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Bullard 1994; Checker 2004; Taylor 2000; Szasz 1994). Political ecology studies of the
developing world, furthermore, tend to focus on settings of rural nature, issues of land and
resource use, biodiversity and conservation, and/or indigenous and peasant groups (c.f.
Collinson 1996; Faber 1993; Guha and Martinez-Alier 1997; Peet and Watts 1996; Peluso and
Watts 2001). This dissertation addresses the growing but under-theorized phenomenon of
urban grassroots environmentalism in the global South. The anti-lead movement reflects
some aspects of the New Social Movement (NSM) paradigm (cf. Escobar and Alvarez 1992;
Laraña et al 1994; Melucci 1989; Slater 1985), in that it exhibits autonomy from the
traditional political system, focuses on a “new” cause, and promotes an expanded notion of
human rights. It diverges from NSM theory, however, in that its distancing from traditional
politics has enabled new forms of articulation with the political party system, in its
continuities with “old” forms of struggle such as union activism and neighborhood
assemblies, and in the fact that although “cultural politics” plays a role in their activism
(Alvarez et al 1998), many of the demands of the CVSP are anything but “post-materialist.”
The dissertation moves beyond the limited NSM framework and tries to balance the
“newness” of the lead issue with a historicized analysis of the continuity and legacies of
activism (cf. Edelman 1999). It bridges the common divide between identity or discursiveoriented
approaches to environmentalism and materialist or practice-based ones.
My research draws broadly from a political ecology perspective. Political ecology
combines neo-Marxist and poststructuralist approaches to the human-nature nexus, bringing
political economy to bear on environmental processes, with careful attention to issues of
power and inequality, as well as the discursive constructions of nature. In this way it is a
“fluid and ambivalent space that lies among political economy, culture theory, history, and
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