them queer, are not only calling for an end to police violence, but demanding racial justice, gender justice, and systemic change. In Making All Black Lives Matter, award-winning historian and longtime activist Barbara Ransby outlines the scope and genealogy of this movement, documenting its roots in Black feminist politics and situating it squarely in a Black radical tradition, one that is anticapitalist, internationalist, and focused on some of the most marginalized members of the Black community. From the perspective of a participant-observer, Ransby maps the movement, profiles many of its lesser-known leaders, measures its impact, outlines its challenges, and looks toward its future.
The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse
David Owen - 2012
The quest for a breakthrough battery or a 100 mpg car are dangerous fantasies. We are consumers, and we like to consume green and efficiently. But David Owen argues that our best intentions are still at cross purposes to our true goal - living sustainably and caring for our environment and the future of the planet. Efficiency, once considered the holy grail of our environmental problems, turns out to be part of the problem. Efforts to improve efficiency and increase sustainable development only exacerbate the problems they are meant to solve, more than negating the environmental gains. We have little trouble turning increases in efficiency into increases in consumption.David Owen's The Conundrum is an elegant nonfiction narrative filled with fascinating information and anecdotes takes you through the history of energy and the quest for efficiency. This is a book about the environment that will change how you look at the world. We should not be waiting for some geniuses to invent our way out of the energy and economic crisis we're in. We already have the technology and knowledge we need to live sustainably. But will we do it?That is the conundrum.
A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story
Elaine Brown - 1992
More than a journey through a turbulent time in American history, this is the story of a black woman's battle to define herself.
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
Charlene Carruthers - 2018
Her debut book upends mainstream ideas about race, class and gender and sets forth a radically inclusive path to collective liberation. Her inclusive story about Black struggle draws on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions including the Haitian Revolution, U.S. Civil Rights, and Black and LGBTQ Feminist Movements. Bold and honest, Unapologetic is an inside look from an on-the-ground activist and movement leader about how to move people from the margins to the center of political strategy and practice.
Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A Do-It-Ourselves Guide
Scott Kellogg - 2008
We need sustainable living right where so many of us are: in urban neighborhoods. But how do we do it?That’s where Toolbox for Sustainable City Living comes in. In 2000 the dynamic Rhizome Collective transformed an abandoned warehouse in Austin, Texas, into a sustainability training center. Here, with their first book, Scott and Stacy, two of Rhizome’s founders, provide city dwellers—those who have never foraged or gardened along with those who dumpster-dive and belong to CSAs—with step-by- step instructions for producing our own food, collecting water, managing waste, reclaiming land, and generating energy. With vibrant illustrations created by Juan Martinez of the Beehive Collective and descriptive text based on years of experimentation, Stacy and Scott explain how to build and grow with cheap, salvaged, and recycled materials. More than a how-to manual, Toolbox is packed with accessible and relevant tools to help move our communities from envisioning a sustainable future toward living it.Scott Kellogg a Stacy Pettigrew are co-founders of the Rhizome Collective, an educational and activist organization based in Austin, Texas, that recently received a $200,000 grant from the EPA to clean up a 10-acre brownfield that they are transforming into an ecological justice park. Toolbox developed out of R.U.S.T.—Radical Urban Sustainability Training—their intensive weekend seminar in urban ecological survival skills.
Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot
Masha Gessen - 2014
In neon-colored dresses, tights, and balaclavas, they performed a “punk prayer” beseeching the “Mother of God” to “get rid of Putin.” They were quickly shut down by security, and in the weeks and months that followed, three of the women were arrested and tried, and two were sentenced to a remote prison colony. But the incident captured international headlines, and footage of it went viral. People across the globe recognized not only a fierce act of political confrontation but also an inspired work of art that, in a time and place saturated with lies, found a new way to speak the truth. Masha Gessen’s riveting account tells how such a phenomenon came about. Drawing on her exclusive, extensive access to the members of Pussy Riot and their families and associates, she reconstructs the fascinating personal journeys that transformed a group of young women into artists with a shared vision, gave them the courage and imagination to express it unforgettably, and endowed them with the strength to endure the devastating loneliness and isolation that have been the price of their triumph.
Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
Amanda Montell - 2019
Even before its usage to mean a female canine, bitch didn’t refer to gender at all—it originated as a gender-neutral word meaning genitalia. A perfectly innocuous word devolving into a female insult is the case for tons more terms, including hussy, which simply meant “housewife,” or slut, which meant “untidy” and was also used to describe men. These words are just a few among history’s many English slurs hurled at women. Amanda Montell, feminist linguist and staff features editor at online beauty and health magazine Byrdie.com, deconstructs language—from insults and cursing to grammar and pronunciation patterns—to reveal the ways it has been used for centuries to keep women form gaining equality. Ever wonder why so many people are annoyed when women use the word “like” as a filler? Or why certain gender neutral terms stick and others don’t? Or even how linguists have historically discussed women’s speech patterns? Wordslut is no stuffy academic study; Montell’s irresistible humor shines through, making linguistics not only approachable but both downright hilarious and profound.