Welcome to our website “Stories of Environmental Danger, Justice, and Transition.”

Narratives about the environment today are often frightening and relatively impersonal stories of rampant pollution, ecosystem collapse, climate change, nuclear meltdown, and extinction. Yet people who experience environmental danger and disaster firsthand tell stories that stand in stark contrast, humanizing what has happened. This story-telling, this humanizing, illuminates just how deeply personal and far-reaching the consequences can be. It should not just remain the province of journalists, academics or other book-writers; for it is not. Those many others who face environmental threats or catastrophes themselves also have tales to tell.

This website culls stories of those whose lives have been lived in confrontation with select industrial and other environmental perils—petrochemical complexes, lead smelters, asbestos mines, and nuclear plants. Some of these stories come in the guise of individual interviews, oral histories. Others rely on a collective interviewing method, the witness seminar. Here, a group with different angles on an historical experience, community or event gathers to share their memories and perspectives.