Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (review)

Sze's Noxious New York is a well-considered and expertly written book that presents case studies of four neighborhoods in the metropolitan New York area and of four different environmental-justice movements: the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition's campaign against the Bronx Lebanon medical waste incinerator, the West Harlem Environmental Action's campaign against the North River Sewage treatment plant, El Puente's and the Community Alliance for the Environment's campaign against the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator in the Williamsburg neighborhood, and the United Puerto Rican Organization's campaign against the Sunset Park sludge treatment plant. These studies are not separate, however; in its entirety, Noxious New York reveals how the configurations of space and capital (are the two ever separable?) have produced not only specific land-usage policies of varying insalubrity but also group responses that were shaped within equally specific (local) circumstances.

Each episode is recounted in its own chapter, the author relying primarily upon interviews with activists, personal correspondence, media accounts, and published reports. Sze has provided the full scope of the issues at play, though a richer narrative might have been rendered by engagement with the obvious villains of the story (representatives of corporate interests, vacillating and pro-privatization politicians, or even nimbyist members of more affluent neighborhoods) or by the inclusion of more traditional sources, such as City Council and Community Board meeting minutes. What makes Sze's analysis so compelling, however, are her broad theoretical and historical sensitivities. If all environmental justice politics are local, to paraphrase an old saying, they have emerged, Sze points out, within a nexus of national and global(izing) tendencies apparent for half a century. Noxious New York provides explanations of the global and local economies of waste disposal and energy production, and of the workings of identity politics as a means of building communal consensus around health interests.

Sze's claim that her study is "one of the few that analyzes environmental racism and the environmental justice movement as responses to privatization and deregulation" (9), is important; it signals her view of the matter as rooted in urban political economy. Sze thereby situates New York City environmental-justice efforts within the larger sweep of U.S. urban studies, a field that has not been overshadowed (though threatened to be) by the politics of suburban sprawl. If today the most salient political divisions seem to be less between "red" states and "blue" states than between red suburbs and blue cities, Sze is correct to identify the most critical issue in urban environmental justice as the decline of "municipal socialism," a term coined by Melosi and used by Sze in her consideration of deregulation, privatization, and environmental politics.¹

Sze is concerned with the relationships between political economy and group identities, along with the political strategies that groups tend to employ. Racialization of space is not simply a top-down process of postwar ghetto creation. Organizations such as we act and own utilize the "politics of representation" (141), basing their claims for environmental justice in the language of racial justice (both filed suits under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act). Of energy politics in New York, Sze notes, "the shape that deregulation took in New York City was racialized by activists who focused on the siting of power plants, which was concentrated in low-income areas and communities of color" (160).

Noxious New York is a call for more critical investigation and consideration of environmental justice as one of the most pertinent issues of the twenty-first century, and for Sze American Studies is uniquely positioned to capture the problematics and nuances of environmental injustice and the movements formed to challenge it. The political engagements that American Studies has embraced have informed the interdisciplinary methods that it, and Sze, have adopted. In that regard, the first chapter of the book outlines Sze's borrowings from historians, geographers, and sociologists, and the last...