Category: Book Reviews

8 April 2021 – by Ben Chappelow

In recent weeks, an increasing surge of migrants have attempted to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, many of them being unaccompanied minors. Authorities have placed these minors in overcrowded detention centers. American lawmakers cast blame for the inhospitable facility conditions across the partisan aisle. Congress has been unable to pass any legislation to change their country’s immigration system. Meanwhile, thousands of bald eagles have begun their pre-breeding migratory season. They are crossing the U.S.-Canada border by the thousands to build their nests in the trees of the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia. 

We are led to believe that our material reality exists in an orderly fashion, that what we call nature organizes itself through confinement. Certain things belong in certain places. Any movement outside of these confinements is an anomaly. What is foreign is invasive. Sonia Shah, in her recently published book The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move, points to a dynamic world (increasingly so with the impacts of climate change), and the enduringly migratory humans that, only recently, have placed abstract obstacles between one another.

A Faulty Science

A large portion of Shah’s book uses an appeal to nature when it comes to the inherent migratory function found in almost all species. Originally, our collective science of taxonomy was based on location. We thought of habitats as closed containers, where each species has a specific function to fulfill and can grow only based on the availability of resources within that closed space. Early scientists believed ecosystems were in a constant stasis, and therefore, any species leaving one location and entering another spelled disaster. They saw migration as a threat to the balance, where according to Gause’s Law of Competitive Exclusion, if two species are competing for resources within a closed space, one will always destroy the other. 

It isn’t difficult to follow the threads of these beliefs through the history of racial discrimination and immigration law, and the conflation of those laws as ethics. The father of taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, based his 18^th century classifications on the distinctions between species and perpetuated that certain racial distinctions between humans invoked a hierarchy. As pseudoscientific racial science gathered support in Western countries, certain racial traits were deemed undesirable, nonexistent borders between races were arbitrarily parsed, and new immigration laws based on the prevention of racial mixing surged. These sentiments carry into modern-day immigration law with Linnaean nationalism and neo-Malthusian practices underlying modern reactionary anti-immigrant rhetoric, (e.g., American right-wing nationalism and Italy’s Five Star Movement).

No Vivarium in Nature

Of course, these beliefs are not centered in much scientific ground. No ecosystems functions as a closed system. Individuals move in and out of populations and environments constantly. Invasive species are often more common and less malevolent than people think. What scientists nowadays are adopting is an ecology not based on origin, but one based on traits and contributions to an ecosystem. According to Shah, the reasons for migration are a complex myriad of genetic and environmental factors, but she stresses the question we need to ask shouldn’t be why people choose to migrate. Rather, we need to ask why migration inspires terror in natives. Migration is written into the essence of our species. We have been migrating as long as we have been around, for opportunity and for survival. And as Shah finds, migrating peoples are not inherently more violent, nor less intelligent, nor unhealthier, nor a constant hindrance on a host country’s long-term economy. What remains is the ideological and immaterial borders we construct at the cost of the real suffering of people.Despite titling her work The Next Migration, Shah spends the majority of her book investigating the past and affords little time speculating about the future. If one were to build off of her findings and predict the future of migration, one needs to keep in mind the expiration date on xenophobia. There is no such thing as a closed system, and as assimilation increases and distinctions between people diminish, people holding on to some idealized figment of a place will find their environment change around them.

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28 January 2021 – by Aubrey Calaway

When President Donald Trump issued a tirade of tweets berating late Maryland congressman and civil rights advocate Elijah Cummings, the media and public were quick to condemn the remarks.

Some cited Carl A. Zimring’s Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States in order to explain the racist roots of lodging those specific criticisms against a majority-Black city. Zimring’s book, widely released the same year that Donald Trump was elected, provides an incisive look at how whiteness, waste, and sanitation have been entangled since the emergence of the United States (US). Now, after four years of the Trump presidency and the deaths of over 400,000 Americans due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it is arguable that Clean and White offers critical new insight into the current crisis. How might the same legacy of environmental racism in those tweets be at play in the politics of the pandemic?

Environmental Fear-Mongering

When Trump and right-wing pundits call COVID-19 the “Chinese virus”, but make sure to describe the new variant of the virus as “first identified in Britain,” this is not simply the result of differing international relations. Throughout his administration, Trump has evoked fears of foreign filth as a way to pander to white nativism.

In doing so, Trump preyed on the same underlying anxieties about environmental hygiene and sexual pollution that Zimring argues have been stoked since the mid-19^th century. He writes that “during the [Civil] war, fear of germs and fear of social order without slavery produced fears that would endure and intertwine”. The early 20^th century influx of immigrants and Black southerners to northern cities, Zimring explains, would demand new methods for whites to uphold both racial purity and superiority, two mutually supporting ideas. The sanitary maintenance of these growing industrial cities was just the ticket.

As Zimring shows, non-white citizens have long been over-represented in “dirty” jobs like laundry, waste hauling, and scrap recycling. Jewish immigrants, once barred the white middle-class, were able to “ascend” the racial hierarchy by moving from scrap-scavengers to junkyard managers. Black, Asian, and Latinx residents were, as a result of restricted economic mobility and the supposed biological impurity of their skin color, kept tied to waste. Ideas of “who would deserve to be clean and who should do the cleaning” that were codified in the 1850s were solidified within the 20^th century urban order.

A Dirty Legacy

Cleanliness in the years 2020 and 2021 has taken on new meaning, but the costs to non-white communities fall in line with the history that Zimring lays out. Immigrants and non-white communities are overly represented among essential, frontline workers, and fewer than 1 in 5 Black workers are able to telework. One Harvard study found that healthcare workers of color were more likely to care for patients with COVID-19, to report using inadequate or reused protective gear, and nearly twice as likely as white colleagues to test positive for the coronavirus. As non-white nurses, bus drivers, warehouse workers, and cleaning service people continue to be exposed to COVID-19 at dramatic rates, we see the contagious new consequences of centuries-old environmental racism.

But understanding America’s history of environmental racism is not just about survival. It is also about resistance. Despite record-breaking numbers of protesters at Black Lives Matter protests this past summer, high rates of mask wearing and social distancing led to no noticeable increases in COVID 19 cases. While it is too early to tell whether the Capitol riot will prove to have been a ‘superspreader’ event, images of the dense, maskless, and overwhelmingly white crowds demand a new look at how race and hygiene are once again colliding. As Zimring highlights, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated after delivering his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech in support of the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike. The political entanglement of masks, “dirty things” and racial justice is not one of happenstance. It is simply the newest iteration of a history of struggle.  

Looking to the future

Almost fourteen years ago to the day, then senator Joe Biden filed the paperwork to launch his bid for president of the United States. Later that afternoon, speaking in reference to fellow candidate senator Barack Obama, Biden remarked: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

Clean and White sifts through the dirt and grime of 244 years of American history to prove that understandings of race – and the perpetuation of racism – have always been about who has been deemed to be “clean,” and who has not. As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on and Joe Biden steps up to replace Donald Trump as president, the legacy of environmental racism and hygiene in the United States is more pressing than ever. Whether Joe Biden and white Americans will pay attention remains to be seen.

This book review was published as part of our January 2021 collaboration with E&U for the Climate and Human Rights Pulse on Environmental Justice and Human Rights.

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19 January 2021 – by Ella Kiyomi Dobson

I use the terms Native and Indigenous interchangeably throughout this book review. These terms refer to the Indigenous communities across the United States whose land was stolen during European colonisation of the Americas. I am eternally grateful to be living and studying on Abenaki Land.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker, of the Colville Confederate Tribes, creates a compelling narrative centred upon the environmental justice of the centuries-long Indigenous fight against the United States’ (US) cultural and legal systems. Systems that, to this day, are deep-seated in white supremacist and settler-colonial frameworks of oppression. The author provides a range of case studies surrounding more contemporary environmental justice issues such as the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and extractive development expansion, to the industrial revolution’s impact on environmental and cultural degradation. An underpinning theme is the paradigm shift required within environmental justice; away from one “defined by norms of distributive justice within a capitalist framework” (Gilio-Whitaker, 2019, pp. 12), to one that “can accommodate the full weight of the history of settler colonialism…and embrace differences in the ways Indigenous peoples view land and nature” (pp.12). She argues that the eradication of Indigenous worldviews through the imposition of dominant Christian settler-colonial ideas still permeates today, and that a deeper understanding of the Indigenous worldview that “there is no separation between people and land, between people and other life forms, or between people and their ancient ancestors” (pp. 138) would pave the way for freedom from environmental harms and injustices for Indigenous communities.

Legal frameworks should protect people, their health and wellbeing, and that of the environment. However, Gilio-Whitaker highlights that the US legal system is embedded in settler-colonial understandings of Indigenous cultures, which continues to cause harm. The first example of this is the Obama administration’s endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (pp.32). Whilst sanctioning for Indigenous peoples’ rights, the government’s “dictatorial and colonial” (pp. 33) approach functions like a backhanded compliment. It claims to support “rights to Indigenous self-determination” (pp. 32), but drowns the document in disclaimers, which shows the lengths to which administrations are willing to go in order to maintain a false pretence of supporting Indigenous peoples. A second example is in passing the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (1978), which outlawed the ban on Indigenous religious expression, but still provided legal backing for the destruction of sacred sites (pp. 140). The examples of unsuccessful cases, such as Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association (pp. 140) and San Francisco Peaks (pp. 141-142), assumes the fundamental misunderstanding of Indigenous religion within Western agendas. This stems from the historical imposition of Christianity that still infiltrates today despite US secularity. This lack of understanding or compassion has forced Indigenous communities to pursue alternative approaches, such as pointing out human health implications (pp. 142), in hopes of establishing legal agency within jurisdictions. In order to decolonise the system, Gilio-Whitaker argues that we must divorce the legal system from a dominant Western religion in order to better protect Indigenous peoples and their cultures.

The need for coalition-building between Native and non-Native peoples is another strong undercurrent of Gilio-Whitaker’s book. However, in order to achieve productive collaboration for environmental justice, an understanding of histories and cultures is required by non-Natives, in order for us to act as better allies and collaborators. One such critical understanding that Gilio-Whitaker promotes through the history of national parks is the social construction of nature originating from the “virgin wilderness hypothesis” (pp. 39), or The Pristine Myth, which physically manifested into national parks. These parks were created in the name of “preservation”, but in reality, the only thing preserved was “white supremacy and settler privilege” (pp. 95) through relentless erasure of Indigenous peoples. In order to move forward in the environmental movement, non-Natives must disentangle ourselves from and decolonise the way we think about nature by for instance, re-imaging the way we think and talk about “wilderness”, particularly in the US. Another critical understanding was brought to the surface in Gilio-Whitaker’s account of the demonstrations organised by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe against DAPL and the culture clash that arose from the requirement for women to wear skirts. It highlighted the importance of traditional understanding and respect when supporting Indigenous communities. At first, I could understand why women stood by their views on wearing a skirt, which was embedded in the historical oppression or conditioning of women. However, Gilio-Whitaker makes a strong argument for why such clashes occur, which made me rethink my own stance. This shift in understanding came from looking at the changes in cultural systems as only benefitting white communities, and ultimately promoting white privilege. This reframing of the non-Native women’s belief as “white cultural superiority” (pp. 124) solidified for me how this culture clash still promotes an inherently racist agenda.

On the whole, I found Gilio-Whitaker’s analysis of Indigenous environmental justice crucial and thought-provoking. However, I felt that there was a political bias which, albeit understandable, convoluted the narrative and was at times contradictory. For instance, in her introduction, the same paragraph claims that Democrats and their values both do and do not support the movement for Indigenous social and environmental justice (pp. 11). Furthermore, the author goes on to argue that President Obama and his administration were more supportive of Indigenous peoples (pp. 33). Yet, throughout the book Gilio-Whittaker highlights the ambivalence of the Obama administration on Indigenous rights through examples such as the UNDRIP endorsement (pp. 32-33) and San Francisco Peaks legal battle (pp. 141). I would argue that instead of this conflicted approach towards a single administration, holding all political parties and leaders accountable would further benefit the environmental justice movement.

Gilio-Whitaker’s holistic account of Indigenous environmental justice structured within contemporary and historical timelines highlights the work that is still required to decolonise knowledge production and for the US to finally divorce itself from deeply racist ideologies that dictate social, environmental and legal systems.

This book review was published as part of our January 2021 collaboration with E&U for the Climate and Human Rights Pulse on Environmental Justice and Human Rights.

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References

Gilio-Whitaker, D. (2019). As Long as the Grass Grows: The indigenous fight for environmental justice, from colonisation to Standing Rock. Boston: Beacon Press.