Dina Gilio-Whitaker

this might reflect more on my mental state but i found this a very choppy read. some of it felt really academic and hard to process, and some of it was easy to understand and really interesting. i don't know if that's more topics that were more digestible for me personally or my head space or the book itself, but i had trouble with it.

still, there is some interesting and important information here (probably much more than what i got from it). the things that struck me the most were:

"The findings revealed, among other things, the smoking gun: while socioeconomic status was implicated in siting hazardous waste facilities, race was the most significant variable, and three of every five black and Hispanic Americans and approximately half of all Asians, Pacific Islanders, and American Indians lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites."

"To be a person of direct Indigenous descent in the US today is to have survived a genocide of cataclysmic proportions. Some Native people have described the experience of living in today's world as post apocalyptic."

"The national park system has long been lauded as 'America's greatest idea,' but only relatively recently has it begun to be more deeply questioned. In his 1999 book Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks, Mark David Spence delivered a long-overdue critique that linked the creation of the first national parks with the federal policy of Indian removal. Spence points out that the first so-called wilderness areas that had been deemed in need of preserving were not only and in actuality Indigenous-occupied landscapes when the first national parks were established, but also that an uninhabited wilderness had to first be created. He examines the creation of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite National Parks in particular to illustrate the way the myth of uninhabited virgin wilderness has for more than a century obscured a history of Native land dispossession in the name of preservation and conservation and serves as the foundation of the environmental movement."

"The idea of wilderness as conceived by preservationists and conservationists was a white-settler social construct. It imagined an unpeopled, wild landscape as pristine, pure, and unspoiled, and as the environmental historian Carolyn Merchant asserts, reflected values that equated wilderness with whiteness and, after postbellum black urban migration, cities with darkness and depravity. These tropes, rooted in policies of removal and segregation, she argues, led to the idea of an American 'colonized Eden,' a 'controlled managed garden' from which colonized Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and people of color were systematically excluded and which led to patterns of toxic waste dumping in communities of color."… (mehr)