BOOK REVIEW: Can We Restore the Planet and Repair our Social Fabric?
Written by Arif Ullah
Review of Climate Chaos: Killing People, Places, and the Planet by John Hans Gilderbloom
By A couple of months ago, I visited Reserve, Louisiana as part of my job -- a community in St. John the Baptist Parish. The parish (essentially the equivalent of a “county” in most other parts of the US) sits along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. It’s dotted with farms (especially sugarcane fields), squat single-family homes, lakes, and wetlands. Big blue skies above. But don’t mistake this scene as picturesque. Something sinister also fills the landscape: more than 200 petrochemical plants and oil refineries, many the size of college campuses, making the very air that people breathe poisonous. Residents are dying of cancer at alarming rates, earning the region the tragic moniker of “Cancer Alley.”
I was there with colleagues on a “toxic tour” led by Robert Taylor, who founded the group in 2016, and his daughter Tish, a powerful father-daughter duo who lead Concerned Citizens of St. John, a community group advocating for better health outcomes and environmental protection. As they spoke with us, they rattled off the names of people in just their one family who had died of, or are afflicted with, cancer. It was disturbing. Equally upsetting was how the petrochemical companies had bought off local elected officials and even some community leaders. Though unique in its distinction of having the highest rate of environmental cancer of any census tract in the country, the story of communities being devastated by pollution connected with the fossil fuel economy goes far beyond the St. John Parish region, playing out in every corner of the US. Not surprisingly, most of these places are low-income, Black, Brown, and immigrant.
My work at A2 (Anthropocene Alliance), a national environmental organization, has given me a bird’s-eye perspective on this epidemic, which is both a climate and public health crisis. With over 430 frontline member groups nationwide, the organization has insight into the most common environmental challenges these communities face. What we know is that pollution – air, soil, and water – is at the top of the list, thanks to petrochemical and extractive industries. While they reap obscene profits, communities and our planet pay the price. And the climate catastrophe they are squarely responsible for is unleashing another set of existential challenges, especially for those already burdened by environmental and health injustices.
It's against this backdrop – Cancer Alley, corporate impunity, frontline communities fighting for survival – that I read Climate Chaos: Killing People, Places, and the Planet. The editor, Dr. John Hans Gilderbloom, is a sociologist and urban planner with a long list of accomplishments and accolades. He is director of the Center for Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods at Neighborhood Associates in Washington, D.C. And he was a professor in the Department of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of Louisville for 37 years. I lift up this particular aspect of his bio as Louisville figures prominently in his writings. Much of the book is focused on environmental pollution and its devastating effects on communities across the country and globally. It consists of 19 chapters, all of which Gilderbloom is either a lead or co-author, except for one by Stephen A. Roosa.
Ultimately, Climate Chaos is a compilation of journal articles that Gilderbloom and his co-authors have published over the years in academic journals. As such, there is considerable repetition across the chapters. Had Gilderbloom included articles from other scholars, a wider range of place-based examples could have been provided, making the book more engaging. And, though the cover of the book makes it appear to be for the lay person, most of it reads like it is geared towards social scientists, as the chapters delve into explanations of research methodology such as case selection, dependent and control variables, regression equations, etc. At the same time, the book sometimes feels rudimentary, stating obvious points such as the need to reduce emissions, the role of carbon in driving climate change, and the fact that renewable energy includes solar and wind. There are some notable exceptions to the academic format, including Roosa's chapter and those on Portland, Amsterdam, and historic preservation, though some sections of these chapters are not related to the climate crisis or solutions (e.g., decriminalization of sex trade and drug usage in Amsterdam), however interesting they may be.
Setting aside these critiques, Gilderbloom's passion for the subject is evident from the opening pages. He launches into the book in streetfighter mode, bare knuckles, directing his fists at the culprits and perpetrators of the climate crisis: from fossil fuel companies, electric utilities, and petrochemical conglomerates to heavy industry, industrial agriculture, plastics manufacturers, and the financial institutions that bankroll them. “We call it corporate terrorism waged on people and scientists,” he writes. “Dishonest polluters and government are the ‘merchants of doubt’...” (8) That about sums up my sentiments on the matter too. These villains have been perpetrating a decades-long, well-funded campaign to delegitimize and undermine rigorous science that proves the existence and growing threat of a warming planet, peddling outright lies to the general public. Meanwhile, they’ve known all along that the science was real, that their activities were causing climate change, destroying lives, and ravaging the environment.
“We are facing a catastrophic crisis that will destroy the Earth as we know it in eight years, according to the United Nations.” Gilderbloom writes, ringing the alarm loud and clear. “Climate chaos, if it goes unchecked, will result in more wars and catastrophic environmental damage.” (443). The book is full of similarly anxiety-inducing and upsetting statistics about the impacts of the crisis on people’s lives – for example, living in an area with high levels of air pollution can reduce life expectancy by up to 13 years (196) and decrease cognitive function in children (247), resulting in poorer academic performance and diminished life opportunities. Kentucky, especially Louisville, is used throughout much of the book to illustrate the many problems causing and caused by climate change. This is not surprising given Gilderbloom’s history there. He and his collaborators offer the city as a representation and microcosm of both the larger pollution epidemic and as an example of egregious environmental injustice. As they put it, the city, particularly West Louisville, is a “toxic wasteland,” a consequence of 44 chemical companies, several liquor distilleries, and a coal-fired power plant. The authors expound on the impacts of pollution on people’s lives, in Kentucky and beyond, listing harrowing and unnerving facts, including on the correlation between pollution and infant mortality, cardiac and respiratory health, cancer, pulmonary diseases, and more.
Places like West Louisville have been turned into sacrifice zones, and the people living there are considered dispensable. I say “turned into” very intentionally, as parts of West Louisville were “redlined” in the 1930s, effectively sealing its fate for decades to come. Redlining, administered by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (established in 1933), was a discriminatory practice where banks, insurers, and government agencies systematically denied services or investments to people based on the racial or ethnic makeup of their neighborhoods. Across the country, the areas that were redlined were Black, Brown, and immigrant. Juxtaposing maps of redlined and highly contaminated areas immediately reveals a disturbing, though not surprising pattern: present day sacrifice zones are almost invariably communities that were redlined. Gilderbloom and his colleagues mention redlining only in passing, perhaps because it has been well documented elsewhere. Given its significance for environmental injustice, it warrants greater attention. Though the authors acknowledge the correlation between systemic racism and pollution in Black neighborhoods, including through a powerful quote by Dr. Robert Bullard (below), this brief treatment does not adequately address how structural and institutional racism built these disparities.
“The communities where police are shooting Blacks are the same communities with high asthma rates, greater incidences of diabetes and strokes, more poverty, and more deaths from COVID-19. Forty years ago, people were saying ‘we can’t breathe, we are choking, you are killing us.’ We are seeing across the board people are talking about dismantling this violent system of racism, not just when a police officer kneels and chokes a person to death. It’s violence when you have all this pollution pumped into a neighborhood and people are choking.” (171-172)
Cumulative impacts are another surprising omission, given the book's focus on pollution and the fact that overlapping, long-term environmental hazards compound health risks for exposed communities.
Despite these gaps, the authors go beyond merely diagnosing the devastating consequences of the climate crisis. They devote a significant portion of the book to exploring possible solutions: regulation of pollution and tougher enforcement, clean-up of brownfield sites, green schools and housing developments, transition to renewable energy, and smarter, more sustainable cities with mixed use neighborhoods (common in the “developing” world), increased walkability and bike access, historic preservation, better and more accessible public transportation, multi-unit residential developments, and community-based planning. The authors also offer hope that the crisis can be managed. They contend that cities in particular are fertile ground for innovation and policies to combat, if not reverse, the devastating impacts of climate change on everyday residents, noting that the majority of the world’s population now lives in cities and that trend will only grow in the coming decades.
I particularly enjoyed chapters 16, 17, and 18 on Portland, Amsterdam, and historic preservation. These chapters highlight the significance of smart urban planning, forward-thinking public policies, strong leadership, and an entrepreneurial spirit in creating sustainable cities. Oddly, the discussion of innovative urbanism is abruptly interrupted by a critique of Marxism, an aside that feels both random and unnecessary. Gilderbloom, the lead author on both chapters, even titles a section in chapter 16, "Why do Marxists hate green cities like Portland and Amsterdam?" (380) His premise is both perplexing and flawed: Marx and Engels were deeply concerned about the environmental destruction and ecological imbalance wrought by industrial capitalism. Gilderbloom appears to conflate Marxist critiques of gentrification with opposition to environmental urbanism itself, a false equivalence that seems rooted in his unwillingness to entertain anti-gentrification concerns, which he associates with Marxist ideology. He goes so far as to claim that "anti-gentrification is the new racism," arguing it reflects "a belief that Blacks are not deserving of first-class neighborhoods." (433) This framing is deeply problematic: it oversimplifies legitimate concerns about displacement and urban inequality while presuming to speak for Black communities, positioning Gilderbloom as the arbiter of what counts as racism rather than centering the voices of those directly affected. While all strategies to combat climate change in cities deserve scrutiny, Gilderbloom’s ideological digression ultimately distracts from the otherwise practical lessons these chapters offer on sustainable urban planning.
Parts of the book also feel outdated, particularly given its release at the end of 2025. The authors reference Trump’s first term – policies and rollbacks enacted then and their impacts. However harmful his first administration, just the first 11 months of his second term have been leagues worse. We are witnessing seismic shifts in environmental and climate policies that are setting us back many years and will require many more just to return to baseline. The book offers no substantive discussion of these new policies or their role in accelerating climate chaos. Recommendations such as the one in chapter 3, calling for EPA professional pollution-monitoring stations in all cities, feel oddly out of step with today’s reality, as do projections that the cost of renewables will decline amid looming tariffs. That there is no mention of AI, particularly AI data centers, adds to the feeling that the book is already partially outdated. These centers, some hundreds of acres in size, are rapidly expanding across the country, usurping local electricity and water supplies, driving up utility bills, and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. A McKinsey report projects that data center electricity use will account for 11.7% of total consumption by 2030, triple its current level.
We are in uncharted territory for the climate crisis and environmental justice. In this reality, Gilderbloom and his colleagues’ focus on cities takes on a new significance; for at least the next few years, it is at the local level where any meaningful progress is possible. But their recommendations that rely on federal regulation and enforcement now confront a starkly different landscape, one where agencies like the EPA have been hollowed out and essential protections like the Clean Air Act are under assault.
Arif Ullah is the executive director of the Anthropocene Alliance.
The book is available from Bloomsbury at www.bloomsbury.com.