There's Something in the Water

Environmental Racism in Indigenous & Black Communities

Paperback, 184 pages

English language

Published April 2, 2018 by Fernwood Publishing.

ISBN:
978-1-77363-057-1
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3 stars (1 review)

In There's Something In The Water, Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities.

Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi'kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova …

1 edition

Not really suitable as a first introduction to environmental racism

3 stars

TBH, I found this really hard going. The earlier chapters used an academic style that I found hard to follow, while some of the later chapters seemed to consist of a literature survey, but without a real sense of synthesis tying it together. Probably the best part of the book was the conclusion, in which Waldron returned to the Nova Scotia communities in which she'd done her research. I think the book would be valuable to return to after gaining a background in critical environmental justice, to cover some of the specifics of the Canadian experience, but I was hoping to get an introduction to the topic of environmental racism and this wasn't really it.

Subjects

  • Environmental policy--Canada
  • Hazardous waste sites--Canada
  • Black people--Canada--Politics and government
  • Indigenous peoples--Canada--Politics and government
  • Racism--Canada
  • Equality--Canada
  • Canada--Ethnic relations