Here are some of the books, papers and other resources touching on justice that have been mentioned by our contributors. You can find Creative Contributions on the theme in the previous section.
Books – non-fiction
- Architecture is a Verb, by Sarah Robinson (2021, Routledge)
- Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (2020, Penguin)
- Just Us: An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine (2020, Penguin)
- Recoded City: Co-Creating Urban Futures by Thomas Ermacora & Lucy Bullivant (2016, Routledge)
- Landmarks, by Robert Macfarlane (2016, Penguin)
- The Nature Seed, by Lucy Jones & Kenneth Greenway (2021, Profile Books)
- The Nutmeg’s Curse, by Amitav Ghosh (2021, Hachette)
Books – fiction
- The Overstory, by Richard Powers (2019, Penguin)
Papers & essays
- What Environmental Justice Means in Indian Country, by Dina Gilio-Whitaker (6/3/17, KCET)
- The Recognition Dimensions of Environmental Justice in Indian Country by Kyle Whyte (2011, Environmental Justice, Vol. 4, No. 4)
- Indigenizing Futures: Decolonising the Anthropocene by Kyle Whyte (2017, English Language Notes, Vol 55 (1-2)).
What does justice mean to you?
Here are some short quotes on the theme, as another way into thinking about environmental justice. Leave a Reply below to share something you’ve found useful or offer your comments on previous contributions.
"Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity must spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening." -- Audre Lorde (quoted in How to do Nothing: resisting the attention economy by Jenny Odell)
"Through its commitment to cyclical, rather than linear or universal, processes, and to well-being and participation, ‘recoding’ aims to adapt and renew different public realm contexts into community assets with strong ‘place capital’, or the shared wealth of the built and natural environments"
-- Thomas Emacora & Lucy Bullivant, in Recoded City: co-creating urban futures.
"Language, personhood, and politics have always been linked to human rights. Will we have the wisdom to expand the circle yet again? Naming is the beginning of justice. Around the world, ideas of justice for nature are emerging in political and legal arenas. In New Zealand, when the Whanganui River was threatened, indigenous Maori leadership earned protection for the sacred waters by getting the river declared a legal “person” with rights to its own well-being. The constitutions of indigenous-led Ecuador and Bolivia enshrine the rights of Mother Nature. The Swiss amended their constitution to define animals as beings instead of objects. Just last year, the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin amended its tribal constitution, recognizing that "ecosystems and natural communities within the Ho-Chunk territory possess an inherent, fundamental, and inalienable right to exist and thrive.” This legal structure will allow the tribe to protect its homelands from mining for fracking sand and fossil fuel extraction because the land will have legal standing as a person." -- Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Speaking of Nature (Orion Magazine, June 2017)
"I have an enduring passion for Anaximander, the Greek philosopher who lived twenty-six centuries ago and understood that the Earth floats in space, supported by nothing. We know of Anaximander's thought from other writers. Only one small original fragment of his writings has survived - just one: 'Things are transformed one into another according to neccessity, and render justice to one another according to the order of time.'" --Carlo Rovelli, in The Order of Time (Penguin, 2019)