47. Ingrid Waldron on systemic environmental racism in Canada

Free City Radio

Listen to the 47th edition of Free City Radio. Professor, author and activist Ingrid Waldron speaks on systemic environmental racism in Canada, looking at the ways that specific zoning around industrial zones, land access and frameworks of territorial rights speak to structural environmental racism in Canada that is rooted in systems of white supremacy that are inherent to the Canadian colonial state. Ingrid underlines the critical importance of addressing and naming environmental racism as central to any movements for climate justice. Ingrid is the author of "There's Something In The Water" out via Fernwood publishing, which was also turned into a documentary that is on Netflix, and was produced in collaboration with Elliot Page, the book is described this way : In “There’s Something In The Water”, Ingrid R. G. Waldron examines the legacy of environmental racism and its health impacts in Indigenous and Black communities in Canada, using Nova Scotia as a case study, and the grassroots resistance activities by Indigenous and Black communities against the pollution and poisoning of their communities. Using settler colonialism as the overarching theory, Waldron unpacks how environmental racism operates as a mechanism of erasure enabled by the intersecting dynamics of white supremacy, power, state-sanctioned racial violence, neoliberalism and racial capitalism in white settler societies. By and large, the environmental justice narrative in Nova Scotia fails to make race explicit, obscuring it within discussions on class, and this type of strategic inadvertence mutes the specificity of Mi’kmaq and African Nova Scotian experiences with racism and environmental hazards in Nova Scotia. By redefining the parameters of critique around the environmental justice narrative and movement in Nova Scotia and Canada, Waldron opens a space for a more critical dialogue on how environmental racism manifests itself within this intersectional context. https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/there8217s-something-in-the-water Free City Radio is hosted and produced by Stefan @spirodon Christoff