Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice

Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice provides a comprehensive overview of the achievements and challenges confronting the environmental justice movement. Pressured by increased international competition and the demand for higher profits, industrial and political leaders are working to weaken many of America's most essential environmental, occupational, and consumer protection laws. In addition, corporate-led globalization exports many ecological hazards abroad. The result is a deepening of the ecological crisis in both the United States and the Global South. However, not all people are impacted equally. In this process of capital restructuring, it is the most marginalized segments of society -poor people of color and the working class-that suffer the greatest force of corporate environmental abuses. Daniel Faber, a leading environmental sociologist, analyzes the global political and economic forces that create these environmental injustices. With a multi-disciplinary approach, Faber presents both broad overviews and powerful insider case studies, examining the connections between many different struggles for change. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice explores compelling movements to challenge the polluter-industrial complex and bring about meaningful social transformation.

Faber deftly exposes the roots of the environmental injustices that the poor, people of color, working class, and indigenous communities confront every day in the U.S. and globally. This is a moving and critical account of domination and resistance in the struggle for the most precious thing of all: life itself., Daniel Faber's searing critique details the depressing realities of the economic, political and social contours of America's worst corporate polluters. While they selectively victimize people of color and working class families, there is a growing ray of hope: a transformed and revived grassroots green politics committed to base building and political-economic reform., Daniel Faber's comprehensive approach locates blame for growing environmental degradation to the US economy's need to compete with world markets. He provides intelligent suggestions for how the environmental justice movement can broaden its power by expanding its vision to a wider network of coalitions and to move from solely distributional justice to productive justice. Faber emphasizes grassroots democracy in environmental organizing, rather than policy-based lobbying groups. Despite the power of those who destroy the environment, Faber shows there is much hope through organizing., Daniel Faber's powerful new book is the Fast Food Nation for the environmental justice movement. Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice exposes the ugly underbelly of capitalism and its parasitic dependency on structural racism and classism for profits. Faber is provocative and honest as he carefully lays out an indictment of the institution he cleverly calls the polluter-industrial complex., While providing illuminating accounts of the prospects for a 'green' political movement in the U.S. that effectively links labor, indigenous peoples, women, people of color, and consumer advocates, the discussion is polemical. . . . Faber does a good job of elucidating the waxing and waning of enthusiasm for environmental justice principals in various presidential administrations. . . . Highly Recommended. Three-star review.

Daniel Faber is director of the Northeastern Environmental Justice Research Collaborative in Boston. He co-founded the international journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism and is the author or editor of several books, including Foundations for Social Change.