January 28, 2025
Meghan O’Toole
Brian McCammack awarded NEH fellowship for environmental justice project
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies and Chair of Environmental Studies Brian McCammack was recently awarded a $60,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for his book project, Black, Brown, and Green: The Origins of Environmental Justice in the 1970s.
The fellowship will enable McCammack to take time to focus on writing the book, which counters the conventional historical narrative of the origins of the environmental justice movement. McCammack’s research focuses on the historically marginalized figures who drove the movement: people of color who advocated for the safety and protection of their communities and the environment.
“Environmental justice histories tend to begin in the 1980s, and most of the histories of the mainstream environmental movement tend to leave out people of color or ignore their multiple responses to the mainstream movement in late ’60s and early ’70s,” McCammack said.
McCammack’s research began in 2018 after the publication of his first book, Landscapes of Hope: Nature and the Great Migration in Chicago. The new book, McCammack said, is “a collective biography of environmentalists of color who have been lost to history.”
McCammack hopes that the book can help white allies identify how they have failed in the past in order to provide better support to peers of color in the future in order to more effectively advance the twin goals of environmental justice: racial equity and environmental health.
“The stories that I am telling in the book are more or less about people of color in environmental groups who didn’t have allies and were hung out to dry, or they had allies who didn’t go to bat for them when they needed it,” McCammack explained. “The stories I see in the archives are like historical lessons that help explain how and why the environmental movement continues to struggle with racial diversity.”
McCammack will include the stories of environmental activists and organizers of color whose names are not part of the public’s general knowledge of key environmental figures. This will contribute to acknowledging the diverse history of the environmental justice movement that often goes unacknowledged.
The NEH awarded a total of $22.6 million for 219 humanities projects nationwide. McCammack will begin leave in 2026 in order to devote more time to the project.