ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses scholarship at the intersection of industrial contamination, cities, and environmental health and justice. It describes the lead of green criminologists who argue for interdisciplinary and political economic perspectives on green violence and crime that highlight the structuring mechanisms of “green injustice” while moving beyond a narrow focus on ecological harms recognized and governed by law, policy, and state regulations. The chapter focuses on both graphic “violent environments” and the often hidden-from-view world of “toxic suffering” generated by the industrial contamination of air, water, and land in cities across the world. It reviews the efforts of citizens, grassroots groups, scientists, and their allies in contesting green violence by forging alternative knowledge regimes and meaningful paths toward environmental justice (EJ). Cities are privileged sites from which to grasp the environmental injustices and crimes of the under-regulated and free market-oriented neoliberal order, as well as to examine globally expanding movements for EJ.
