Extractivism has been predominant in the Arctic since whaling and sealing campaigns began in the sixteenth century, followed by mining and drilling for oil and gas. In this chapter we present some of the main features of this ‘extractivist history’ of the circumpolar region. We organize this development along a set of themes. First, we explore the extractive frame of mind in Western thought and how it has continued to shape visions of the region. Second, we explore the material and social impacts of historical extractivism. Third, we use the theoretical lens of colonialism and decolonialism to understand the social and political relations, especially with aboriginal populations. Fourth, we examine the, often fraught, recent and contemporary debates around contemporary and future extractivism and its implications for the Arctic. The historical overview serves the purpose of providing a legible pattern from what is also a range of diverse and rich variations. A key finding is that extractivism is a lasting legacy and a path dependency of the region. At the same time resource extraction has many problematic sides that the seeking of new Arctic futures will have to deal with.

This chapter traces the international environmental rights movement, discusses international environmental law, and analyzes the theoretical deveopment and policy practices of environmental protection and human rights. It then examines the issue of environmental justice including environmental racism. Topics such as pollution and human rights, climate change and human rights, and environmental refugees and human rights are also explored.

This chapter unpacks Garrett Hardin's 1968 landmark article "The Tragedy of the Commons" by exploring the controversial views of its author and the explosive social context from which it emerged. More than an essay about resource management in the abstract, Hardin's admitted main point in "The Tragedy of the Commons," often excerpted out of many anthologies and reprints, is at its core an argument for population control. Hardin’s views veered from the mainstream and openly incorporated racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant ideas. Given this, it seems quite surprising today that the article was received so well, both popularly and in academic circles. But in reality, Hardin's success came because of his focus on population – not in spite of it. The article came at just the right time to catch on: precisely when the environmental movement neared its crest and just before his most controversial idea – population control – was about to enter the public realm as a serious matter of debate.

Approaching food systems today as a global pharmakon can help advance an Environmental Humanities response to the risks and unknowns of food. Whether it is the difficulty fish have in distinguishing microplastics from plankton, or the trouble humans who live in urban food deserts have finding fresh edibles, food in the early twenty-first century carries unprecedented threats of undernourishment, toxicity and death alongside its promise of life. Paradoxically, the ethics and politics emerging in response to the pharmakon of food may not always involve attempts to purify or certify it “free” of social and environmental ills. One alternative is to tell stories about “food-power” that highlight the agency of other species within a relational ontology that reveals human control, including efforts to control for food safety, to be a fiction. On their own, stories of food-power cannot confront the “power to devour” through which some humans assert their exceptionalism and domination. Gutsy struggles against food injustices by colonized and Indigenous people also show that food is neither an object nor a subject but a multispecies relationship protected through both story and action.

Scholars from across the humanities and sciences have deepened our understanding of the relationship between environmental and human health, revealing the centrality of race as a critical variable. Historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have revealed the centrality of race in disparities in access to healthy environments and medical care. Structural inequalities that stem from the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and imperial violence are embedded with racial ideologies that supported those systems. The growth of biomedicine and Western medical institutions in the context of slavery, colonialism, and empire produced medical ideologies of racial difference in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Similarly, environmental movements that emerged in the context of European and US empires emphasized conservation at the expense of indigenous land rights. The long-term impacts of slavery and colonial policies are apparent in studies of environmental damage and health disparities. In the late twentieth century, environmental activists in the Global South and southern USA challenged racism and postcolonial development, and advocated for environmental justice.

This chapter analyzes several recently recovered newspaper and magazine narratives by Edith Maude Eaton. Extending far beyond the Chinatown plots of Mrs. Spring Fragrance for which she is best known, "Away Down in Jamaica," "The Alaska Widow," and "Wing Sing of Los Angeles on His Travels" exemplify the broad scope of Eaton's engagements with environmental health, cross-racial relationality, and transnational geographies, as well as how these themes intersect with her experiments with genre, narrative voice, and serial form.

“Hurricane Alley” ponders what happens when we define the literature of the coastal American South (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas), as shaped by the paths, threats, and aftermaths of hurricanes. It explores what shifts in our understanding of the field if we consider Southern literature not solely in terms of plantation and Creolization, but also around a geography of vulnerability. It argues that coastal southern literature (and its resonances with the Caribbean) provides an apt example to reflect on the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental racism. With a nineteenth- to twenty-first-century corpus featuring fiction, poetry, theater, visual arts, and cinema by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Edwidge Danticat, Spike Lee, Patricia Smith, Kara Walker, Benh Zeitlin, Natasha Trethewey, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward, the chapter expands the limits – generic, geographical, ethnic, generational, gendered, sexualized -- of southern literature.

The introduction places climate disruption within histories of colonization and enslavement. A reflection on the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice frames the persistence of structures of enslavement and racial apartheid that are evident in the US landscape through both presence and absence. Proposing a reparative and decolonial approach to climate justice, the introduction draws on a range of perspectives, including environmental justice, decolonial theory, and Black agrarianism. In dialogue with expressive cultures and resistance movements of frontline communities, the introduction outlines the ways that utopian narratives can express a desire to be freed from the sins of the past. In response, this introductory chapter offers narratives of revolutionary pasts and dystopian futures; practices of mourning, dissent, and hospitality; and everyday inhabitation and social care as locations where better worlds are created.

Chapter 4 interprets funerals and second lines performed since Hurricane Katrina to articulate an ethics of mourning and hospitality. In the context of post-Katrina New Orleans, these second lines perform memorials for all those who died or were dispossessed during the storm and have been unable to return. They are simultaneously forms of mourning and protest, occupying public space in resistance to government policies of diaspora. Drawing on trauma theory, I argue that Katrina can only be understood from a morally and politically engaged position, and healing can only happen within this context. Furthermore, I build on Jacques Derrida’s work on hospitality to link mourning and repair in post-Katrina New Orleans, illuminating the ways the people of New Orleans articulated an ethics for climate disruption through solidarity and social care. I conclude with a reading of Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones, which depicts the empathy, care, and courage of an African American family in the bayou during the storm.

During and immediately after the American Revolution, US writers described a salubrious national climate that would ensure the prosperity of the nation. Maintaining a good climate involved managing air quality through various forms of so-called improvement. In the 1790s, a series of yellow fever epidemics upended this fantasy and suggested that the US atmosphere might be either fundamentally toxic or incredibly vulnerable to foreign contagion. During this period, maintaining healthy air came to be understood as a national security issue. This discourse offers one point of origin for the contemporary militarization of climate to the benefit of some and at the expense of others. The heightened vulnerability of poor and nonwhite communities to airborne toxins can also be traced to the 1790s, when the government prioritized the health of white bodies at the expense of black people. This chapter traces this arc through Mercy Otis Warren’s anti-British plays, writing by and about Benjamin Franklin, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown. The chapter closes by connecting this literary history to contemporary scholarship about air pollution.