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

In the years that have passed since Robert Bullard's groundbreaking Dumping in Dixie (1990), the environmental justice (EJ) movement has been both expanded and reframed in important ways. Julie Sze's Noxious New York examines the intersection of community health and environmental justice in New York City, in communities that have little or no access to what might be called "nature" in an urban environment (parks, waterfronts, beaches). While the siting of unwanted infrastructural projects such as garbage transfer stations, power plants, incinerators, and sewage treatment plants was part of the communities' concerns, they were broadened to include other issues.

Sze uses four inner-city minority neighborhoods as case studies: West Harlem, Sunset Park, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx. Each is different both in racial composition and in strategies of activism. Sze was careful to recognize conflicts and differences, wary of oversimplifying culture and class across and within the studies chosen. Of particular interest to historians of technology is the careful attention paid to contextualizing the various polluting infrastructure proposals within the framework of EJ. Sze does not make the mistake, as some EJ scholars have done, of presenting the conflict as if it was a new phenomenon without a past. Each dispute is prefaced by a carefully researched, albeit short, history of how the problems began for urban areas and why they were a bigger problem for minority communities in particular. These histories of infrastructure intersect the literature on land-use development and planning as well as the literature on race, class, and public health issues.

While minority citizens in poor neighborhoods had been the recipients of noxious infrastructural projects in the past, the recent era of privatization led to a boom in their approval by the city. However, Sze writes, "in contrast to earlier associations of garbage, filth, and disease with the stigmatization of people based on their poverty, race, or ethnicity, late twentieth century environmental justice campaigns in New York understand [this] . . . as a catalyst for social movement mobilization and community organizing" (p. 55). The EJ movement represented a sea change in the way neighborhoods creatively marshaled resources, made strategic alignments with other groups, and reframed the NIMBY—not in my back yard—label into one of fairness and justice.

Community groups in New York claimed that they were not against new facilities of any kind, but opposed to the health effects of such facilities. They used decades of data to fortify their contention that Latinos and African Americans in New York City are five times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than whites. Community heath partnerships with university medical and public health researchers verified claims of unequal health effects in these neighborhoods.

The history of municipal waste and the rise and fall of government ownership of such services is the backdrop against which Sze positions the rise of private garbage contractors. The shift of infrastructural services from public to private ownership paralleled a shift toward transnational waste companies. Once waste became a valuable commodity, there was no incentive to reduce it, thus further burdening waste-processing plants already operating at capacity. Under the banner of free trade and public choice, energy deregulation swept the United States in the 1990s, unleashing a powerful corporate-state alliance that left smaller players voiceless, particularly poor communities with no political strength.

Concluding, Sze recognizes an even larger contribution of the environmental health and social movements demonstrated by her case studies: that of citizen-driven community development. Activist groups "radicalized" EJ in innovative ways, calling for moratoriums on future noxious facilities until a participatory planning process could be instituted. Some groups demanded a "cumulative review" that would consider the total community burden of pollution and the fairness of the distribution before permitting more facilities. In the end, Sze argues, these EJ initiatives are transformative, as they are building "an agenda of community-centered action . . . [in] neighborhoods that historically have been lacking...