Environment, Power, and Justice

Southern African Histories

Graeme Wynn editor Nancy J Jacobs editor Jane Carruthers editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Ohio University Press

Published:26th Jul '22

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Environment, Power, and Justice cover

With appreciation for both regional and chronological variation, this volume’s contributors track the global concept of environmental justice to analyze its influence in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Lesotho and to expand popular understandings of social-environmental harm.

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 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, rethinking invasive species and racialized urban development. It adds in a sophisticated way to the literature on environmental justice.”
“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 from the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid pasts. This lively conversation not only gives new perspectives on the contingencies of the past, it opens up possibilities for the future.”
“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 for environmental justice. This is a must-read volume for everyone interested in environmental justice, not only in the Southern African context, but also on the African continent and globally.”
“A critical text on postcolonial environmental humanities scholarship and presents environmental justice as a ‘traveling’ multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary concept [that is] useful for scholars in many fields, such as environmental historians, political scientists, sociologists, policy planners, activists, and environmental scientists.” * H-Environment, H-Net Reviews *

ISBN: 9780821424841

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

368 pages