Transforming environmentalism
Subtitle: Warren county, PCBs, and the origins of environmental justice
By: Eileen McGurty.
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2007
Place of publication: New Brunswick, NJ
Language: eng
Number of pages: 204
ISBN-13: 9780813539669
Description: "In Transforming Environmentalism, Eileen McGurty explores a moment central to the emergence of the environmental justice movement. In 1978, residents of predominantly African American Warren County, North Carolina, were horrified to learn that the state planned to build a landfill in their county to hold forty thousand cubic yards of soil that was contaminated with PCBs from illegal dumping. They responded to the state's plans with a four-year resistance, ending in a month of protests with over 500 arrests from civil disobedience and disruptive actions. McGurty traces the evolving approaches that residents took to contest 'environmental racism' in their community and shows how activism in Warren County spurred greater political debate and became a model for communities across the nation. Transforming Environmentalism explores how the specific circumstances of the Warren County events shaped the formation of the environmental justice movement and influenced contemporary environmentalism"--Page 4 of cover.