Local Environmental Struggles: Citizen Activism in the Treadmill of Production

Frontmatter......Page 1
Contents......Page 7
Preface......Page 11
Transnational versus Global and Local Perspectives......Page 17
The Logic of Modern Industrial Production: The Treadmill of Production as the Terrain of Environmental Conflicts......Page 21
From the National to the Transnational Terrain of the Treadmill of Production......Page 24
Stakeholders in the Transnational Treadmill......Page 29
Contesting Locally in the Transnational Terrain: A National Environmental Organization and Wetland Watchers as Exemplars......Page 34
Local Movements and Extralocal Production: The Machinery of the National Treadmill......Page 42
Local Movements and Extralocal Production: Re-Engineering the Transnational Treadmill......Page 46
Environmental Localism versus Political-Economic Transnationalism......Page 49
Conclusion: The Rest of the Book......Page 51
Origins of the Local Wetland Protection Project......Page 58
The Road to Conflict: Transportation and Housing versus Wetland Protection in Suburb, USA......Page 59
Unraveling Resource Planning Conflicts in Suburb, USA......Page 70
The Hierarchy of Dialectical Conflicts over the Use of Wetlands......Page 74
Resource Allocation and Social Inclusion Practices: Regulating Access by Openly Managed Scarcity......Page 78
The Terrain of Natural Resource Conflicts: Diversity and Continuity in Career Trajectories......Page 84
Conclusion: The Political Economy of "Think Globally, Act Locally"......Page 95
3 - Slights of Hand: How Public Participation in Remediation of Water Pollution Fails to Trickle Down......Page 98
The Devolution of Nation-State Interests in Transnational Water Quality......Page 99
The State of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River Basins......Page 100
Local Case Studies: Governments, Citizen-Workers, and Environmental Conflict......Page 101
Conclusion: Political Realism: Is There a Trickle-Down of Public Participation from the Binational Level?......Page 132
4 - Recycling: Organizing Local Grass Roots around a National Cash-Roots Policy......Page 143
Contextualizing Recycling......Page 144
An Overview: What Happened?......Page 151
What Might Have Been? Reuse versus Remanufacturing......Page 155
From Past Practices to Current Policies: The Rise of Recycling in Chicago......Page 160
Local and Multinational Actors: Utopias versus Dystopias......Page 162
The Institutionalization of a Bad Policy: The Ambivalent State and the Misled Movement......Page 166
Competing Models in Recycling Policy: Reform and Resistance......Page 168
Elaborating a Social Concept of Ecological Scarcity......Page 170
Capital Flows and Production Transformations: The Transnational Dimension......Page 174
Conclusion: Channeling Citizen-Worker Resentments......Page 177
Political and Economic Resistance to Local Environmentalism across the Three Empirical Studies......Page 180
Reflecting on the Empirical Studies......Page 188
Incorporating Localism within the Transnational Political Economy......Page 192
Mobilization to Contest Transnational Capital Flows: The Contemporary Challenge......Page 197
Key Dimensions of Sustaining Resistance: Moving from Local to Extralocal Movements......Page 202
Canaries in the Mine......Page 212
Resistance from Outside Treadmill Organizations: Citizen-Workers' Networks as "Canaries in the Mine"......Page 216
Resistance from within the Treadmill: Vulnerabilities of Treadmill Organizations and Actors......Page 219
In Conclusion......Page 229
References......Page 233
Author Index......Page 248
Subject Index......Page 251