Not Just Green, Not Just White - by Mary E Mendoza & Traci Brynne Voyles

About the Book

This collection analyzes the relationships between environment, race, and justice through a historical lens, exploring how environmental injustices have profoundly shaped communities of color throughout U.S. history and today.

Book Synopsis

Not Just Green, Not Just White brings together a group of diverse contributors to explore the rich intersections between race and environment. Together these contributors demonstrate that the field of environmental history, with its core questions and critical engagement with the nonhuman world, provides a fertile context for understanding racism and ongoing colonialism as power structures in the United States.

Earlier historiography has defined environmental history as the study of the changing relationships between humans and the environment--or nature. This volume aims to redefine the field, arguing that neither humans nor environment is a monolithic actor in any given story. Both humans and the environment are diverse, and often the environment causes conflict between and among peoples, leaving unequal access and power in its wake. Just as important, these histories often reveal how, despite unequal power, those who carry less privilege still persist.

Together these essays demonstrate the promise of the field of environmental history and reveal how, when practitioners in the field decide to move away from "green" and "white" topics, they will be able to explain much more about our collective past than anyone ever imagined.

Review Quotes

"As a field, environmental history has long had a problem with being too narrow, specifically too white. Instead, this volume gives us different kinds of environmentalism that interpret diverse histories and relationships with the natural world. It provocatively connects racial hierarchies and the settler-colonial past and present to historical relationships between humans and nature."--Joshua L. Reid, author of The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs

"This volume has the potential to transform environmental history. It reveals the limitations of the field and develops a theoretical framework--white settler supremacy--to explain how environmental historians can move questions of race and justice to the center of their work. With an impressive cast of scholars, Not Just Green, Not Just White ranges widely across time and space and brims with original insight. It is a brilliantly conceived, remarkably perceptive collection that will inspire new stories about the environmental past."--Finis Dunaway, author of Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice

About the Author

Mary E. Mendoza is an assistant professor of history and Latino/a studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of several journal articles and book chapters about the intersections of race, environment, health, and disability. Traci Brynne Voyles is a professor and department head of history at North Carolina State University. She is the author of The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (Nebraska, 2021) and Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Patty Limerick is a professor of history at the University of Colorado and the author of Desert Passages, The Legacy of Conquest, and Something in the Soil.