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
