Back Issues of Race, Poverty and the Environment
RP& E began publication on Earth Day 1990 to address the
concerns of a growing environmental justice movement. It is the
longest-running national publication that addresses these combined
issues.
You
can view the table of contents of each issue in the print archive. Selected articles from each issue are also available. Printed back issues are $10 including shipping.
For specific back issues, after selecting the issue name, click the add to cart button (repeat as many times as you like.)
You can now order a CD Collection of PDF copies of 1990-2009 RP&E issues for $150.
The complete print set is available for reference use for $250. For the print collection, out of print editions will be replaced by photocopies
Order the complete digital or print set here.
The cost is $10 per copy, including shipping.
Individual articles (and some older back issues) can be downloaded free from the archive below.
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Climate Change: Catalyst or Catastrophe? (Fall 2009)
I started this issue as a skeptic of climate change. I didn’t doubt its reality the human contribution to it, or the threat it represents to the ecological health of the planet but I doubted that this crisis created an organizing moment that could benefit low-income people and communities of color. When Race, Poverty and the Environment covered this topic in 2006, efforts within the United States to organize in response to climate change were scattered and largely led by white environmentalists. We had to turn to a Canadian author to find a succinct description of a framework for green economics. [ |
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"Everyone has the Right to..." (Spring 2009) When President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the United States Congress in January 1941, he called for “a world founded upon four essential freedoms”—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from fear, and freedom from want. Popular conceptions of rights at the time moved beyond the constitution’s narrow framing of civil and political rights to include basic social and economic rights. When Roosevelt gave this speech, the depression still lingered on. The official figure for unemployment in California was at 11.7 percent. As it happens, in March 2009, California was once again facing an unemployment rate of over 11 percent, the highest since 1941. Today, the politics of fear and the ubiquity of want have many calling for a new “New Deal.” In this issue of Race, Poverty and the Environment we take a look at the kind of organizing needed to win social and economic rights for all. |
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Race and Regionalism (Fall 2008) The election of Barack Obama represents a turning point in the role of race in United States politics. It proves conclusively that the United States electorate has moved past simple prejudice based on the color of a person’s skin. And it demonstrates that there is a majority coalition in favor of progressive change. This is a milestone, and it offers an outstanding opportunity to advance a new national agenda. Unfortunately, the election in itself does very little to challenge the economic and social system that inflicts racism on vast segments of the people in this country. To make change, our movements will need to maintain consistent grassroots pressure on the new leadership. But we also need to deepen our understanding of how racial inequality is maintained. Furthermore, we need a solid theory of how and where we can redistribute opportunity so that communities of color and low-income people can gain their fair share of benefits and remedy past wrongs... |
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Who Owns Our Cities? (Spring 2008)
In this issue of Race, Poverty, and the Environment we take a look at the fundamental power relationships that shape life in the urban United States. Who owns and who controls our public resources and how has the dividing line between public and private shifted over the last century? Roads, ports, parks, schools, libraries, community centers, public housing, government buildings, military bases, and digital rights of way are all nominally controlled by democratically elected bodies that are mandated to act in the public interest. But across the nation, a pattern of economic exploitation of public resources for private gain has undermined public control of these resources and increased the divide between rich and poor. |
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Educating for Equity (Fall 2007)
This summer's United States Social Forum was singularly successful in its use of popular education, holding over a thousand workshops in three days. This issue of Race, Poverty and the Environment opens with a quick look at the forum and then delves into the many complex ways people are using education to strengthen the movements for social justice... |
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JUST Jobs? Organizing for Economic Justice (Spring 2007)
One
doesn’t have to possess an advanced degree in economics to see that
there is something definitively out of alignment when it comes to job
creation in the United States. Multinational corporations with no
national, much less local, allegiances are given billions of dollars in
tax subsidies in a shell game, which moves an ever-shrinking number of
manufacturing jobs from city to suburbs, and state to state.... |
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Getting Ready for Change: Green Economics and Climate Justice (Summer 2006)
Climate change threatens all forms of life on planet Earth, but when it comes to human life, it is the poor communities that will be hit first, and hardest. Human-caused climate change is now accepted as a reality, even by the mainstream media. But the effects of climate change on our communities are still covered only intermittently; and ideas about how we can organize for positive change are almost never covered at all... |
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Moving the Movement (Winter 2005/2006) This issue of Urban Habitat’s journal, Race, Poverty, and the Environment, presents an analysis of transportation equity that can help build the movement for civil rights and environmental justice. Featuring contributions from leading practitioners in the field and a cross-section of voices from the grassroots, it reveals a transportation and land use system that harms urban quality of life; damages the planetary environment; promotes wars for resource domination; and supports racism and class-based segregation. Published on the 50th Anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, this issue ... |
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Burden of Proof; Using Research for Environmental Justice (Winter 2004/2005) What are the legacy and limitations of science, research, technology and public health methodologies that underpin environmental policies?
How has dependence on existing paradigms of science perpetuated environmental racism?
To protect our communities, the EJ Movement must engage in the debate over environmental science and ... |
| Reclaiming Our Resources: Imperialism and Environmental Justice (Summer 2004)
"The word “imperialism” is back on the radar of political discourse, after lying dormant for many years, thanks to the Bush administration’s willingness to throw the weight of the United States around with abandon. Imperialism is a useful word. Just as the concept of “internal colonialism” was helpful to people thinking about power and injustice in the 1960s, imperialism can be brought home to good effect for today’s activists and movement leaders. But as an analytical term... |
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| Issue before 2004 (when Urban Habitat became the sole publisher) are available below as pdfs with selected articles also available in html. | |
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Governing from the Grassroots (Fall 2003) As Californians recover from the tumultuous gubernatorial election in our state while also looking ahead to the 2004 presidential election, the issue of electoral politics looms large. The question is: how do activists and organizations struggling to promote equity in low-income communities and communities of color incorporate electoral politics into our work? |
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Where Do We Go from Here? (Summer 2003) This issue of Race, Poverty and the Environment both celebrates the EJ Movement and offers a critique of it. At this critical point in EJ history, RPE takes a big-picture look at the Movement's past, present and future. In the "Looking Back" section, three articles explore the relationship between EJ and the Civil Rights Movement, examining lessons learned from liberation struggles of the 60s and 70s, as well as failures and missteps to avoid ... |
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Fixin' to Stay (Summer 2002) Gentrification, the wrenching process of neighborhood change, was first named in the 1960s. The name, however did not acknowledge the permanent erasure that takes place when a community loses its memory. Gentrification, or urban blight were policy terms that carried social and racial values, as well as a political and economic agenda. The layered meanings of the language of redevelopment has been understood by many communities that have fought to remain intact... |
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Reclaiming Land and Community (Winter 2001) By current estimates, there are nearly half a million brownfields, or derelict and possibly contaminated sites in our cities. These abandoned places, in many cases still leaking toxic chemicals into land, air or water, are most often concentrated in low income communities where the majority of residents are people of color. Compounding the health threats posed by the brownfields sites, these communities are also... |
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A Place at the Table (Winter 2000) Food is something many of us take for granted. Supermarkets are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, stocked with foods shipped in from all over the world, providing us with the illusion of health and abundance. We do not often stop to consider where that food came from, whose hands harvested it, how it was grown, and whether it is safe, equally available to all, and produced in a manner that does not degrade and destroy resources and communities... |
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The Border (Summer/Fall 1996) Steel walls. Military-style attack raids. People hunted down to be beaten, and sometimes killed, by government agents. Politicians speaking the language of ethnic cleansing. This description is not of Northern Ireland, Palestine, or Bosnia. Instead it is a picture of the United States/Mexico border... |
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Multicultural Environmental Education (Winter/Spring 1996) Multicultural environmental education is not merely environmental education with multicultural populations or "audiences" nor is it "urban environmental education with multicultural populations." It is rather a very new kind of environmental education, where content is influenced by and taught from multiple cultural perspectives... |
| Transportation and Social Justice (Fall 1995)
Our transportation system can tell us a lot about |
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Burning Fires (Spring/Summer 1995) U.S. Army General Leslie Groves and nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer designed the Manhattan Project according to the military model: secrecy was created and sustained by compartmentalizing every phase of the work. The Project that produced the first atomic bomb was spread over thirty-seven installations scattered across the United States and Canada, each an isolated unit providing only a fragment of the bomb-making process.... |
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Previous Issues 1990-1995
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