Fighting to breathe: Race, toxicity, and the rise of youth activism in Baltimore. By NicoleFabricant, Oakland: University of California Press. 2022. 266 pages. $40.00 (paperback). ISBN: 9780520379329

Fighting to breathe: Race, toxicity, and the rise of youth activism in Baltimore is an ethnographic account of the political campaign waged by a group of Baltimore high schoolers against local industrial polluters and the politicians supporting them. From 2011 to 2022, students of Free Your Voice (a student activist group) organized to block a new waste-to-energy incinerator from being built, which would have been the 16th industrial polluter located in South Baltimore alone. They protested against the 10-year contract renewal of an existing incinerator. When that failed, they rallied to put the incinerator out of business using practical zero-waste strategies—an ongoing project. The students’ original concern lay with historical and state-sponsored neglect of South Baltimore, which made it an attractive site for large-scale waste management. Over time, their efforts expanded to advocate for conditions critical to good health, such as clean air and water, affordable housing, and access to recreational green space. However, evidence of adverse health impacts from living in close proximity to waste plants was not enough to sway corporations and politicians. Here, the students ran up against a fundamental tension of public health as a discipline: the imperative to increase population wellness by targeting structural determinants of poor health while also maintaining a productive labour force. Productive economies require healthy workers, which is why governments heavily invest in population wellness programs. However, this can lead to governments coopting the language of public health to advance policies dually linked to health and prosperity. Such policies may purport to advance economic growth and support industries while also investing in collective and individual wellness, but often these policies end up abdicating responsibility for systemic factors related to poor health (such as pollution), especially amongst racialized populations (for example, see the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, or mercury poisoning in Grassy Narrows, Ontario). “Evidence-based practice” is a popular term in public discourse that suggests the correct course of action in contentious situations can be achieved by following the facts. This framework neglects to consider the politics of knowledge production, dissemination, and mobilization. For example, the students of the Free Your Voice program solicited scientific assessments of the impact of living with lead and mercury exposure, but these facts failed to convince big waste entities to relocate their plants. Economic arguments that poor health cost their community $55 million in damages were similarly ignored. To local politicians, the profits gleaned from turning trash into electricity (which powered as many as 40,000 homes) took precedence over obscurely timed health consequences. The seemingly negligible economic contributions of this under-resourced community transformed these Baltimore residents into a surplus population whose health was expendable. Residents serve the larger economy by being forced to contend with the hazardous effects of waste management, repercussions other populations can escape. Their consequent premature morbidity and mortality are not flaws of the system, as much as they are anticipated outcomes. Marxist economic geographer David Harvey notes that capitalism is a system perpetually in crisis, one that renews itself constantly without reconciling these tendencies. As a result, crises are not resolved but deferred. Through this lens, efforts to make waste management greener through reducing carbon emissions—which the Baltimore incinerator plans to do—while useful in the short term, ultimately overlook how capital accumulation is the linchpin of excess waste. Without reinventing waste production, the crisis of waste management continues to loom. This discussion matters when environmental pollution disasters abound, without clear connections to their instigators in a cycle of seeming inevitability and political apathy. This book's strength lies in its thick descriptions of places and people. It showcases the students’ political critiques through paragraphs lifted in their entirety from interviews. Readers gain insight into how everyday experiences with disenfranchisement bring these youth to a revolutionary consciousness. As an engaging account of youth activism in public health and environmental justice, Fighting to breathe brings academic discourse into conversation with grassroots community movements. Nicole Fabricant has written a book that inspires us to build long-lasting relationships between communities and the researchers who support them.

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