JULIE SZE: The people who are most affected by pollution, by greed, by environmental and social injustice—they just don’t roll away and die because capitalism wants them to. They exist, and they continue to live and to fight these ideologies that define profit over people’s lives, define markets as the arbiter of human value. What social movements do is to say that that’s not true, and it shouldn’t be true.

My name is Julie Sze. I’m a professor of American studies and I am the author of Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger.

I’ve been working on environmental justice since I was a student activist in the nineties, and that’s when environmental justice as a social movement became more named and visible as “environmental justice,” responding to environmental racism. I’ve both worked with organizations and was an organizer; and also done research with organizations and on environmental justice movements from California, New York, and China as well. So the book is a reflection of like 25 years of thinking with movements on these very big issues. And the catalyst for this book, specifically, is that I think some of the foundational ideas of environmental justice movements—especially the idea that things are connected, that environmental and social injustices are related—those connective tissues are even more salient now than ever before and they’re more obvious to more people.

When I started doing work on environmental justice, I remember listening to somebody talk about how race and class and pollution were linked and I think they were putting transparencies on top of each other—it was sort of pre-GIS. And it was like race, class, lead poisoning, other levels of pollution, and I remember being stunned, because I had never seen that kind of visualization of how race and poverty and class were connected. And now I think the benefit of say social media is that people do kind of understand how things are connected and so you can say “Standing Rock” or “Flint” or “Hurricane Katrina,” “Hurricane Maria,” and people generally—again, not everybody, but many, many more people understand what environmental racism is, and environmental justice and social movements as being attempts to fix those problems.

The moment of danger, and that question of how do you periodize it? like what’s the start point of danger? is a really important one, and I don’t believe that there’s a simple answer to that, because some of the organizations and the movements I look at, especially the black and indigenous movements in the book, they talk about the moment of danger coming from contact and colonialism or slavery. So you know, you’re talking about an arc of 500 years or so. Another way to a periodize danger might be neoliberalism. When I think about Occupy or even before that the free trade struggles—the battles for Seattle, you know, in the late nineties—I mean, everything those movements said about what the era of free trade would do, destroying labor and environmental regulations and destroying bodies and places, is what happened. I think the moment of danger we’re in is the resurgent authoritarianism, corporate extraction, pollution, white supremacy, gender violence. I mean, it can feel very overwhelming because they are very powerful forces right now, in the US and globally. But the moment of danger is also the moment of opportunity in that the environmental justice movements, because they have the connective analytic, give us a roadmap for how to fight these hydra-headed struggles.

I wanted to write about cases that have a lot of resonance in part because even though Standing Rock and Flint and Hurricane Maria are pretty recent, a lot of the details already start to kind of fade. So the chapter structure wants to talk about these emerging iconic stories to have these sort of short, readable histories, but also contextualize them through keywords. So the Standing Rock chapter, I talk a lot about dispossession and extraction. The second chapter is really focused on neoliberalism and privatization. I talk about Flint and the Central Valley together because there are ways in which the violence in Flint, the environmental violence is very different from the sort of normalized slow violence in the Central Valley, which is a region of California that’s defined by environmental pollution and social inequality. I wanted to connect things that are not normally thought of together. The third chapter on Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Maria has a middle bit around climate justice and these Arctic communities, native communities that are fighting climate injustice. And the chapter also tries to talk about radical hope in a moment where hope can feel like a dream. Part of what the moment we’re in—especially in the US, but I think probably everywhere—is that the relentlessness of the violence and the struggles are meant to sort of overpower and overwhelm. It’s sort of the shock and awe strategy of despair and ennui, and to create a sense of hopelessness. And part of the argument of the book, ultimately, is that environmental justice movements have been active for a long time, whether you want to say hundreds of years or post-civil rights or post-eighties. How can we despair when others who have been struggling with life and death continue to fight.

That sense of time and scale and space are threaded throughout the case studies. And I’m very interested in how activists themselves make these connections. And so, in a very concrete way, you see this at Standing Rock where the people who are fighting in Flint will come and have solidarity. So the social events themselves cross space, which I think is really important. Activists often cross temporalities: you know, they’ll talk about how their struggles are tied to these broad scales of history. And I think that’s what organizers and activists do: they conceptualize things in ways that resist the kind of bureaucratic/institutional mode of understanding issues or time scales. Environmental justice is important not because of, like, concrete wins—though concrete wins are essential. Organizing is to organize, to win particular battles. But I don’t think movements can be judged by how successful they are in these kind of pragmatic ways, only.

At Standing Rock, #NoDAPL wasn’t a failure because the pipeline was built; it still did important work, politically and culturally. In part the cultural work is imagining a native-led movement for environmental justice where allies can support a struggle against extraction and against capitalism. Part of what movements do is to create that kind of capacious sense of creativity and struggle and life. And you know, that’s why the book uses poetry and songs. The culture of social movements matters too; and cultural production. And part of it is to create and also reinforce that kind of sensibility that’s counter-hegemonic, against the idea of markets determining life.

I wrote the book after the 2016, because...in some ways I wrote the book for myself [laughter], to feel...like, to try to understand the moment we’re in, and what we can do in the moment we’re in. Because, to be honest, I often do feel that despair. I wrote this book in part to thread struggles together that activists themselves thread—I’m not making the connections, they are. And so it’s partially to honor the work of people who struggle, and also to write to all the people for whom this is new but important. And so I’m trying to create a kind of intellectual space for people to have some tools to respond and also to not despair. So that’s why in the last chapter I talk about non-naive hope, and why we need some; and that environmental justice actually helps us have some stories that are based on solidarity and non-naive hope, and to remember the importance of fighting. That’s the goal. I don’t know if it succeeds, but I tried.