Melissa Checker

Like Nixon Coming to China: Finding Common Ground in a Multi-Ethnic Coalition for Environmental Justice

This article uses ethnographic fieldwork to illustrate how a multi-ethnic group of activists in Brooklyn, New York, formed a coalition for environmental justice in thhborhood. Until the late 1980s local activists had organized in separate and antagonistic movements, competing over access to housing, schools, and police protection. However, as they increasingly realized that the environment was an urban concern, and was subject to discrimination, activists added it to their organizing agendas. In so doing, activists began to construct an expansive environmental narrative that cast all minorities in the neighborhood as united in the face of disproportionately high pollution rates. Activists thus found that they could enhance their environmental struggles by creating environmental identities that superseded rigidly defined identities based on ethnicity. Through organizing for environmental justice, activists redefined the meaning and significance of ethnic differences. [ethnicity, environmental justice, social movements, urban United States]

“Make Us Whole”: Environmental Justice and the Politics of Skepticism

Just after 6 p.m. on a mid-summer evening, I balanced on a small orange stool attached to a yellow Formica table, along with some 60 residents of Augusta, Georgia’s Hyde Park neighborhood. As the day’s thick humidity battled with the building’s air conditioner, residents wiped their brows and fanned themselves with meeting agendas. A few children squirmed in their seats or played in the back of the room, while around them, tensions mounted. Wearing a pressed suit and tie that defied the sultry evening, David Salter, a Washington D.C.-based consultant specializing in environmental justice issues, stood before us and said, ‘‘You will be made whole. That’s the idea.’’ Salter was referring to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Uniform Relocation Act policy, which dictates that residents displaced by federally funded projects and programs ‘‘be made whole’’ through fair and adequate compensation for their expenses and losses.

Eco-apartheid and Global Greenwaves

Perhaps no current struggle more strongly links the fate of African-descended peoples than the struggle for environmental justice. Colonialism, segregation, and legalized racism may have become officially obsolete, but the legacy of such processes has left many of the peoples of the African diaspora vulnerable to social and ecological degradation. In turn, the ever-growing demand for cheap and disposable goods, coupled with neoliberal economic policies, has dispossessed these people of their land, traditions, health, and livelihoods—resources that were especially hard won given histories of enslavement and subjugation. Indeed, environmental-justice activists refer to the increasingly unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens as “eco-apartheid.” The advent of global warming portends a worsening of such conditions, inasmuch as poor people and people of color are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, whether it takes the shape of dwindling natural resources or of violent storms and other severe weather.

Introducing Public Anthropology Reviews, September 2011

Welcome to the third installment of American Anthropologist’s new “Public Anthropology Reviews” section. We hope the section is fast becoming an important resource and space to present, constructively critique, and debate cutting-edge anthropological work that seeks to reach nonacademic audiences and influence critical issues of the day. If you missed the section’s first two issues, we encourage you to revisit those reviews (available in the journal and open access at http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/ 123301409/PDFSTART) and our introduction to the section (Checker et al. 2009). In this issue, we begin with our first “dialogic review,” which will generally feature an anthropologist and an interlocutor offering two perspectives on the impact and import of a work of public anthropology. In this case, we feature Vibrant, the six-year-old biannual international journal of the Association of Brazilian Anthropologists (ABA), which is seeking to increase the global accessibility of Brazilian anthropology by publishing in English, French, and Spanish— rather than just in Portuguese—and by making Vibrant available free online. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, who oversaw the launch of Vibrant as president of the ABA and remains an editorial board member, offers an overview of the linguistic, technological, and political-economic complexities of expanding the diversity of anthropological voices and disseminating anthropological knowledge around the globe. Then interlocutor Janet Chernela critiques the journal from the point of view of a reader. Eric C. Thompson discusses another effort to introduce anthropological perspectives into popular discourse in his review of “Ini Budaya Kita” (lit., this Is Our Culture), Julian Lee’s regular column for a Malaysian art and lifestyle magazine. As Thompson explains, Lee and a number of anthropologically inclined guest writers bring anthropological insights to contemporary Malaysian life while questioning popular, and generally narrow, understandings of “culture” that are frequently used by political conservatives “to rail against all manner of things—from music to political protest—by disparagingly commenting. . . . this is not our culture” (this issue). Next, Robert Rotenberg discusses Jared Braiterman’s Tokyo Green Space blog on “microgardening.” The blog is documenting efforts to use gardening in the smallest and most unusual urban spaces—rooftops, walls, schools—“to support biodiversity in the world’s largest city” (this issue). Of particular interest to environmental and urban anthropologists, not to mention gardeners, Rotenberg’s review describes a blog that combines design anthropology, lush color photography, and the eye and imagination of the flâneur to explore a transforming Tokyo. Finally, Edward M. Maclin brings us an analysis of anthropologists’ presence at the 2009 global climate change talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. Drawing on his own, at times harrowing, research at the talks, Maclin describes some of the challenges faced by anthropologists studying climate change and environmental activism in both conducting research and disseminating research findings about an issue of such obvious global significance beyond academia. In future issues, we intend to review a broad range of topics including the U.S. military’s Human Terrain program, anthropologists’ response to the earthquake in Haiti, service learning, new publishing experiments, and changes to tenure requirements. We continue to welcome submissions for work to be reviewed as well as the names of potential reviewers (e-mail publicanthreviews@gmail.com). We also welcome your suggestions, critique, and other feedback as we develop this important new section of American Anthropologist.