Futures After Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore
- ISBN-10
- 0226833593
- ISBN-13
- 9780226833590
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2024-05-02
- Author
- Chloe Ahmann
Description
A powerful ethnographic portrait of South Baltimore, a place haunted by toxic pasts in its pursuit of better futures. Baltimore is a city where promises of progress have revealed themselves to carry lethal costs. In Futures after Progress, anthropologist Chloe Ahmann explores the rise and fall of industrial lifeways on Baltimore's far southern edge, and the uncertainties that linger in their wake. Focusing on the community of Curtis Bay--one of the most polluted places in the country--she also follows local efforts to realize a good future after industry, and the rifts competing visions opened between neighbors. Examining tensions between White and Black residents, environmental activists and industrial enthusiasts, local elders and younger generations, Ahmann shows how this community has become a battleground where some lives are written off as the cost of doing business. But this is a story of hope, too. Rigorous and moving, Futures after Progress offers insight into the deep roots of our ecological predicament, giving us a glimpse into what lies ahead for a country beset by dreams deferred and a planet on the precipice of change.
