EBOOK
Environment, Power, and Justice
Southern African Histories
Various AuthorsSeries: Series in Ecology and History(0)
About
Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these historical and locally specific case studies analyze and engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity.
This book highlights the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilized against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. Some chapters track the genealogies of contemporary activism, while others introduce positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. Addressing health, economic opportunity, agricultural policy, and food security, the chapters in this book explore a range of issues and ways of thinking about harm to people and their ecologies.
Because environmental justice is often understood as a contemporary phenomenon framed around North American examples, these fresh case studies will enrich both southern African history and global environmental studies. Environment, Power, and Justice expands conceptions of environmental justice and reveals discourses and dynamics that advance both scholarship and social change.
Contributors:
• Christopher Conz
• Marc Epprecht
• Mary Galvin
• Sarah Ives
• Admire Mseba
• Muchaparara Musemwa
• Matthew A. Schnurr
• Cherryl Walker
This book highlights the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilized against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment. Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid eras, these studies engage vernacular, activist, and scholarly efforts to mitigate social-environmental inequity. Some chapters track the genealogies of contemporary activism, while others introduce positions, actors, and thinkers not previously identified with environmental justice. Addressing health, economic opportunity, agricultural policy, and food security, the chapters in this book explore a range of issues and ways of thinking about harm to people and their ecologies.
Because environmental justice is often understood as a contemporary phenomenon framed around North American examples, these fresh case studies will enrich both southern African history and global environmental studies. Environment, Power, and Justice expands conceptions of environmental justice and reveals discourses and dynamics that advance both scholarship and social change.
Contributors:
• Christopher Conz
• Marc Epprecht
• Mary Galvin
• Sarah Ives
• Admire Mseba
• Muchaparara Musemwa
• Matthew A. Schnurr
• Cherryl Walker
Related Subjects
Reviews
"This is an excellent essay collection breaking new ground on environmental histories. Its aim of illuminating how environment, power, and justice are imbricated in Southern Africa builds on old academic foci … but speaks to new ecological issues. Together the chapters in this volume span African thought on ecology in the context of colonialism, water injustice, land dispossession, GMOs, rethinkin
Vishwas Satgar, associate professor of international relations, University of Witwatersran
"Wynn, Jacobs, and Carruthers have carefully brought together a dozen scholars of distinct disciplines and diasporas to offer wisdom and insight into environmental justice and power in southern Africa. In offering specificity and precision as to the ways environmental harm and human inequality vary but conjoin, the volume collectively frames contemporary discussions of justice in concepts of harm
Emily Wakild, coeditor of The Nature State: Rethinking the History of Conservation
"This is a remarkable volume that offers important new insights into ways in which environmental justice and injustice play out in contemporary and historical Southern Africa. The case studies demonstrate strikingly that environmental injustice varies greatly across time and space and, to paraphrase the editors, Rachel Carson is indeed not the beginning of the southern African 'story' of fighting
Phia Steyn, University of Stirling lecturer in African environmental history