by Elizabeth Ammons (Editor), Modhumita Roy (Editor)

The first of its kind, this anthology of eighty international primary literary texts--poems, short stories, personal essays, testimonials, activist statements, and group-authored visions--illuminates Environmental Justice as a concept and a movement worldwide in a way that is accessible to students, scholars, and general readers. Also included are historical selections that ground contemporary pieces in a continuum of activist concern for the earth and human justice, a much-needed but seldom available perspective.

Arts and humanities are crucial in the ongoing effort to achieve an ecologically sustainable and just world. Works of the human imagination provide analyses, articulations of experience, and positive visions of the future that no amount of statistics, data, charts, or graphs can offer because literature speaks not only to the intellect but also to our emotions. Creative literary work, which records human experience both past and present, has the power to warn, to persuade, and to inspire. Each is critical in the shared struggle for Environmental Justice.

Author Biography

Elizabeth Ammons (Editor)
ELIZABETH AMMONS is Harriet H. Fay Professor of Literature at Tufts University, where she teaches courses on Environmental Justice and U.S. literature and American Indian writers. She is the author or editor of numerous titles, including Brave New Words: How Literature Will Save the Planet.

Modhumita Roy (Editor)
MODHUMITA ROY is an associate professor of English at Tufts University, where she teaches courses on non-Western women writers and postcolonial theory and fiction. She is the author of many essays on empire, culture, and social justice issues.