Pellow’s study focuses on the sociopolitical and global economic factors driving the global North’s historical targeting of the global South for toxic waste disposal. In the first chapter, Pellow evaluates the role of global trade in creating this scenario. He faults globalization for two of the four principle reasons for shifting toxic waste disposal from the North to the South. The global South is largely impoverished due to national debt and unstable political atmospheres, forcing these nations to accept toxic waste for financial compensation. Also, the nature of globalization perpetuates this cycle by favoring maximized profits and promising improved economies for the global South, but never delivering. However, race, class and national inequalities are ultimately “the primary drivers behind this drama.”
In the second chapter, the author characterizes the findings of a number of race studies, connecting our society’s poison of racism to the “ideological foundations supporting [structural racism and economic oppression] in world history.” The most interesting topic in this chapter was the author’s two critiques of current race studies. Pellow criticizes studies of race and economics for largely ignoring the instrumental role of powerful corporations in driving capitalism, conquest and slavery throughout history. He also notes that few race studies adequately examine institutional racism’s facilitation of environmental inequality. By understanding these two foundations of environmental inequity, EJ advocates and scholars can more adequately evaluate the socioeconomic processes that lead to certain groups (the global North) dominating others (the global South) and develop a more pragmatic understanding of racism.
Pellow points out that the global North is relatively affluent compared to the global South, affording those nations the ability to demand better life quality in terms of environmental conditions. We discussed this correlation after reading Cox’s article “Prospects for Environmental Justice.” The result of this affluence, of course, is a shift in Northern waste to Southern nations, where environmental regulations are generally inexpensive and less stringent. Pellow calls this trend “toxic colonialism” for its roots in institutional racism and colonial-period concepts of racial minorities. Interestingly, Pellow writes that the efforts of predominantly white Northern NGOs or TSMOs to correct toxic colonialism in the global South is sometimes received as cultural imperialism, the continued efforts of western society to push their ideals on other nations. Awareness of and sensitivity toward this perception is critical in order to develop effective transnational organizations.
