Environmental Justice at Western

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Reading Group

Environmental Justice Reading Group

Most quarters, a group of students and faculty gather once a week to discuss recent books and films on environmental justice. ENVS 499D: Environmental Justice Reading Group, offers an opportunity for community-building and student-directed learning. Here’s what we’ve been reading:

  • Spring 2024: Grist’s Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Our Future Ancestors and Solnit and Young-Lutunatabua’s Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
  • Winter 2024: Dina Gilio Whitaker’s As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (with Dr. Xi Wang)
  • Fall 2023: Leticia Nieto’s Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment (with Dr. Rebekah Paci-Green)
  • Winter 2023: Carceral Environmental Justice, assorted readings
  • Fall 2022: Leah Thomas’ Intersectional Environmentalist (with Dr. Nini Hayes)
  • Spring 2022: Catherine Coleman Flowers’ Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret 
  • Fall 2021: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (with Dr. Nini Hayes) 
  • Spring 2021: Harriet Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind
  • Winter 2021: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
  • Fall 2020: Sarah Jaquette Ray’s A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety
  • Spring 2020: Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (though we actually abandoned this early on and did a series of podcasts to address pandemic-related issues)
  • Winter 2020: Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate
  • Fall 2019: Robin Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
  • Spring 2019: Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower
  • Winter 2019Sharing the Earth: An International EJ Reader, Edited by Elizabeth Ammons and Modhumita Roy and Between the Heart and the Land, Edited by Brenda Cardenas
  • Fall 2018: Carolyn Finney’s Black Faces, White Spaces
  • Winter 2018: Sarah Wiebe’s Everyday Exposure