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Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore

Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death. Fighting to Breathe follows a dynamic and creative group of high school students who decided to fight back against the race- and class-based health disparities and inequality in their city. For more than a decade, student organizers stood up to unequal land use practices and the proposed construction of an incinerator and instead initiated new waste management strategies. As a Baltimore resident and activist-scholar, Nicole Fabricant documents how these young organizers came to envision, design, and create a more just and sustainable Baltimore.

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  • “Fabricant centers the gripping stories of youth fighting for the right to breathe. A thread of urgency weaves throughout the book, from environmental injustice and police violence to the global pandemic. This is a book of our moment.”

    - Nicole King coeditor of Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a US City

  • “Fighting to Breathe will convince readers that we each have an obligation to dismantle Baltimore’s toxic environmental ecologies.”

    - Lawrence Brown author of the “Black Butterfly: the Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America”

  • "What a concrete examination of a struggle around environmental justice! Nicole Fabricant has written an excellent look at the development of a struggle around economic justice in Baltimore. She provides the historical foundation for a scholarly yet passionate look at a struggle in a city in transition, with a focus on the actual work of young activists."

    - Bill Fletcher, Jr., coauthor of Solidarity Divided; author of "They're Bankrupting Us" 

Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced

Nicole Fabricant illustrates how landless peasants politicized indigeneity to shape grassroots land politics, reform the state, and secure human and cultural rights for Native peoples. 

Fabricant takes readers into the personal spaces of home and work, on long bus rides, and into meetings and newly built MST settlements to show how, in response to displacement, Indigenous identity is becoming ever more dynamic and adaptive. In addition to advancing this rich definition of indigeneity, she explores the ways in which Morales has found himself at odds with Indigenous activists and, in so doing, shows that Indigenous people have a far more complex relationship to Morales than is generally understood.

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