Showing 1-20 of 21 items.
Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town
By Laura Hart
Rutgers University Press
Risk and Adaptation in a Cancer Cluster Town examines the role of emotion and its relationship to community experiences of social belonging and inequality. Using a cancer cluster community in Northwest Ohio as a case study, Laura Hart advances an approach to risk that grapples with the complexities of community belonging in the wake of suspected industrial pollution. Her research points to a fear driven not only by economic anxiety, but also by a fear of losing security within the community—a sort of pride that is not only about status, but connectedness. Hart reveals the importance of this social form of risk—the desire for belonging and the risk of not belonging—ultimately arguing that this is consequential to how people make judgements and respond to issues. Within this context, affected families experience psychosocial and practical conflicts as they adapt to cancer as a way of life. Hart ultimately presents possibilities for the democratization of risk management and underscores the need for transformative approaches to environmental justice.
Growing Gardens, Building Power
Food Justice and Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn
Rutgers University Press
Across the United States marginalized communities are organizing to address social, economic, and environmental inequities through building community food systems rooted in the principles of social justice. But how exactly are communities doing this work, why are residents tackling these issues through food, what are their successes, and what barriers are they encountering? This book dives into the heart of the food justice movement through an exploration of East New York Farms! (ENYF!), one of the oldest food justice organizations in Brooklyn.
Flooded
Development, Democracy, and Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam
Rutgers University Press
Flooded provides insights into the little-known effects of dam building through a close examination of Brazil’s Belo Monte hydroelectric facility, the fourth largest dam in the world. Klein tells the stories of dam-affected communities, such as fishermen and displaced urban residents, as well as their advocates, including activists, social movements, public defenders, and public prosecutors. This ground-level perspective shows how local democracy is at once strengthened and weakened by a rapid influx of government resources. In the midst of today’s climate crisis, Flooded showcases the challenges and opportunities of meeting increasing demands for energy in equitable ways.
Building Something Better
Environmental Crises and the Promise of Community Change
Rutgers University Press
Showing that it is possible to challenge social inequality and environmental degradation by refusing to continue business-as-usual, Building Something Better shares vivid case studies of small groups who are making a big impact by crafting alternatives to neoliberal capitalism. It offers both a call to action and a dose of hope in these troubled times.
Risky Cities
The Physical and Fiscal Nature of Disaster Capitalism
By Albert S. Fu
Rutgers University Press
Over half the world’s population lives in urban regions, and increasingly disasters are of great concern to city dwellers, policymakers, and builders. Risky Cities is a critical examination of global urban development, capitalism, and its relationship with environmental hazards.
Residues
Thinking Through Chemical Environments
By Soraya Boudia, Angela N. H. Creager, Scott Frickel, Emmanuel Henry, Nathalie Jas, Carsten Reinhardt, and Jody A. Roberts
Rutgers University Press
Residues offers readers a new approach for conceptualizing the environmental impacts of chemicals production, consumption, disposal, and regulation. With detailed stories that span the globe, we introduce “residual materialism” as a way to track the, often invisible, impacts of chemicals through time and space and for explaining their world-making powers.
Electric Mountains
Climate, Power, and Justice in an Energy Transition
Rutgers University Press
Electric Mountains examines opposition to wind energy in an environmentally progressive region. It contextualizes opposition within regional culture and political economy and uses environmental sociology to illuminate wind energy’s contested role in transitioning North America’s electricity grid away from fossil fuels.
Back to the Roots
Memory, Inequality, and Urban Agriculture
By Sara Shostak
Rutgers University Press
Urban agriculture has become a critical domain for explorations of, and challenges to, the long standing and systemic inequalities that shape cities, neighborhoods, and the lives and life chances of their residents. Back to the Roots describes how urban farmers and gardeners reckon with the cultural meanings and material legacies of the past as they seek to create more just and equitable futures.
Toxic and Intoxicating Oil
Discovery, Resistance, and Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand
Rutgers University Press
When oil and gas exploration was expanding across Aotearoa, New Zealanders faced the typically distinct problems of oil spills, hydraulic fracturing, offshore exploration, climate fears, and disputes over unresolved Indigenous claims nearly simultaneously. Collectively, these grievances created the foundation for an organized civil society to construct and then magnify a comprehensive critical oil narrative--in dialogue, practice, and aspiration. Community advocates and socioecological activists mobilized for their health and well-being, for their neighborhoods and beaches, for Planet Earth and Planet Ocean, and for terrestrial and aquatic species and ecosystems. In this allied ethnography, quotes are used extensively to convey the tenor of some of the country’s most passionate and committed people. By analyzing the intersections of a social movement and the political economy of oil, Patricia Widener reveals a nuanced story of oil resistance and promotion at a time when many anti-drilling activists believed themselves to be on the front lines of the industry’s inevitable decline.
Has It Come to This?
The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink
Rutgers University Press
Geoengineering is the deliberate and large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system in an attempt to mitigate the adverse effects of global warming. Now that a climate emergency is upon us, claims that geoengineering is inevitable are rapidly proliferating. How did we get into this? What options make it onto the table? Which are left out? Whom does geoengineering serve? These are some of the questions that the thinkers contributing to this volume are exploring.
Science by the People
Participation, Power, and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge
By Aya H. Kimura and Abby Kinchy
Rutgers University Press
Studies show that citizen science projects—projects involving nonprofessionals—face dilemmas ranging from austerity to presumed boundaries between science and activism. By unpacking the politics of citizen science, this book aims to help people negotiate a complex political landscape and choose paths moving toward social change and environmental sustainability.
Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People
Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action
Rutgers University Press
Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature and Social Action draws upon nearly two decades of examples and insight from Karuk experiences on the Klamath River to illustrate how the ecological dynamics of settler-colonialism are essential for theorizing gender, race and social power today.
For the Birds
Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze
Rutgers University Press
Offering readers a glimpse behind the binoculars, For the Birds reveals birders to be important allies in the larger environmental conservation movement. Drawn from extensive interviews and field observations, it shows birders participating in citizen science projects, witnessing the devastating effects of climate change, and discovering small pockets of biodiversity in unexpected places.
Fractured Communities
Risk, Impacts, and Protest Against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions
Edited by Anthony E. Ladd
Rutgers University Press
In Fractured Communities, Anthony E. Ladd and other leading environmental sociologists present a set of crucial case studies analyzing the differential risk perceptions, socio-environmental impacts, and mobilization of citizen protest (or quiescence) surrounding unconventional energy development and hydraulic fracking in a number of key U.S. shale regions.
Dwelling in Resistance
Living with Alternative Technologies in America
Rutgers University Press
Chelsea Schelly uses ethnographic research, participant observation, and numerous in-depth interviews to examine four alternative U.S. communities where individuals use electricity, water, heat, waste, food, and transportation technologies that differ markedly from those used by the vast majority of modern American residential dwellers.
Vanishing Bees
Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health
Rutgers University Press
In 2005, beekeepers in the United States began observing a mysterious and disturbing phenomenon: once-healthy colonies of bees were suddenly collapsing, leaving behind empty hives. As it explores the contours of this crisis, Vanishing Bees considers an equally urgent question: what happens when beekeepers, farmers, scientists, agrichemical corporations, and government regulators approach the problem from different vantage points and cannot see eye-to-eye? The answer may have profound consequences for every person who wants to keep fresh food on the table.
From Workshop to Waste Magnet
Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region
Rutgers University Press
From Workshop to Waste Magnet presents Philadelphia’s environmental history as a bracing case study in mismanagement and injustice. Tracing the complex interactions among economic decline, federal regulations, local politics, and shifting ethnic demographics, sociologist Diane Sicotte uncovers how only a few communities came to host many types of polluting or waste disposal land uses. What she finds reveals the devastation that occurs when mass quantities of society’s wastes mix with toxic levels of systemic racism and inequality.
Superstorm Sandy
The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore
Rutgers University Press
Why do people build in areas open to repeated natural disasters? Drawing on a variety of insights from environmental sociology, Superstorm Sandy offers a wide-ranging look at the Jersey Shore both before and after this disaster, examining the many factors—such as cultural attachment, tourism revenues, and governmental regulation—that combined to create a highly vulnerable coastal region and that fueled the demand to rebuild.
This Is Our Land
Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century
Rutgers University Press
In This is Our Land, environmental historian Cody Ferguson documents a little-noted but important change in the environmental movement, describing three representative grassroots groups—in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee—whose stories show how quite ordinary citizens can band together to solve environmental problems. As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world.
The Tragedy of the Commodity
Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture
Rutgers University Press
The Tragedy of the Commodity explores the role of human agency in the overfishing crisis, highlighting the social and economic forces behind this looming ecological problem. In a critique of the classic theory “the tragedy of the commons” by ecologist Garrett Hardin, the authors argue that it is the commodification of aquatic resources that leads to the depletion of fisheries and the development of environmentally suspect means of aquaculture.
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