Political Prisoners and Environmental Justice

About this record

David N. Pellow's 2018 article in Capitalism Nature Socialism arguing for a "prisoner-led environmental justice movement." Pellow traces how revolutionary movements of the 20th and 21st centuries — Black Power and Black Liberation, Indigenous and American Indian, Puerto Rican independence, White/European-American anti-imperialist, and radical ecology movements — each carried an environmental-justice orientation through their fights against state power, racism, colonialism, militarism, and the imposition of ecological harm on vulnerable communities. Just as Dan Berger has argued that prisons and jails were important sites of political formation for the civil-rights movement, Pellow argues that spaces of incarceration serve a similar function for the environmental justice movement. Foundational scholarship linking the U.S. political-prisoner archive to environmental justice studies.