The Racial Environmental State: Contested Spaces of Resistance

Uncovers how US environmental policy enforces racial oppression—and offers openings for communities to fight back

This book delivers a bold rethinking of how race, environment, and state power are entangled. At its center is the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, the “action-forcing” mechanism of the US National Environmental Policy Act. Long upheld as a technocratic tool of objectivity, the EIA emerges here as a contested site where the state remakes environments and racial orders while communities leverage it for resistance.

Keith K. Miyake introduces the framework of the racial environmental state, showing how laws and policies that claim to safeguard the environment are also deeply embedded in racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and US empire. Yet within these contradictions lie openings for decolonial and abolitionist struggle. Examining the EIA as both a weapon of state power and a foothold for grassroots intervention, Miyake reveals surprising ways people have reshaped political and legal terrains.

Four sharply drawn case studies anchor the narrative: the racial politics of public housing in 1970s New York, a Central California fight linking prison abolition to endangered species, an Indigenous reclamation struggle against militarism in Hawaiʻi, and contemporary battles over the construction of US-Mexico border walls. Across these conflicts, Miyake shows how ordinary people transform environmental policy into a lever for justice, forging abolition geographies in the shadow of state violence.

With its interdisciplinary reach—across environmental politics, critical race theory, and geography—The Racial Environmental State opens new directions for understanding collective resistance, place-making, and liberation in building toward more abundant futures.

Keith K. Miyake is assistant professor of ethnic studies at University of California, Riverside.