I’ve been writing books on environmental journalism and teaching Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the University of Delaware for 25 years. Each of these books has made a particularly powerful impression on me and my students in recent years. They are powerful calls for a genuine reckoning with racial and environmental injustice throughout American history
By Mckay Jenkins
In the winter of 1913, high in the Canadian Arctic, two Catholic priests set out on a dangerous mission to reach a group of Eskimos and convert them. Upon reaching their destination, the priests were murdered. Over the next three years, one of the Arctic's most tragic stories became one of North America's strangest and most memorable police investigations and trials. A near-perfect parable of late colonialism, as well as a rich exploration of the differences between European Christianity and Eskimo mysticism, Bloody Falls of the Coppermine, possesses the intensity of true crime and the romance of wilderness adventure.
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By Robin Wall Kimmerer
A deep well of ecological and Indigenous cultural wisdom. Kimmerer, a distinguished professor of ecology and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, writes gorgeous, vivid essays about Native American culture and the spiritual resonance that arises from becoming more intimate with our natural world. One of my favorite books of the last decade.
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By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
A riveting narrative history of the United States refracted through the Native American experience. Absolutely devastating in its moral clarity. Dunbar-Ortiz examines the violence that routinely accompanied the country’s founding, beginning with genocide and colonial land grabs; overtly racist federal land policy; and ceaseless discrimination, political neglect, and cultural blindness directed at contemporary Native American communities. A clarion call for a national reckoning with the country’s founding, a troubling vision of itself.
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By Joe Sacco, Chris Hedges
An illustrated book of long-form nonfiction that examines poor Black, Indigenous, White, and Migrant communities in the United States, and how they have all been broken by extractive capitalism and racist public policy. Hedges’ writing is intentionally polemical, designed to shatter any illusions about the welfare of our fellow citizens living in communities ruined by racism and industrial-scale environmental degradation. Sacco’s long-form graphic illustrations are equally haunting. I’ve taught this book continually for many years.
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By Lauret Savoy
A beautifully constructed memoir written by a geologist, examining her own mixed-race heritage, national stories and myths, and environmental justice across the continent. Savoy travels the country searching for the ephemeral threads connecting herself to her African-American and Native American heritage, and in so doing explores everything from the destruction of all-Black towns to the imposition of dislocated European place-names on the North American landscape. In the end, she writes that “each of us is, too, a landscape inscribed by memory and loss."
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By Catherine Coleman Flowers
A powerful investigation into decades-long environmental injustice and land exploitation that have compromised African-American communities, in this case, in Alabama, and around the Deep South. A harrowing look at just how relentless southern white political structures have oppressed poor, rural African-American communities. In the end, also a riveting example of how – with proper leadership and organization -- communities can come together to fight back against structural racism.
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