Environmental Justice Is for You and Me is a Spanish-English-language bilingual children’s book that introduces young readers to the concept of justicia ambiental (environmental justice). This collaborative work includes the intergenerational energies of coauthors Assistant Professor of Communication Catalina de Onís, anthropologist Dr. Hilda Lloréns, her child Khalil, and student artist-activist Mabette Colón Pérez. Puerto Rican publisher Editora Educación Emergente is providing the book for no-cost download through its website. The authors are working with the publisher to produce physical copies of the book for purchase online, and all royalties will be donated to the Comité Diálogo Ambiental (a grassroots group that coordinates an annual environmental justice camp for youth in southeastern Puerto Rico). The related El poder del pueblo (Power of the People) website, which de Onís created to provide a shared resource hub, features a forthcoming documentary about energy justice and distributed rooftop solar in Puerto Rico, various virtual panels and other event recordings, and much more. 

In conversation with these public-facing projects, Energy Islands: Metaphors of Power, Extractivism, and Justice in Puerto Rico is available for preorder and will be published in June 2021 (Discount code: 17M6662). This University of California Press book names and studies the concepts of energy coloniality and energy privilege and examines decolonial energy alternatives in grassroots, horizontal, and coalitional struggles to transform power in all forms. Energy Islands blends historical and ethnographic research to discuss enactments of apoyo mutuo (mutual support) among communities in southeastern Puerto Rico that face the disproportionate cruelties and lethal consequences of racial capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism, while they work to live good lives and imagine and implement an alternative present and future.

More information about these and other related projects is available at the author’s website.