LGM Podcast: Toxic Debt
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I was lucky enough to talk to Josiah Rector of the University of Houston about his amazing new book Toxic Debt: An Environmental Justice History of Detroit, published this year by the University of North Carolina Press. Among other things, it received a tremendously long review in the New York Review of Books, which was awesome not only for him but because NYRB usually hasn’t traditionally reviewed US history books unless they are political tomes about the near past or letting Gordon Wood bloviate on about the latest book on the Constitution for 35 years. In any case, we get a little inside baseball here, which I think a lot of you will like, about the periodiziation of the environmental justice movement, how including labor in these histories really complicates and enriches them, the role of so-called “presentism” in the field, the role neoliberalism by both parties played in creating the environmental injustice problems of Detroit, and most critically, the role of financial capitalism and the real estate market in creating environmental inequalities.
Check it out.
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