How histories of environmental inequalities and settler colonialism undercut a famously "green" region

In Portland's harbor, environmental justice groups challenge the EPA for a more thorough cleanup of the Willamette River. Near Olympia, the Puyallup assert their tribal sovereignty and treaty rights to fish. Seattle housing activists demand that Amazon pay to address the affordability crisis it helped create. Urban Cascadia, the infrastructure, social networks, built environments, and non-human animals and plants that are interconnected in the increasingly urbanized bioregion that surrounds Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, enjoys a reputation for progressive ambitions and forward-thinking green urbanism. Yet legacies of settler colonialism and environmental inequalities contradict these ambitions, even as people strive to achieve those progressive ideals.

In this edited volume, historians, geographers, urbanists, and other scholars critically examine these contradictions to better understand the capitalist urbanization of nature, the creation of social and environmental inequalities, and the movements to fight for social and environmental justice. Neither a story of green disillusion nor one of green boosterism, Urban Cascadia and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice reveals how the region can address broader issues of environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and the politics of environmental change.

How histories of environmental inequalities and settler colonialism undercut a famously "green" region

About the Author

Nik Janos is associate professor of sociology at California State University, Chico. Corina McKendry is associate professor of political science and environmental studies at Colorado College.

Reviews

"A delightful new contribution to the growing debate on urban political ecology (UPE), especially as it is interested in environmental justice concerns, and at the same time a definitive portrait of a region that has long looked coherent to its residents for ecological, historical, geographical, cultural, and political reasons, but has now gained a clear profile beyond the region itself...Janos and McKendry's book ultimately presents Cascadia as a-materially humid, watery, and rainy-source of powerful concepts and ideas that have already been formative and will be generative in UPE conversations in years to come."

* The AAG Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9780295749365
Author Nik Janos
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint University of Washington Press
Publisher University of Washington Press
Weight(grams) 408g