In her insightful and carefully argued new book, Tracy Perkins frames changes in the environmental justice movement as the story of a slow shift from disruptive “outsider” tactics to the more professional and institutionalized “insider” tactics that prevail today.
During the 1980s, Perkins explains, activists propelled the nascent environmental justice movement by leveraging effective community organizing to mobilize attention-grabbing marches, angry protests, and aggressive lawsuits. Although conceived as a nationwide movement, some of the most dramatic protests originated in California, such as the grassroots campaign in the late 1980s led by Las Madres del Este de Los Angeles (Mothers of East Los Angeles) against the construction of a new incinerator in Vernon, California. Regulators had approved the project without requiring an environmental impact assessment, despite projections that it would release some 19,000 tons of hazardous emissions each year into surrounding Latinx neighborhoods. After several years of unrelenting protests, the company...
University of California Press