Mrs. Block Beautiful: African American Women and the Birth of the Urban Conservation Movement, Chicago, Illinois, 1917–1954 (original) (raw)
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African American Environmental Ethics: Black Intellectual Perspectives 1850-1965
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Johanna Ortner, you sat with me when I needed a friend and your daily emails as I revised became the first thing I looked forward to every morning-you were my cheerleader. Elijah Demosthenes, you bought so much joy to my heart when you showed me how proud you were of me for jumping through the hoops and successfully completing this process. Rev. Cowart, you have prayed for me and encouraged me to trust in God's unchanging hand. Izzy Owens, you made the difference in the last leg of this journey. You pushed me beyond the limitations that I set for myself and kept me healthy so that I could finish strong.
Race, class, gender, and American environmentalism
UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE …, 2002
This paper examines the environmental experiences of middle and working class whites and people of color in the United States during the 19 th and 20 th centuries. It examines their activism and how their environmental experiences influenced the kinds of discourses they developed. The paper posits that race, class, and gender had profound effects on people's environmental experiences, and consequently their activism and environmental discourses. Historical data show that while some middle class whites fled the cities and their urban ills to focus attention on outdoor explorations, wilderness and wildlife issues, some of their social contemporaries stayed in the cities to develop urban parks and help improve urban environmental conditions. Though there were conflicts between white middle and working class activists over the use of open space, the white working class collaborated with white middle-class urban environmental activists to improve public health and worker health and safety, whereas, people of color, driven off their land, corralled onto reservations, enslaved, and used as low-wage laborers, developed activist agendas and environmental discourses that linked racism and oppression to worker health and safety issues, limited access to resources, loss of or denial of land ownership, and infringement on human rights.
Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice in Boston, 1900 to 2000
The following work explores the evolution of a resident-directed environmentalism that challenged negative public perception to redevelop their community. Beginning in the 1950s, city leaders justified the dislocation of minority residents from Boston’s South End with the argument that they failed to maintain personal property and degraded community institutions. Most of these minority residents were forced to move to Roxbury. From 1963 to 1983, Roxbury lost 2,200 housing units. The vacant lots led to illegal dumping, and increased toxicity in the air, water, and soil from undesirable land use businesses such as asphalt plants. As a result, banks, supermarkets and pharmacies refused to locate in the area. By 1985, the Dudley area of Roxbury shared a median income with the poorest communities in the United States. This dissertation argues that the negative perception of residents, abrogation of civil and property rights, denial of essential services, isolation, and vulnerability instituted and enforced environmental racism. This work explores the roots of the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) that emerged in Boston during the 1990s. Extending back to the nineteenth century, minorities employed a variety of environmental strategies and actions to control their community and shape policies that impacted their community. In response to urban renewal and coupled with civil rights efforts, residents developed an activist approach in the 1960s. In the 1970s, groups recruited participants, built organizational capacities, and improved the networking capabilities of residents. While they did not identify as environmentalists, their pragmatic pursuit of equality led to specific environmental improvements. In the 1980s, the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI) drew directly from the experiences and personnel of previous efforts to build a national exemplar of environmental justice. Building an “urban village” in Dudley Square facilitated a variety of environmentally focused initiatives that increased access to public transportation, expanded clean energy use, improved air quality, and reduced pollutants. Activist groups pioneered civic environmentalism, or the philosophy that environmentalism and civic activism begins in the home, street, and community where one lives. Proponents of civic environmentalism contend that local environmental stewardship leads to sound environmental policy on more complex scales.
The author of this work, Robert L. Dorman, sets out to uncover how these individuals helped define the issues that culminated in the American environmental movement that began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the writings of Thoreau, which emphasized the spiritual effects of natural scenery, to John Muir's advocacy for wilderness conservation and his struggle against development in nature parks, these individuals, Dorman argues, each built upon the last, gradually setting the foundations for American environmentalism.