Plastic Pollution as an Environmental and Climate Justice Crisis

Plastic Pollution as an Environmental and Climate Justice Issue

This talk draws on Pezzullo’s latest book, Beyond Straw Men. Inspired by on- and offline organizing in the Global South and the Global South of the North, the book engages public controversies and policies through analysis of hashtag activism, campaign materials, and her own podcast interviews with headline-making advocates in Bangladesh, Kenya, the United States, and Vietnam. Pezzullo’s talk will illustrate how plastics have become an articulator of an environmental justice crisis and an entry point into the contested environmental politics of today, focusing on how plastic waste has proliferated through greenwashing by what she calls the plastics-industrial complex. We will discuss pollution colonialism, waste imperialism, and related climate injustices. In conclusion, she will discuss campus negotiations about single-use plastics in our campus vending machines, as well as four trends globally of anti-plastic pollution advocacy that have started to turn the tide.

Prof. Phaedra C. Pezzullo is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication with affiliations in Environmental Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Media Studies. She is founding co-editor (with Salma Monani) of an award-winning University of California Press book series, Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture, and Editor of the journal Environmental Communication. She is founding Co-Director of C3BC (the Center for Creative Climate Communication & Behavior Change) and the Just Transition Collaborative. Her latest book (University of California Press, 2023) is based, in part, on her podcast, Communicating Care. Her first monograph, Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution and Environmental Justice (University of Alabama Press, 2007), won four awards; she also has coedited Green Communication and China (MSU Press, 2020), coedited Environmental Justice and Environmentalism (MIT Press, 2007) and edited Cultural Studies and the Environment, Revisited (Routledge, 2010).

• Stairs option: From outside the west entrance to the ECCR (Engineering Center) building, enter the building through the doors to your right (with “ECCR” in large letters on the glass to the right of the door). Then go down the stairs that are in front of you. At the bottom of the stairs, the classroom is immediately to your left. 
• Elevator option: From outside the west entrance to the ECCR (Engineering Center) building, enter the building through the doors in front of you (with “ENGINEERING CENTER WEST ENTRANCE MAIN LOBBY” to the right of the doors). The elevators will be just to your left; I recommend you ask the Information desk staff for detailed directions on how to reach 1B40 from there.