Joseph Brown (UMass-Boston). Social movements mobilize to fight climate change, water pollution, and biodiversity loss with a variety of direct action tactics. What is the best way to understand these campaigns? This book argues that the "environmental" framework fails to capture the importance of race and Indigenous sovereignty in intersectional "environmental justice" movements. The importance of intersectionality emerges in months of participant observation fieldwork inside Atlanta's Stop Cop City movement and the Wet'suwet'en Nation's resistance to the Coastal GasLink pipeline. Dozens of interviews illuminate the political and social pathways to direct action, as well as the controversies that arise over strategy and tactics. Given its "insider" research approach, the book sheds light on the subjective experience of direct action, including the highs and lows, triumphs and traumas, hopes and fears of those engaged in frontline environmental justice struggle.

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