Environmental Crisis and Recovery

Matt Hermane  

Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Matt Hermane, and you’re listening to the 10th and final episode of season two, and we’re wrapping up the season with a focus on environmental history. In this episode, we hear Conor Howard’s conversation with Andrew Highsmith of UC Irvine. The June issue of the AHR features Professor Highsmith’s review of three recent monographs that examined crisis recovery, democracy, and justice in the cities of Flint and Detroit. But first, I spoke with Elizabeth Chatterjee, whose article titled “Late Acceleration: The Indian Emergency and the Early 1970s Energy Crisis” also appears in the June issue of the AHR. In the article, she discusses the famous Arab oil embargo of 1973 as only one component of a broader climate food energy crisis experienced by poor oil-importing countries. In India, the effort to address this crisis scenario by relying on domestic coal was a significant contributor to the imposition of a constitutional dictatorship, known today simply as the Emergency that lasted from June 1975 to March 1977. Through the lens of the Emergency, Professor Chatterjee asserts that only by analyzing and understanding the dynamics between climate, energy, popular expectations, and politics, can we begin to dislodge carbon-intensive energy regimes. Elizabeth Chatterjee is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the University of Chicago, where she focuses on energy and infrastructure, especially in independent India. Here’s my conversation with Professor Chatterjee.

I guess we should go back to October of 1973. Of course, the time that is famous for the oil embargo that the Arab oil-exporting countries put into place. But you’re making the point in your article that India is already in the throes of this energy crisis. So I was wondering if maybe you could just take us back to India in the early 1970s. Maybe before that, and kind of just set the stage for us? What challenges is India facing energy-wise?

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Absolutely. So in many ways, what interested me about this is that the oil shock if any topic and energy history makes its way into regular undergraduate syllabi, it’s going to be 1973.

NBC Evening News for Thursday, Nov 08, 1973  

Here’s what the oil shortage caused by the Middle East war is doing around the world…

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

But actually, if you look at India, we need to look back before October 1973, I draw attention, particularly to the series of climate shocks that struck around the world in 1972. In India, the monsoon failed. And because it was so dependent on hydroelectricity, and certainly in the West and the South, this started turning into an energy crisis. It also, of course, hit the harvests. And at the same moment, climate shocks around the world, say in the Soviet Union, and so on, turn the Soviets and also China into huge food grain purchasers. So at the very same moment, India began facing its own food crisis, a hydroelectricity crisis, a coal crisis based on long-standing problems in the coal mining sector. All of these were simmering well before the huge quadrupling in the oil price towards the end of 1973.

Matt Hermane  

You might think, because, you know, India is this developing country in the 50s, 60s, 70s, that energy consumption or an energy crisis might hurt people at the top of society the most, the societal elite who maybe have access to the things that consume energy more. But you’re clear to make the point also, that the energy crisis is something that affects people across society.

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Right. So the initial reaction in India to the oil shock is one of schadenfreude because of precisely this assumption, that this is something that affects the rich consumer lifestyles, most. This has proven not to be true. One thing that happens is, as wealthier consumers start turning back to traditional fuels like firewood, this puts all sorts of pressure on poorer consumers to meet their energy needs. And there’s lots of evidence that say the amount of time women spend foraging for fuel starts to go up. Also, the other big component of this is fertilizers that are derived from oil, as they go missing as well this ramifies through into food availability, food prices, in ways that starts to impact the poor as well. So I think it becomes sadly clear, belatedly, to India’s own policymakers that this is harming even the poor in ways that they didn’t initially expect. So a crisis that in the USA looks like a bit of a pain having to queue at the pump actually becomes much more existential for poor households who are really the problem is both what to put in the cooking pot and what to put underneath the cooking pot in order to cook it becomes really, really a critical discussion. And this translates then into food riots, protests over the availability of kerosene to cook with, and so on well before the end of 1973 itself.

CBS Evening News for Thursday, Nov 4, 1971

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was at the White House today a very serious lady with very serious problems. Here’s how it went on the South Lawn when she arrived:

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, CBS Evening News for Thursday, Nov 4, 1971

It has not been easy to get away at a time when India is beleaguered to the natural calamities of drought, flood, and cyclones has been added a man-made tragedy of vast proportions. I have come here looking for a deeper understanding of the situation in our part of the world in search of some wise impulse, which, as history tells us, has sometimes worked to save humanity from despair.

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

And along with that then grows a disillusionment amongst India’s leaders about the whole idea of the Global South, I say project of postcolonial solidarity. So by 1975, then Indira Gandhi and other senior leaders are starting to become quite cynical about OPEC, about countries like Algeria, who are trying to pick up the mantle of being postcolonial champions and say, quite explicitly, you know, this is not the three worlds the rich world, the communist world and the third world anymore. There are four worlds that we live with now. And in that fourth world, are the most severely affected countries who are poor oil importers. And so they start to say, you know, maybe actually, these rich Arab states have more in common with the West where they’re sending their Petrodollars than they do with us. So in this way, as well, I think there is this new sense of being left behind, even by other postcolonial states that coalesces at this moment, the idea that India is amongst the poorest of the poor countries, really emerges at this point.

Matt Hermane  

So eventually, what will happen, right is with these ongoing challenges, and then of course, 1973, India will make the decision to move towards coal and develop this reliance on fossil fuels. But you mentioned earlier that the coal industry faces challenges prior to this point. So it takes this real effort to make that transition to coal. Can you kind of give us a little bit of a background on why that was? Why the coal industry wasn’t that challenging state? And then what had to be done to make that transition?

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Yes, so from the vantage point of today, the really striking feature is that India, like China, is overwhelmingly dependent on coal for electricity generation. The past month it actually was above 80% of all electricity generated came from coal. But how did this dependence actually come into being? I think it’s important that we don’t naturalize this and assume that it’s some sort of innate property of the fact India has quite large coal reserves say or that the colonial regime was into coal mining. And I think it really is in the aftermath of the 1970s energy crisis, that we see this deepening dependence. So the coal sector that was inherited from colonial rule was in the hands of hundreds of small private owners, many of whom, as the state started to tighten its grip had very little incentive to increase mechanization say, or technologically upgrade their mines. So you have lots and lots of small, very low productivity, underground mines with astonishingly dangerous labor conditions, lots of accidents. And then this cannibalistic relationship with the railways, which is the biggest consumer alongside the electricity sector of that coal, and is not very good at bringing it from mines to power stations. So in some ways, one of the things I was trying to work out is why there is this surprising embrace of coal in the face of these problems. The other side of this too is, it’s worth remembering I think, that there is a real strong set of environmental critiques at this point, reaching up pretty much to the apex of the Indian state under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her inner circle of advisers. This is not a regime that’s sort of like, yes, emulate the West in all things, this Western-style development is so great or indeed Soviet development. We shouldn’t forget, for example, that Indira Gandhi is the only foreign head of state to attend the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, which is seen as a real turning point in planetary politics at the environment.

1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment 

Stockholm, Sweden, June 12 1972 Mrs. Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India arrived today to address the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment  

It is clear that the environmental crisis which is confronting the world will profoundly alter the future destiny of our planet. No one amongst us…

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Here again, this is a surprise, why on earth is a country harnessing its future to fossil fuels, in the face of an awareness of pollution, and the ecological and social costs of Western-style development? So I try and chart how the fact that there was this abundant and crucially, indigenous resource becomes very important. And as well, it’s then in the early 1970s, that coal is nationalized. And there’s also a political rationale for leaning on coal, then once it’s in the hands of the central government. It can be used actually as a political weapon to try and rein in all of India’s state governments bearing in mind India, like the US is a fractious federal system. So this becomes a way then that the government centralizes power, at the same time as it turns to coal for electricity too.

Matt Hermane  

And what does that centralization look like?

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

So we still don’t have very many histories of India in the 1970s. Partly, a lot of the sources are sealed. Historians, can’t access them, many have been destroyed. And if there are histories they overwhelmingly concentrate on the political episode known as the Emergency—that is the suspension of democracy in India, for so far, the first and only time in Indian history between June 1975 and March 1977.

NBC Evening News for Thursday, Jun 26, 1975

Good evening. India, which calls itself the world’s largest democracy is not that today, under a state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government, at least 676 politicians had been arrested, including some of the country’s best-known opposition leaders. Others claimed 1000s have been jailed. Censorship has been established, some civil liberties have been suspended. Mrs. Gandhi…

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Elections were suspended various other rights like habeas corpus were suspended and the media was incredibly tightly controlled. So I tried to read then the Emergency through this energy lens, and this authoritarian turn through an energy lens too. So the centralization of coal on one hand means the nationalization of coal, under what becomes Coal India Limited by some metrics, the largest mining corporation in the world, a huge state-owned enterprise, and the entry of New Delhi into directly owning and controlling coal-fired power stations through another huge state-owned enterprise, the National Thermal Power Corporation, and in this way, then, New Delhi is able to control the flow of inputs lower down the polity, at least this is there idea. It, in fact, does not really work all that well by the 1980s. But we see the centralization going on institutionally. And we also see the darker use of energy and electricity during the Emergency as well. So actually, power cuts are a big way that the Emergency censorship regime is installed by cutting off power to India’s newspapers in Delhi. Deploying then electricity workers in kind of performative rallies for Indira Gandhi, you know, using the state’s control of its own hundreds of 1000s of employees becomes a tool. And then finally, electro-torture, which has a long and very unsettling history from French Indochina, through notoriously Latin America really starts to arrive in India in the 1970s and becomes a weapon that is deployed to torture then critics of the Emergency as well. So in all of these ways, I think we can see the flows of energy being used to attempt to centralize power in New Delhi’s hands in the face of this broad crisis of governability. This is in many ways, the figuratively darkest hour in India’s history. And I suggest it was also literally the darkest hour because it is so characterized by these problems in the energy sector that really do somewhat start to improve for all sorts of reasons beyond the state’s control, like the monsoon recovers, and also, hundreds of 1000s of Indians migrate to the Middle East and their remittances in turn actually prop up the economy. So I don’t think that the regime can take credit through the centralization for solving these problems it’s the beneficiary of much bigger forces beyond its control. But nonetheless, I think it tells us something very interesting about how to de-exceptionalist the Emergency as well and I note that, for example, there are all sorts of other understudied episodes elsewhere in the global south at this point, like the end of Emperor Haile Selassie’s regime in Ethiopia,

NBC Evening News for Thursday, Sep 12, 1974 

Known as the “Conquering Lion of Judah,” “the Elect of God,” and he is part of a royal line, which goes back 2500 years. Today, he’s out of work.

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Or we could look at Bangladesh, the world’s newest state, where very quickly Sheikh Mujib, father of the nation becomes himself increasingly authoritarian, is assassinated, and military ruler is installed.

NBC Evening News for Friday, Aug 15, 1975 

Sheikh Mujib went from public adulation amounting to hysteria to disaster and death in just three and a half years. The ingredients of his downfall were evident even at the beginning. There were floods, drought, cyclones, famine, corruption, and poverty, and almost no machinery to deal with them.

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

So there are all of these other histories, I think that show in other a similar intriguing link to the very, very difficult conditions around this energy crisis, that oil-importing poor states in the Global South, specifically faced. And this is often read, as, for example, the result of the pathologies of Indira Gandhi’s own personality or something uniquely dysfunctional that’s going on in the Indian polity at this moment. I think by reading this through the energy lens, we can actually start to see that it’s also simultaneously the product of global forces and challenges in the energy sector.

Matt Hermane  

You say that post-1973, “the impetus of emissions growth swung to the huge emerging economies of the [Global] South. In a trend we might call the Late Acceleration…” Of course, this follows what we would refer to as the Great Acceleration of previous decades that saw the industrialized world relying on fossil fuels and emitting more as a consequence. So I’m thinking about Great Acceleration then Late Acceleration, and it implies this trajectory, right? So is this something that you thought about as you were doing your research and writing this article?

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Yes, I think like lots of environmental historians, my work is absolutely unabashedly presentist in that it’s motivated by thinking about the climate crisis. And one of the key features of the world that we live in today that I think environmental historians have to take seriously is that we live in a multipolar world in emissions terms. And I don’t necessarily know that the distribution of scholarship in the field reflects this. So we know today, for example, that North America, the whole of North America is probably about 17% of annual emissions, compared to Asia, which is, you know, maybe 55%. What this means is, it’s in Asia, that our futures, a planetary future is going to be written. So I think this means it’s imperative to study the histories of Asian energy-intensive societies in their own right. So with the Late Acceleration, I’m not simply pointing the finger or something like this, at China and India as big emitters, the incredibly grossly energy-intensive American modes of living, of course, has not spread to India, India per capita emissions still remain well below the world average. And I think this is really important to emphasize. What I’m trying to really get at is, I think there is a too easy tendency to look at the Great Acceleration as this one long period from roughly 1950 onwards, where every single indicator goes up exponentially—economic growth, human population, and all of the ecological effects that go with it, whether it’s carbon dioxide emissions, freshwater use, the collapse and biodiversity and so on. By doing that, I think we can tend to assume that the drivers are the same all the way along that this is the expansion of a really distinctively American consumer culture around the automobile, oil, and so on, that spreads. By the late acceleration, what I’m trying to highlight is I think the dynamics in some way, like India look really distinctive, and we have to analyze them in their own right. So, in the 70s, we see these hugely important institutions installed for the first time, these huge state-owned enterprises. And the politics of energy that comes along with that. We see the physical infrastructure installed this turn to huge opencast coal mines that ravage the landscape, and all of the carbon emissions and from power generation at this point. And we see the interest groups that help lock in this very coal-heavy energy system in place, we see this kind of emerge as well. So all of these dynamics, I think, look very different to the hyper abundance of American consumer society. This is much more, I argue, a situation of highly politicized, scarce energy mediated by the state, in what ends up returning thankfully to being a democratic society. And it’s this kind of set of dynamics that really are going to shape what happens in the 21st century. I feel very firmly that historians have a very important role in accurately diagnosing where we stand today. So we might understand how energy systems might change. And that is really what motivated me to write this piece.

Matt Hermane  

I think we’ll leave it there. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.

Elizabeth Chatterjee  

Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Matt Hermane  

That was Elizabeth Chatterjee, whose article titled “Late Acceleration: The Indian Emergency and the Early 1970s Energy Crisis” appears in the June issue of the AHR. Next, we hear Connor Howard’s conversation with Andrew Highsmith, whose review of three recent books on environmental justice is featured in the same June issue of the AHR. That review titled “The Long and Wide Environmental Justice Movement: Dispatches from Flint and Detroit” discusses Katrinell Davis’s Tainted Tap: Flint’s Journey from Crisis to Recovery, Benjamin Pauli’s Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis and Josiah Rector’s Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit. Professor Highsmith suggests that together the three books allow us to appreciate an environmental justice movement with a history that stretches further back and includes a far wider range of participants than is often recognized. Connor and Andrew also chat about the process behind writing a feature review for the AHR. Andrew Highsmith is an Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine, where he specializes in modern US history with particular interests in metropolitan development, public policy, racial and economic inequalities, and public health. Here’s Connor’s conversation with Professor Highsmith.

Andrew Highsmith  

My name is Andrew Highsmith, and I’m an Associate Professor of History at the University of California Irvine, my research and teaching focus on modern American history, Metropolitan history, and the history of racial health and environmental disparities.

Conor Howard  

Great. Thank you. And thank you for joining us. All right, so what is it like to write a feature review for the American Historical Review? What is the process like? who approached you or did you approach the journal?

Andrew Highsmith  

Okay, that’s a great question. So this is the first time that I’ve ever written a feature review for the American Historical Review. So it was a new experience for me. It started about a year ago, and the editor of the AHR reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in reviewing some recently published books on the environmental catastrophes in Flint and Detroit, specifically. I jumped at the chance because, like a lot of academics, I often struggle to keep up with new work in my field. And I’d written a book about Flint and had since moved away and moved out to California. And so I was eager to dig into this wave of new books that had been published in the last few years. And so that’s how it all started. The first real task was to figure out which books to review because so many have been written in recent years and so many excellent books. And so, what I did was, I started by creating a list of my own, and the three books that I ended up reviewing were near the top of that list. And then I asked other scholars that I respect, and these three books came up again and again, and so that confirmed my idea that these three books would be great choices. So what I try to do when I’m, you know, writing historiographically is to think about items from an acronym called THOMAS. And I didn’t invent this a scholar at Virginia Tech, Danna Agmon, who I don’t even know, but a friend of mine from Virginia Tech knows Professor Agmon, she introduced this concept of THOMAS, which is a sort of guide for how to think about the big takeaways from academic literature as you read, and each letter of THOMAS stands for a different item, and they move in ascending significance. So T stands for topic, H stands for historiography, O stands for organization, M is method, A is argument, and S is significance. And if you use THOMAS to do assessments of readings, it allows you to kind of pull out the key, you know, bits of importance for various works. And so I started with trying to do THOMAS assessments of these three books. And in the course of doing that, realize that each of these three books is excellent in their own right. But then together, they have an overarching significance related to what I call the the long and wide environmental justice movement. And so big shout out to Professor Agmon, who hopefully I’ll meet one day, but it’s a really remarkable tool, I think, for helping figure out what to look for in the middle of some of these densely argued and written books.

Conor Howard  

Yeah, that’s a great little system, anyone who’s getting ready for exams or whatever, I’m gonna mention that, that that is just a beautiful little thing.

Andrew Highsmith  

I advise all of my grad students here at UC Irvine to use it, and they seem to really appreciate it. So I do think it’s a great tool and it’s I think it’s really helpful when you’re writing, review essays for thinking about what needs to be in this review. And so that helps to structure the historiographical writing, I think.

Conor Howard  

Something that comes up several times in your review is this difference, I suppose they’re different related valuable dimensions to really specialized academic knowledge. And someone who is a local, who doesn’t necessarily have the same academic credentials, but is in the situation, I guess.

Andrew Highsmith  

This has been a recurring theme, particularly in the case of the Flint water crisis, the sort of ongoing tension between local residents who, throughout the duration of the water crisis have developed their own expertise and training in not only, you know, safe water management, but also in the epidemiology of lead poisoning. And so residents have consistently engaged in this production of knowledge about the city’s water crisis. And they have often come into conflict with outside academic experts who have come up with different findings. And so this is actually a really interesting facet of Ben Pauli’s work Flint Fights Back is the real tension between local residents who were seeing cloudy water come through the taps, you know, water that was foul smelling and tasting, and just didn’t sit right, water that was giving them skin rashes, making them feel sick. And all the while experts from you know, the state government were saying this is not a problem, the water is safe. And that really flew in the face of what local residents were experiencing.

Conor Howard  

So someone might look at this set of reviews and say, these are great works. They contribute important ways to our historiography on Flint, Michigan. But I think that certainly, you’re making the case, and as I believe the authors of these three works would make the case as well, that even though these are very locally specific works, there is a very clear, broader implication. I was wondering if you could speak maybe a little bit to the relevance of the local for the national or regional.

Andrew Highsmith  

Sure, so, and I’m glad we’re taking a chance now to talk specifically about the three works that I reviewed because they’re really outstanding in so many ways. Each of these three studies is a local case study. And one of the challenges of, of writing local case studies is to explore in which ways is the case study unique and in which ways is it representative. And I think that individually, they all focus on particular aspects of environmental injustices. So in Davis’s case, she writes about how decades of of structural racism and neglect led to the development of the water crisis. In Pauli’s case, his focus is more on the democratic crisis that led to the water contamination. He argues that the Flint Water Crisis wasn’t simply a leaden water crisis, it was a crisis of democracy marked by the state’s takeover of the city in 2011. And then, Rector’s book really kind of blends elements of Davis and Pauli together to focus both on structures of environmental inequality, but also on the agency of local activists. And what Rector does is to show that the environmental justice movement in Detroit, and perhaps in other cities, as well took shape earlier than we traditionally think of the environmental justice movement taking place in the early 80s, in Orange County, North Carolina. He also shows that environmental justice campaigns in places like Detroit didn’t just target the traditional vectors of pollution in quote, unquote, fenceline communities like the smokestacks, and the polluting landfills and so forth, that environmental injustice was also in a sense, de-spatialized, because it also resulted from city-wide economic crises that affected everyone regardless of where they lived in Detroit. And so each of the three looks really carefully at local municipal politics, but they also try to explore the extent to which their cases are representative. And I think that probably of the three Rector’s job really stands out in that way in showing that we want to think more broadly about environmental justice, we have to look at the fenceline, of course, where so many environmental inequities take place, but we also have to look at what happens in the wake of deregulation, in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis, and how city dwellers from various neighborhoods, even those far away from polluting industries also suffer grave environmental harm. And so I think that, that Rector’s book, probably, in my opinion, does the best job of, of showing the larger significance of Detroit’s environmental crisis. The term that I use in this piece is the long and wide environmental justice movement. Yeah. And, what I mean by that, so this is something that I wasn’t really thinking about at all. But then I read these books, and I was I was going back to my THOMAS and thinking about the S, the significance of, of each, and then the significance of them collectively. And what I came to realize is that all three of these books in very different ways, are all pointing us to a more capacious conceptualization of environmental justice than most of us typically have. And what I mean by that is that all three books show us that environmental justice campaigns were really taking shape in cities like Flint, and Detroit. Well, before the 1980s. If you Google search, environmental justice, and you look for timelines, almost all of them begin, either in the late 1970s, with the campaigns against landfills in Houston, or in the early 1980s, with the storied protests in Warren County, North Carolina against the storing of hazardous chemicals in a heavily black community. And, and these, these books, and again, particularly Davis, and Rector, they bring the chronology back even earlier and show that, that in the post-war era, you see the emergence of environmental campaigns that link environmental protection with broader concerns over social, economic and racial justice. And they’re, you know, they emerge over time, and they emerge at different speeds in different places. But they definitely point us, I think, to an earlier chronology for thinking about the environmental justice. That brings us back into the post-war era. And in addition to pointing us toward a re-periodization of the environmental justice movement, they also point us toward the broad part, the long and wide part that environmental justice campaigns were much broader in scope than we often typically assumed. They were about, as I said before, they were about targeting inequities that were happening in fenceline communities of course, but they were also about like in Pauli’s case challenging the denial and suppression of local democracy. They were about challenging city-wide housing policies and exposed communities of color to the various vectors of disease and contamination. And so the movement was broader in scope than I think that the literature that we have really allows for. And so those are the kind of key components of the long and wide movement that it was, it was, you know, began earlier than we assumed, it began, not just in the South but in communities nationwide, and that it encompassed a broader set of demands than just those that addressed fenceline inequities.

Conor Howard  

Is this a term that you kind of put together yourself? Or is it something that’s been floating around in the literature?

Andrew Highsmith  

So this is a term that I believe I’m the one who coined it, I don’t know if anybody else has. If they have I apologize for not knowing about it. But it of course, it draws from an old concept in civil rights historiography, the work of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall who wrote a really provocative piece in 2005, called “The Long Civil Rights Movement and The Political Uses of the Past.” And she tries to do similar things with rethinking the periodization and spatial orientation of the Civil Rights Movement, bringing the timeline back to the 30s.

Conor Howard  

Is there anything else that you wanted to add?

Andrew Highsmith  

I think it’s worth noting that there’s been a long tradition of really fantastic scholarship in, you know, environmental justice history. One of my favorites, Andrew Hurley’s book Environmental Inequalities about Gary, Indiana. Books like Julie Sze’s Noxious New York and David Pellow’s Garbage Wars there’s a long list of just truly standout works that really set the stage for a lot of the work that we’re seeing today. And I think that these three works really fit in that tradition. They’re really impressive individually. But I think also collectively, they point us in some exciting new directions methodologically historiographically, and so I hope that everyone out there will give these books to read and see what they think.

Conor Howard  

Yeah, absolutely, and again, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Andrew Highsmith  

Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Matt Hermane  

That was Connor Howard and Andrew Highsmith discussing Andrew’s featured review titled “The Long and Wide Environmental Justice Movement: Dispatches from Flint and Detroit ” appearing in the June issue of the AHR. You’ve been listening to the season two finale of History in Focus. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association, and the University Library at the University of California Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by Connor Howard, Daniel Story, and me Matt Hermane. Audio engineering and transcription support was provided by Phoebe Rettberg. You can find out more about this and other episodes at americanhistoricalreview.org. Thanks for listening. Have a nice summer and we’ll be back in the fall.