Resources to Learn About Environmental Racism

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Written By Tyson Livingston
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Last updated: 09/11/2021

In addition to nature journaling, fiction, and art, this blog will include resources and information related to conservation and sustainability. In the summer of 2020, I had the opportunity to do some research related to racism and climate change and discovered how much the two issues are linked. I was interested in learning more, and put together this resource list to help myself and others further explore the topic.

The first section contains a few core readings to provide a background on race and the environment. They are the first books from a set of combined lists related to race, the environment, or both. After reading these works, you will probably know more about this topic than most people out there. However, if this sparks an interest, and you want to learn and do more, then there is a lot more to get your hands on.

The next two sections offer that chance and comprise two sets of resources. Section 2 is an ordered layer of information to sit on top of the foundation from Section 1. Think of it as your sophomore year in school. It has two lists, the continuing list from Kendi on race, and then a list combined from the Articles and Essays section of Somini Sengupta's list, "Read Up on the Links Between Racism and the Environment," and then the rest of the Book Riot reading list. Try to read these lists in order, although you can alternate between the two as much as you want.

Section 3 is currently blank, but it is where I will continue to add resources to expand this list as I find them. These works will range across all kinds of media and won't have any particular order. Throw these into your reading whenever you want, including mixing them in to the ordered lists in the previous sections.

I hope you will find this list useful. Like any reading list, take from it what will work the best for you and use it to expand your knowledge. Also, if you have suggestions for Section 3, please send them my way via my social channels.

Section 1: Core Readings

Start with Somini Sengupta's, "Black Environmentalists Talk About Climate and Anti-Racism."

Then learn about the basics of climate change:

"A crash course on climate change, 50 years after the first Earth Day," New York Times

Read the fist four books of Ibram X. Kendi's introductory anti-racist reading list:

  • Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention

  • Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning

  • Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

  • Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility

(Kendi also includes "If you are a person of color and think this syllabus isn’t for you, then read James Forman’s, Locking Up Our Own")

Finally, after reading these books on racism, read these two books from Book Riot's, "An Inconvenient Reading List: Racism and the Environment"

  • Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement

  • David M. Konisky (editor), Failed Promises: Evaluating the Federal Government’s Response to Environmental Justice

Section 2: "Sophomore Readings"

Somini Sengupta's Set:

Remaining Book Riot Set:

  • Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest

  • Julie Sze, Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Urban and Industrial Environments)

  • Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980

  • Gregg Mitman, Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes

  • Peter H. Eichstaedt, If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans

  • Sylvia Hood Washington, Packing Them In: An Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago, 1865-1954

  • Linda Nash, Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge

  • Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement

Ibram X. Kendi's Set Continued:

  • Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

  • Maya Angelou, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  • Janet Mock, Redefining Realness

  • Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage

  • Kiese Laymon, Heavy

  • James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

  • Coates, Between the World and Me

  • Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time

  • Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told

  • Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

  • Leon Litwack, North of Slavery

  • Eric Foner, Reconstruction

  • Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name

  • James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935

  • Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness

  • Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law

  • Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis

  • Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns

  • Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History

  • Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights

  • Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load

  • Paula J. Giddings, When and Where I Enter

  • Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

  • Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow

  • Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?

  • Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

  • Wesley Lowery, They Can’t Kill Us All

  • Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

  • Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid

  • Matthew Desmond, Evicted

  • Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot

  • Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote

Section 3: Additional Resources and Learning

This section is where I will expand and continue to add resources as I discover them. This will include not only essays and non-fiction books, but video, recordings, music, novels, poetry, and anything else that proves useful, informative, or inspiring. Check back often for updates, and if you have a favorite resource, please tell me about it on my social channels so I can add it to this list.

Tyson Livingston

Artist, writer, and musician sharing my work from the wilds of Texas.

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