Improvising against the racial state in Atlanta: Reimagining agency in environmental justice

Recent scholarship on environmental justice highlights a concern about the relationship between the racial state and social movement strategy. This paper addresses the ingenuity of environmental justice organizing in the Proctor Creek and South River watersheds of Atlanta, Georgia, each home to predominantly Black communities and unjust flows of toxicants and sewage through urban creeks, streams, and rivers. We begin from critiques of the failure of institutionalized environmental justice and the state’s role in maintaining environmental racisms. To examine organizing responses to these circumstances, we analyze the improvisational politics of social movements in the context of the racial state, theoretically drawing from Charles Lee’s Ingenious Citizenship (2016). Empirically investigating the work of Atlanta community organizers, we emphasize pathways of strategic innovation among environmental justice organizers that improvise against the racial state even while negotiating with it. The article presents evidence of organizers challenging dominant modes of quantifying environmental injustice, appropriating and repurposing the language of environmental restoration, and improvising in the spaces of environmental governance. While state recognition has sought to contain or co-opt movements, we demonstrate the continuing vitality of mobilizations that simultaneously make demands of the state and rupture the governing forms of knowledge and practice that reinforce environmental racisms.

A ubiquitous tire rubber–derived chemical induces acute mortality in coho salmon

In U.S. Pacific Northwest coho salmon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), stormwater exposure annually causes unexplained acute mortality when adult salmon migrate to urban creeks to reproduce. By investigating this phenomenon, we identified a highly toxic quinone transformation product of N-(1,3-dimethylbutyl)-N′-phenyl-p-phenylenediamine (6PPD), a globally ubiquitous tire rubber antioxidant. Retrospective analysis of representative roadway runoff and stormwater-affected creeks of the U.S. West Coast indicated widespread occurrence of 6PPD-quinone (<0.3 to 19 micrograms per liter) at toxic concentrations (median lethal concentration of 0.8 ± 0.16 micrograms per liter). These results reveal unanticipated risks of 6PPD antioxidants to an aquatic species and imply toxicological relevance for dissipated tire rubber residues.

Estimating load of emerging pollutants originating from urban surfaces

&lt;p&gt;Besides agricultural land, settlement areas are among the primary sources for diffuse contamination of surface waters. Both organic and inorganic compounds originate from wash-off of road and roof surfaces, industrial areas as well as illegal wastewater discharge.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In an 18-month measurement campaign, flow triggered composite water samples were gathered using an automatic sampler, partly in small urban creeks draining settlement areas, partly from storm water channels in 7 mid-sized to large towns (30,000 to 1,800,000 inhabitants) in Hungary. Besides the automatic samples, characteristic runoff events were manually grab-sampled, leading to a time series of the contaminants. Both types of samples were analyzed for the total amount of nutrients (N and P), heavy metals (As, Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, Sb, Zn) and 16 PAH forms.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this contribution, the first results of the sample analyses are presented. The concentration of the measured contaminants is significantly higher during runoff events than in dry periods and can be linked to the amount of road and roof areas on the catchment. Flow triggered composite water samples are efficient in estimating total event load amounts, which were calculated for the pilot catchment areas.&lt;/p&gt;

A Mecca for the Cultivated and Wealthy

This chapter investigates how race relations and geography changed after World War One and how Austin leaders used urban planning to both improve and segregate the city after World War One. Numerous urban race riots across the country and increasing numbers of permanent Mexican residents in Austin encouraged Austin leaders to hasten segregation. As planners improved natural areas like urban creeks, they simultaneously incentivized the removal of minorities from those areas. Zoning and restrictive covenants removed industry from white neighborhoods and allowed it in minority areas. By the 1940s, the city was heavily segregated.