Climate Justice and Public Health
Climate Justice and Public Health
Realities, Responses, and Reimaginings for a Better Future
When climate disasters like hurricanes, heatwaves, and tsunamis strike, they reveal the inequities of our social, political, and economic structures. They also lay bare the negative impacts of these structures on the health and safety of all people, and particularly socioeconomically vulnerable groups. With original contributions from scholars from a wide range of diverse fields—including environmental studies, public health, legal studies, urban planning, literary studies, and nursing—Climate Justice and Public Health examines this nexus of climate change, which has become impossible to ignore in the twenty-first century.
Expanding the climate and health equity discussions to populations all over the globe, the contributors in this volume address an impressive and broad range of topics that include Indigenous health and cultural practices, mental and emotional health, senior health, and impacts on African American communities. Collectively, they present radical new ways of confronting these issues and propose holistic solutions.
‘Climate Justice and Public Health makes a significant contribution to current scholarship and is particularly useful because it addresses not only the physical health impacts that are often written about but also the mental and emotional impacts.’—Jade S. Sasser, author of On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women’s Rights in the Era of Climate Change
‘When I read something and it makes me say, ‘I never thought of it that way,’ I know what I read had an impact. Climate Justice and Public Health adds to climate change literature by advancing arguments about why we all need to pay attention to populations that are already targets of structural activities that create and exacerbate health disparities.’—Michele Morrone, author of Ailing in Place: Environmental Inequities and Health Disparities in Appalachia
RAJINI SRIKANTH is dean of faculty and professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
LINDA THOMPSON is president of Westfield State University.
