ENVIRONMENT, POWER, AND JUSTICE, Southern African histories

354pp., illus., maps, paperback, Ohio University Press, Athens, 2022

ISBN: 9780821424858

Spanning the colonial, postcolonial, and post-apartheid eras, this collection of historical and locally specific case studies analyses the ways poor and vulnerable people in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe have mobilised against the structural and political forces that deny them a healthy and sustainable environment.

“This is an excellent essay collection breaking new ground on environmental histories. Its aim of illuminating how environment, power, and justice are imbricated in Southern Africa builds on old academic foci ... but speaks to new ecological issues. Together the chapters in this volume span African thought on ecology in the context of colonialism, water injustice, land dispossession, GMOs, rethinking invasive species and racialized urban development. It adds in a sophisticated way to the literature on environmental justice.” Vishwas Satgar, Associate Professor of International Relations, University of the Witwatersrand 

“Wynn, Jacobs, and Carruthers have carefully brought together a dozen scholars of distinct disciplines and diasporas to offer wisdom and insight into environmental justice and power in southern Africa. In offering specificity and precision as to the ways environmental harm and human inequality vary but conjoin, the volume collectively frames contemporary discussions of justice in concepts of harm from the colonial, postcolonial, and postapartheid pasts. This lively conversation not only gives new perspectives on the contingencies of the past, it opens up possibilities for the future.” Emily Wakild, co-editor of The Nature State: Rethinking the History of Conservation

Contributors : Christopher Conz, Marc Epprecht, Mary Galvin, Sarah Ives, Admire Mseba, Muchaparara Musemwa, Matthew A. Schnurr and Cherryl Walker.

Historical geographer and environmental historian Graeme Wynn is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Environmental historian Jane Carruthers is Professor Emeritus at the University of South Africa. In 2018 she received the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Environmental History for her critical contributions to the fields of environmental justice, national parks and preservation, and transnational environmental history.

Nancy J. Jacobs is Assistant Professor in the Department of African Studies and the Department of History at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. A historian of the environment, colonial Africa, and southern Africa, she is a recipient of the Alice Hamilton article prize from the American Society for Environmental History.