Graeme Wynn, Jane Carruthers, and Nancy J. Jacobs, eds. Environment, Power and Justice: Southern African Histories. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2022. 368 pp. $36.95. Paper. ISBN: 9780821424858.

Power and Justice: Southern African Histories, the editors pull together an exceptionally diverse group of scholars to historicize the understanding of environmental justice in Southern Africa.The book reveals the contestation and struggles over time and across space around growing environmental problems in a region where inequalities of class and race intersected and amplified injustices.The edited volume begins with a valuable introduction to the overarching dynamics of these debates in Southern Africa over time, and then is divided into two parts, each with four chapters.In a provocative twist, Part One includes work focused on the more contemporary period of "new histories" in the postapartheid era.Then, Part Two shifts to "decolonial histories" of environmental justice in the region.The aim is to bring to the fore older knowledge systems that predate colonial rule and challenge the colonial categories and dominant narratives of the evolution of environmental justice.To provide some important global context for the histories of environmental justice that follow in the book, the coeditors discuss how the very idea of environmental justice spread around the world and then developed in the region of Southern Africa.The editors highlight how these concepts of environmental justice as articulated by such familiar figures as Rachel Carson and Cesar Chavez in the Global North may have been slower to take off in Africa but then the fight for reparations of the environmental harms intensified from the 1980s.The book emphasizes how the understandings of environmental justice were shaped in Southern Africa both by the legacies of racial segregation and persistent colonial rule as well as precolonial cultures and institutions.In Part One, the authors draw on original fieldwork to uncover struggles for environmental justice in postapartheid South Africa.Drawing on powerful interview data and photos, Mary Galvin argues that residents' experiences of injustices and systemic corruption with water supply and sanitation in three provinces of South Africa make democracy seem empty to the people.Cherryl Walker uncovers environmental injustice in the siting of the world's largest radio telescope in the Northern Cape Karoo that threatens livelihoods by excluding local residents from farming.Matthew Schnurr turns to the changing contours of debates on genetically modified maize in South Africa and exposes the complex winners and losers from the introduction of these new agricultural technologies.