Not Just Green, Not Just White brings together a group of diverse contributors to explore the rich intersections between race and environment. Together these contributors demonstrate that the field of environmental history, with its core questions and critical engagement with the nonhuman world, provides a fertile context for understanding racism and ongoing colonialism as power structures in the United States. Earlier historiography has defined environmental history as the study of the changing relationships between humans and the environment-or nature. This volume aims to redefine the field, arguing that neither humans nor environment is a monolithic actor in any given story. Both humans and the environment are diverse, and often the environment causes conflict between and among peoples, leaving unequal access and power in its wake. Just as important, these histories often reveal how, despite unequal power, those who carry less privilege still persist. Together these essays demonstrate the promise of the field of environmental history and reveal how, when practitioners in the field decide to move away from "green" and "white" topics, they will be able to explain much more about our collective past than anyone ever imagined.
Mary E. Mendoza is an assistant professor of history and Latino/a studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of several journal articles and book chapters about the intersections of race, environment, health, and disability. Traci Brynne Voyles is a professor and department head of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (Nebraska, 2021) and Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Patty Limerick is a professor of history at the University of Colorado and the author of Desert Passages, The Legacy of Conquest, and Something in the Soil.
Foreword: Surveying a Field of Study Patty Limerick Introduction: Environmental History and White Settler Supremacy Mary E. Mendoza and Traci Brynne Voyles Section I: Not Just Green: Environmental Histories of Bodies, Trash, Prisons, and Cities Chapter 1: Naturalizing Difference: Labor and Slavery in Colonial Georgia Katherine Johnston Chapter 2: Dirty Work Reconsidered: On the Historical Dynamics of Labor, Waste, and Race in Industrial Society Carl A. Zimring Chapter 3: "The City of Destruction": The Chicago School of Sociology's Ecological Interpretation of Race, Migration, and Inequality Elizabeth Grennan Browning Chapter 4: Collective Memory for the African Motherland in Interwar Black Chicago and the Limits of the Environmental Justice Model Colin Fisher Chapter 5: States of Confinement and Ecological Violence: Incarceration and the Struggle for Environmental Justice David Naguib Pellow Section II: Almost Green, But Not Quite: New Perspectives on the Environmental History of Parks and other Green(ish) Places Chapter 6: Islands of Freedom: The Struggle to Desegregate Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain National Park, 1936-1941 Teona Williams Chapter 7: Conserving Whiteness: The Crisis of Tenancy and New Deal Rural Rehabilitation in the Cotton South Kathryn Taylor Morse Chapter 8: Harvest of Self-Help: The Politics and Paradoxes of Southeast Asian Refugee Community Gardens Cecilia Tsu Section III: Not Just White: Diverse Environmentalisms & Environmental Narratives in Historical Perspective Chapter 9: Amputated from the Land: Black Refugees from America and the Racialized Roots of the Environmentalism-Environmental Justice Divide Bryon Williams Chapter 10: Glen Canyon Dam, Rainbow Bridge, and Hole-in-the Rock: Diversifying Environmentalisms and the Struggle over "Sacred" Landmarks in the American West Erika Bsumek Chapter 11: "How Would You Feel If Someone Were Allowed to Kill One of Your Grandparents?": Native Hawaiian Opposition to the Pacific Shark Fin Trade Miles A. Powell Chapter 12: Radical Presence - The Shadows take Shape: African Americans (Re)making a Green World Carolyn Finney Section IV: Decolonizing Justice: Indigenous Environmentalisms and Struggles over Meaning, Power, and Privilege Chapter 13: Turnerian, Si! Americano No!: Disentangling Nature, Exceptionalism, and the Whiteness of the American Immigration Story Mary E. Mendoza Chapter 14: Pushed Into the Margins: Native Women and Environment in Settler California Traci Brynne Voyles Chapter 15: From Idle No More to Standing Rock & the Fight for Indigenous Environmental Justice Kent Blansett Chapter 16: Seeing the Trees: The Fight for Cultural Sovereignty along the Banks of Sand Creek Ari Kelman Conclusion: Transforming the Field, Transforming the Future Mary E. Mendoza Traci Brynne Voyles
"This volume has the potential to transform environmental history. It reveals the limitations of the field and develops a theoretical framework-white settler supremacy-to explain how environmental historians can move questions of race and justice to the center of their work. With an impressive cast of scholars, Not Just Green, Not Just White ranges widely across time and space and brims with original insight. It is a brilliantly conceived, remarkably perceptive collection that will inspire new stories about the environmental past."-Finis Dunaway, author of Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice "As a field, environmental history has long had a problem with being too narrow, specifically too white. Instead, this volume gives us different kinds of environmentalism that interpret diverse histories and relationships with the natural world. It provocatively connects racial hierarchies and the settler-colonial past and present to historical relationships between humans and nature."-Joshua L. Reid, author of The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs
