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 2019: Sharing 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