From the Ground Up

Luke W. Cole (Author) Luke W. Cole was Director of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation's Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment.Sheila R. Foster (Author) Sheila Foster is Associate Professor at Rutgers University School of Law, Camden.

"From the Ground Up presents the history of the environmental justice movement in the best possible way: through the retelling of the individual stories of local communities that have transformed the nation's environmental laws. Both descriptive and reflective, the book is wonderfully evocative of the passions that have maintained the environmental justice movement and that underlie its enormous promise for social change." - Richard Lazarus,Georgetown University Law School "A fresh and lively treatise on the struggles of ordinary people who are making extraordinary contributions to the environmental and economic justice movement." - Robert D. Bullard,author of Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality "A thought-provoking analysis of how grassroots activism from people of color communities is transforming environmental politics. Such activism has brought an important infusion of energy and vision to the pursuit of environmental democracy." - Charles Lee,principal author of Toxic Waste and Race in the United States "Provides valuable and comprehensive analyses of the driving forces behind environmental injustices. Anyone wanting to know why an environmental justice movement has emerged in this country and what future direction it may take should read this book." - Paul Mohai,author of Black Environmentalism and Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence "They assess the effectiveness of the organizing tactics employed, casting particular scrutiny on the courts as agents of social change...The authors have presented concrete examples, all the while making clear that there are no road maps for successful organizing." (New York Law Journal)