Race and Environment Resources

PRIMERS:
● “Read Up on the Links Between Racism and the Environment,” New York Times,
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/05/climate/racism-climate-change-reading-list
.html (full text at end of this document)

● Purdy, Jedediah, “Environmentalism’s Racist History,” The New Yorker 15 August 2015,
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/environmentalisms-racist-history.

● Brave-Noisecat, Julian, “The Environmental Movement Needs to Reckon with its Racist
History,” Vice,
https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/bjwvn8/the-environmental-movement-needs-to-reckon-
with-its-racist-history

● Hopkins, Hop, “Racism is Killing the Planet,” Sierra June 8 2019

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/racism-killing-planet (useful for discussing this very
phenomenon in terms of arc of the Sierra Club, here, here, here, and here).

Research
Banerjee, Anindita, “Atoms, Aliens, and Compound Crises: Central Asia’s Nuclear Fantastic,” Science
Fiction Studies, special issue on “The Climate Crisis," 45, 3, 2018, 454-68.
Banerjee, Subhankar, ed., Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point, Seven Stories Press, 2012.
Brady, Mary Pat, Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space,
Duke UP, 2002.
Bullard, Robert, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, Routledge, 2000.
Cronon, William, “The Trouble with the Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,”
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, W.W.
Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90.
Deming, Alison H., and Lauret E. Savoy, eds., The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural
World, Milkweed Editions, 2003.
Dillon, Lindsey and Julie Sze, “Police Power and Particulate Matters,” English Language Notes, 54, 2,
2016, 13–23.
Dowie, Mark, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, MIT
P, 1996.
----. Conservation Refugees: The Hundred Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Indigenous
Peoples, MIT P, 2009.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2015.
Dungy, Camille, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, U of Georgia P,
2009.
Estes, Nick. Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long
Tradition of Indigenous Resistance, Verso, 2018.
Finney, Carolyn, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the
Great Outdoors. U of North Carolina P, 2014.
Francis, John, Planetwalker: 22 Years of Walking, 17 Years of Silence,
https://enqvisthomes.com/you/40996-planetwalker-22-years-of-walking-17-years-of-silence-502-76
0.php
Frazier, Chelsea M., "Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist
Interventions in Environmentalism." Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 1 (2016): 40-72.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography.”
The Professional Geographer, 54, 2002, 15–24.
Glave, Diane, Rooted in the Earth: Reclaiming the African American Environmental Heritage,
Lawrence Hill Books, 2010.
Harris, Cheryl, “Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review,” 106, 1993, 1707–1791.
Hayashi, Robert, Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West, U of
Iowa P, 2007.
Hilo-Whitaker Dina, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice From
Colonization to Standing Rock, Beacon P, 2019.
Hundorf, Shari, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination, Cornell UP, 2001.
La paperson, “A Ghetto Land Pedagogy: An Antidote for Settler Environmentalism.” Environmental
Education Research, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 115-30.
Jackson, John, and Nadine Weidman, Race, Racism, and Science: Social Impact and Interaction,
Rutgers UP, 2006.
Jacoby, Karl, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of
Conservation, U of California P, 2001.
Karuka, Manu, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental
Railroad, U of California P, 2019.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the
Teachings of Plants, Milkweed, 2013.
Mascarenhas, Michael, Lessons in Environmental Justice, From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and
Idle No More, U of California, Berkeley, 2020.
Mbembe, Achille, “The Universal Right to Breathe,” Critical Inquiry, translated by Carolyn Shread,
13 April 2020. https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to-breath
Miles, Tiya, “Black Bodies, Green Spaces,” June 19 2019,
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/opinion/sunday/black-bodies-green-spaces.html
Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian, eds., Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference. Duke UP,
2003.
Monani, Salma and Jodi Adamson, eds. Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations From Earth
to Cosmos, Routledge 2017.
Mukerjee, Rahul, Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty, Duke
UP, 2020.
Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Princeton UP, 2011.
Norgaard, Kari, Salmon & Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action. Rutgers
UP, 2019.
Pellow, David Naguib and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Justice,
Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy, NYU P, 2002.
Peña, Devon, Mexican Americans and the Environment: Tierra y Vida, U of Arizona P, 2005
Pulido, Laura, Tianna Bruno, Cristina Faiver-Serna and Cassie Galentine, “Spectacular Racism,
Environmental Deregulation and the White Nation,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 109, 2, 2019, 520-532.
Pulido, Laura, "Geographies and Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism and Racial Capitalism"
Progress in Human Geography. 41, 4, 2016, 524-533.
Purdy, Jedediah, This Land is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth, Princeton UP, 2019.
O'Brien, William E., Landscapes of Exclusion: State Parks and Jim Crow in the American South, U of
Massachusetts P, 2015.
Outka, Paul, Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008.
Ray, Sarah, The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture, U of Arizona P, 2013.
Rayson, Alex K. and S. Susan Deborah, eds., Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays, Palgrave Macmillan,
2016.
Ruffin, Kimberly, Black on Earth: African American Eco-Literary Traditions, U of Georgia P, 2010.
Savoy, Lauret, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape, Counterpoint, 2016.
Simpson, Leanne, As We Have Always Done, U of Minnesota P, 2017.
Slovic, Scott, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran, Ecocriticism of the Global South,
Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.
Smith, Kimberly, African American Environmental Thought, U of Kansas P, 2007.
Spence, Mark, Dispossessing the Environment: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks,
Oxford UP, 2000.
Sze, Julie, Paul M, Ong, and Charles Lee, editors. Asian American and Pacific Islander
Environmentalism, special issue of aapi nexus 11, 1 & 2, 2013.
Sze, Julie, ed., Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power, NYU P, 2018.
----. “Asian American, Immigrant and Refugee Environmental Justice Activism Under Neoliberal
Urbanism,” Asian American Law Journal, 18, 15-23.
----. Environmentalism in a Moment of Danger, U of California P, 2020.
Taylor, Dorceta E., The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and
Environmental Protection. Duke UP, 2016.
Wald, Sarah, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming Since the Dust Bowl, U of
Washington P, 2016.
Wald, Sarah, David J Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarrra, Sarah Jaquette Ray, eds. Latinx
Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial, Temple UP, 2019.
Walker, Gordon, Beyond Distribution and Proximity: Exploring the Multiple Spatialities of
Environmental Justice, 41, 4, 2009, 614-636.
Whyte, Kyle, “Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice,” Environment and Society:
Advances in Research 9, 2018, 125-144.
----. ALL his work, here: https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/climate-justice/
Wildcat, Daniel. Red Alert: Saving the World Through Indigenous Knowledge, Fulcrum, 2009.
Woods, Clyde and Katherine McKitterick, eds. Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, co-edited
with Katherine McKittrick, South End Press, 2007.
Wright, B.H., Bullard, R.D., & Johnson, G.S., “Confronting Environmental Injustice,” [Special Issue].
Journal of Race, Gender, and Class, 5, 1997, 65-79.
Ybarra, Priscilla, Writing the Good Life: Mexican American Literature and the Environment, U of
Arizona P, 2016.
Yusoff, Katherine. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, U of Minnesota P, 2019.

Settler Colonial Studies to Environmental Humanities

Primer: https://unsettlingamerica.wordpress.com/2014/06/06/settler-colonialism-primer/
Research
Adamson, Joni, “Medicine Food: Critical Environmental Justice Studies, Native North American
Literature and the Movement for Food Sovereignty.” Special Issue: Indigenous Studies, Guest
Ed. Kyle Powys Whyte. Environmental Justice 4.4 (December 2011): 213-19.
Anson, April, “‘Master Metaphor’: Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency.”
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 8, 1, 2020, 60-81.
----. “‘The President Stole Your Land’: Public Lands and the Settler Commons.” Special issue on
Public Lands, Western American Literature, 54, 1, 2019, 49-62.
Bacon, JM, “Settler Colonialism as Eco-Social Structure and the Production of Colonial Ecological
Violence,” Environmental Sociology, 5, 2019, 59-69.
Bhandar, Brenda, The Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Duke
UP, 2018.
Boggs, Kyle, “The Rhetorical Landscapes of the ‘Alt-Right’ and The Patriot Movements: Settler
Entitlement to Native Land,” The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and
Communication, edited by Bernhard Forchtner, Routledge, 2019, 293-309.
Bonds, A., & Inwood, J, “Beyond White Privilege: Geographies of White Supremacy and Settler
Colonialism,” Progress in Human Geography, 40, 2016, 715–733.
Bruyneel, K.M, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.-Indigenous Relations. U
of Minnesota P, Indigenous Americas Series, 2007.
Byrd, Jodi, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. U of Minnesota P, 2011.
Byrd, Jodi, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandran Reddy. “Predatory Value: Economies of
Dispossession and Disturbed Realities.” Economies of Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race,
Capitalism, Special Issue of Social Text 36, 2, 135, 2018, 1-18.
Coulthard, Glen, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. U of
Minnesota P, 2014.
Day, Iyko, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism. Duke UP,
2016.
----. The rest of her work: https://mtholyoke.academia.edu/IykoDay
Deloria, Philip J, Playing Indian, Yale U, 1998.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, An Indigenous People’s History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2015.
Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, Grove/Atlantic Inc., 2007.
Gahman, L. (2016). White Settler Society as Monster: Rural Southeast Kansas, Ancestral Osage
(Wah-Zha-Zhi) Territories, and the Violence of Forgetting. Antipode, 48(2), 314–335.
Hixson, W. American Settler Colonialism: A History. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.
Horne, Gerald, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, Monthly Review P, 2018.
Inwood, Joshua F.J. and Anne Bonds, “Property and Whiteness: the Oregon Standoff and the
Contradictions of the U.S. Settler State,” Space and Polity, 2017, 1-16,
Kaufmann, E. “Naturalizing the nation”: The Rise of Naturalistic Nationalism in the United States
and Canada, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 40, 4, 1998, 666–695.
Kim, Jodi, “Settler Modernity, Debt Imperialism, and the Necropolitics of the Promise,” Economies of
Dispossession: Indigeneity, Race, Capitalism, Special Issue of Social Text, Edited by Jodi A.
Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandran Reddy, 135, 36, no. 2, June 2018,
41-62.
King, Tiffany, “Labor’s Aphasia: Toward Antiblackness as Constitutive to Settler Colonialism,”
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 10 June, 2014
https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2014/06/10/labors-aphasia-toward-antiblackness-as-co
nstitutive-to-settler-colonialism/
LeMenager, Stephanie, Manifest and Other Destinies: Territorial Fictions of the Nineteenth-Century
United States, U of Nebraska P, 2008.
McCarthy, J., “First World Political Ecology: Lessons from the Wise Use Movement.” Environment
and Planning A, 34, 2002, 1281–1302.
Mignolo, Walter, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, Duke
UP, 2011.
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. U of
Minnesota P, 2015.
Povinelli, Elizabeth, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Duke UP, 2016.
Razack, Sherene H, Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society, Between the Lines,
2002.
Rifkin, Mark, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation, Duke, 2019.
Simmons, Kristen, “Settler Atmospherics,” Member Voices, Fieldsights, November 20 2017,
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics
----. “Expanse,” Journal for the Anthropology of North America, 22, 2, 2019, 103-105.
Smith, Andrea, “Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy.” In D. HoSang, O. LaBennett, &
L. Pulido (Eds.) Racial Formation in the Twenty-first Century (pp. 66–90). U of California P,
2012.
The Kino-nda-niimi Collective, ed. The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the
Idle No More Movement, ARP Books, 2014.
Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another
Word For Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29, 1, 2016, 4-22.
Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization, Indigeneity,
Education & Society 1, 1, 2012, 1-40.
Washington, Harriet, A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and its Assault on the
American Mind, Little Brown Spark, 2019.
Watts, Vanessa, “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Non-Humans (First
Woman and Sky Woman Goes on a European World Tour,” Decolonization: Indigeneity,
Education & Society, 2, 1, 2013, 20-34.
Special issue of Environmental Justice, Environmental Justice in Native America:
https://www.liebertpub.com/toc/env/4/4
Far-Right Environmentalism, Eugenics, Ecofascism
Primer: https://tankmagazine.com/tank/2019/08/eco-fascism-reading-list/
Primary texts
* Galton, Francis, Hereditary Genius, 1869, and Inquiries into Human Facility and its Development, 1883
* Haekel, Ernst, The History of Creation, 1914
* Grant, Madison. The Passing of the Great Race, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918
* Darre, Richard Walther, Peasantry/Farminghood as Life-source of the Nordic Race, 1928, and New Nobility
from Blood and Soil, 1930
* Devi, Savatri, The Impeachment of Man, 1959 (1945)
* Erlich, Paul, The Population Bomb, 1968
* Hardin, Garret, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1968
* Robertson Wilmot, The Ethnostate, 1992
* Hernstein, Richard J. and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, 1994
* Kaczynski, Ted, “Industrial Society and its Future,” 1995
* Linkola, Penti, Can Life Prevail: a Revolutionary Approach to Environmental Crisis, 2004
* Renaud Camus, Renard, The Great Replacement, 2011
* Tarrant, Brendan, “The Great Replacement,” 2019
* Crusius, Patrick, “The Inconvenient Truth,” 2019

Research
Anson, April and Anindita Banerjee, “Green Walls: Politics of Proximity and the Ecofascist
Unconscious,” boundary 2, 35 pages, forthcoming.
Black, Edwin, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race,
Dialog P, 2012.
Brechin, Gary, “Conserving Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics, and the American Conservation
Movement,” Antipode 28, 3, 1996, 229-245
Fourchtner, Bernard, editor. The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and
Communication, Routledge, 2019, 293-309.
Frankenberg, R. The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness. Duke UP, 2001.
Gann, Lewis H. A History of Southern Rhodesia; Early Days to 1934 (First ed.), Chatto & Windus,
1965.
Helvarg, D. The War Against the Greens: The “Wise Use” Movement, the New Right, and
Anti-environmental Violence. Sierra Club Books, 1994.
Klein, Naomi. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, Simon & Schuster, 2019. (esp. “The
Specter of Eco-fascism”)
Low, Jennifer. “Design is Political: White Supremacy and Landscape Urbanism,” Agora: Journal of
Urban Planning and Design, 2019, 126-136.
Mayer, Neil M. “A Conflux of Desire and Need: Trees, Boy Scouts, and the Roots of Franklin
Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps,” FDR and the Environment, Edited by Henry L.
Henderson and David B. Willner, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
McCarthy, James, “States of Nature and Environmental Enclosures in the American West,” Violent
Environments, edited by Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts, Cornell UP, 2001, 117-145.
Ordover, Nancy, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism, U.
Minnesota P, 2002.
Painter, Nell Irvin, History of White People, W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
Reid Ross, Alexander, Against the Fascist Creep, AK Press 2017.
Schlatter, Evelyn A., Aryan Cowboys: White Supremacists and the Search for a New Frontier,
1970-2000, U of Texas P, 2006.
Serwer, Adam. “White Nationalism’s Deep American Roots,” The Atlantic April 2019
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/04/adam-serwer-madison-grant-white-n
ationalism/583258/
Shapiro, Jonathan, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison
Grant, U of Vermont, 2008.
Staudenmaier, Peter and Janet Biehl, Ecofascism Revisited: Lessons From the German Experience, AK
Press, 2011.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the
American Imagination, Beacon Press, 2019.
Taylor, Blair. “Alt-Right Ecology: Ecofascism and far-right environmentalism in the United States,”
The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication, edited by
Bernhard Forchtner, Routledge, 2019, 276-293.
Uekoetter, Frank. The Green and the Brown: A History of Conservation in Nazi Germany (Studies in
Environment and History) Cambridge UP, 2006.
Weiner, Douglas R. Models Of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet
Russia. U of Pittsburgh P, 2000.

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 POPULAR RESOURCES
Teachable podcasts:
● Hot Take podcast episode featuring Cherokee Journalist Rebecca Nagle
● How to Save a Planet on BLM and Climate Justice

Source lists:
- Mary Heglar’s running list of Green Voices of Colorand her article “Blood at the Root”,
- List by the Queer Ecology reading group at Ohio State U,
- Essential Books on Mexican Americans and the Environment, Priscilla Solaris Ybarra,
- Environmental History Now, “Climate justice is Racial Justice: Reading List,
- The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizationsby Dorceta E. Taylor,
- See also: “Ten Books to Contextualize Idle No More,” Active History (January 4,
2013); “Living Writers on Revolution,” Edge Effects (June 16, 2020);
“Environmental Justice Resources Online,” Environment & Society Portal; “Climate
Justice is Racial Justice: A Reading List,” Environmental History Now (June 11,
2020); “Read Up on the Links Between Racism and the Environment,” New York
Times (June 5, 2020); “Ten Books to Contextualize Environmental Racism,” NiCHE
(July 8, 2020), &

“Read Up on the Links Between Racism and the Environment,” New York Times full text here:
Articles and Essays
Grist links the response to protests against environmental degradation with protests against police
violence.
Dany Sigwalt, a co-executive director of an umbrella group of activist organizations called Power Shift
Network, argued in an essay published on Medium that “the way that we win on mitigating
climate change is to enforce government accountability to its citizens and right now, that
means fighting for justice for George Floyd.”
The Twitter list called Green Voices of Color, curated by the writer, Mary Annaïse Heglar, is a good
place to find writings by people of color.
The marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, writing in the Washington Post this week, urged her
white colleagues in the climate movement to challenge the racial inequality intertwined with
the climate crisis. “I need you to step up,” she wrote. “Please. Because I am exhausted.”
These connections are not new.
In 1982, in what is widely seen as the dawn of the environmental justice movement, a predominantly
African-American community in Warren County, N.C., led a civil disobedience campaign
against plans for a toxic dump site. That and other such campaigns were documented in
“Dumping in Dixie,” by Robert D. Bullard, with whom we spoke for our climate newsletter
this week.
The sociologist Dorceta E. Taylor chronicled several other cases across the country in “Toxic
Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility.”
In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published a pioneering report
documenting the disproportionate number of hazardous waste sites in communities of color
across the United States.
And in 2018, we profiled the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, who has made environmental justice and
climate change a central pillar of his campaign to redress poverty and racism.
The long attention to the problem doesn’t mean it’s gone away. Lead contamination in Flint, Mich., is
regarded as a textbook example, with a long tail of suffering: Its school system has been
struggling with a sharp rise in neurological and behavioral problems among its students, as this
story in The Times chronicled.
It’s worth rewinding to the history of the environmental movement, as well. In the United States, at
least one stream of the green movement has a racist history, as Jedediah Purdy wrote about in
The New Yorker in 2015. And some environmental groups have had to reckon with racism in
their membership, as Brentin Mock wrote in Outside Magazine wrote in 2017.
Though it’s not an article or book, also useful for the discussion about how to rebuild this country is
Heather C. McGhee’s TED Talk about how racism has driven bad public policy for years in
this country. In the era of a hotter planet, she told me this week, we have a chance to rewire the
economy in an explicitly anti-racist way.
Beyond the United States, I wrote how a series of crippling droughts had devastated the region’s
poorest, most vulnerable people in East Africa. My colleagues and I wrote about a massive
coal-fired power plant built on land that belonged to some of India’s poorest farmers. In coastal
cities, how to face a rising sea depends almost entirely on the accident of your birth.

Books
A deeply human meditation on racism and environmental havoc is Sarah M. Broom’s memoir about
her family’s home in New Orleans, called “The Yellow House.”
The writings of Amitav Ghosh have repeatedly explored the impact of environmental degradation on
people who are powerless, from the novel, “The Hungry Tide” to his series of essays in “The
Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable,” to his latest novel, “Gun Island,”
in which wildfires, freakish storms, mudslides and the sinking city of Venice hold a mirror to
the climate chaos of today.
The unequal impact of climate change is chronicled in a collection of essays, poems and stories called
“Tales of Two Planets.” One of its finest pieces is by Mariana Enríquez, who describes growing
up in Buenos Aires, on the banks of one of the most polluted rivers in the world, the
Matanza-Riachuelo:
In September 2002, a group of policemen who were drunk on power forced nineteen-year-old Ezequiel
Demonty, a teenager who lived on the Riachuelo’s banks, to jump into the river. They were
after him for a false complaint of robbery, and they decided to torture him before they arrested
him. The body appeared by the Victorino de la Plaza bridge, the same one I used to cross with
my family when I was little.
In 2014, near an offshoot of the Matanza river, seventeen-year-old Melina Romero’s body was found.
Her murderer and rapist left her in a garbage bag. The newspaper headlines said that she ‘didn’t
go to school’ and ‘liked to go out at night.’ They often illustrated the articles with a selfie of the
girl crying in the mirror, her eyeliner running, her cheeks stained with black tears.
Finally, the one piece I go back to again and again is the prescient Earthseed series by Octavia E. Butler,
and especially the first book, “Parable of the Sower.” Its protagonist, Lauren, feels the pain of
others, which is a lot of pain in California in 2024, when the book is set, amid racist violence,
government corruption and acute water scarcity.