Agyemen Chapter 1

To begin with, Agyeman provides us with some definitions of Environmental Justice- and makes a distinction between the movement (born 1982) and environmental concerns (which have always existed in one form or another. The movement began with the coining of the term environmental racism, which signifies the environmental mistreatment of a neighborhood based on the race of the people who live there. Once this was found to occur, it provided something to rally around--hence the beginning of a movement. The foundations of the movement then, of course, can be found especially in the civil rights movement.

Agyeman goes on to discuss whether or not the focus on racism is helpful. Some argue that such a strong focus combined with the significant focus on environmentalism takes away from other anti-racism movements.

The author describes in detail the institutional history of the Environmental Justice movement, which really began to take shape in October 1991 when an environmental summit authored the Principles of Environmental Justice, a list of the seventeen pillars of the EJ movement. Another conference is held to ratify the principle in 2002.
He also details some of the laws that have been established at the federal level. Despite the fact that the movement has had significant policy implications, its true strength lies in the fact that it remains a broad-based grass-roots citizens movement. At the local and activist level it is "political opportunity, mobilization, and action" while it is also a "policy principle." (19)

Agyeman outlines some of the policy tools, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Good Neighbor Agreement, and The Precautionary Principle.

Another interesting discussion is about risk-assessment. Who can best determine what the environmental risk is of (whatever)? Is is the people, who either do or will have direct experience of the risky activity, is it the corporation or whoever who is instigating the activity, or is it the policy makers who can best say what the risk is? It seems to make sense that the people would best be able to determine how it affects them, and then policy makers should listen to them.
For Agyeman there are five important aspects of the way he defines the Environmental Justice movement for this book. These are: "procedural, substantive, distributive, reactive and proactive." (26)
At this point the author goes in-depth about the situation in Massachusetts, but I won't go into that here, especially since I read the chapter that goes into detail on the fifteen different organizations.

This chapter gave me a better understanding about where the movements roots are. I think this really complimented both my own reading of Chapter 4, the "practical" chapter, and Ken Reardon's talk last Tuesday. All together, it's really quite inspiring to read and hear all of this, and it informs a lot of my own initiatives, including the project I'm involved in for this class.

One thing I find especially intriguing and important is how helpful it is to know the history of the movement- to know that it has roots in the Civil Rights Movement, and that throughout the past few decades, there have been not a few ground-breaking achievements. Hearing about these, and especially about East St. Louis (even though I've heard it at least 6 times now) is really inspiring.

Despite all of this grand inspiration though, there is still so much disagreement and it seems that he spends half of the rest of the book outlining (why?) all of the nit-picky issues. While it's important to understand that there are hardships and important distinctions that can and should be made, is it really that valuable? I mean, surely it's OK to have different people working in different ways to achieve environmental sustainability for everyone. No?

Anyway, I guess my critique is just that: that is seems Agyeman dug himself a nice hole of a book to write, that on the one hand is informative and at some points inspiring, but it was difficult to understand what he is really trying to convey. Maybe that is due to my reading less than the whole thing. At any rate, I would wish for less details on the disagreements, and more details on what actions are working and why and how, and which haven't, and why and how-- asking too much? Should I read a different book? What book is that?