Anna Lora-Wainwright's Resigned Activism offers an intimate portrayal of life in polluted rural China in order to discover why people put up with such toxic living conditions. Is it because they do not know that they are being poisoned? Is it because they do not care? Lora-Wainwright visits three highly polluted villages located in different parts of China to answer this question: Baocun village in Yunnan (industrial pollution), Qiancun in Hunan (mining), and Guiyu in Guangdong (e-waste). Her conclusion is a resounding “no” to both questions: villagers do know they are being poisoned, and they do care. This brings the reader back to the original challenge. Why do they put up with such toxic living conditions? As one might expect, the answer is complex.

After an introductory chapter that helps ground the reader in the literature about environmental health, the second chapter uses data from one of Lora-Wainwright's collaborators, Chen Ajiang, who has worked extensively in China's “cancer villages,” to develop a set of factors that appear to affect the ways that local communities perceive and respond to pollution. The factors include the types of pollution, the cohesion of the community, the local political economy (especially the economic dependence of the locals on the polluting industry), and support from the media and outside expertise. She then keeps these factors in the readers’ minds as she brings us into her polluted case study locations, the focus of the next three chapters.

In each of the villages, Lora-Wainwright begins with a description of her personal experience entering the village, helping readers be aware of her social position as a privileged foreigner even as they are drawn into the experience of living in places that appear to be “hell on earth” (p. 60). The reader gets a good sense of where the pollution comes from in each village and the effects that it is having on the people living there. Lora-Wainwright does an excellent job documenting and explaining how the costs and benefits of pollution are unevenly distributed. Residents are often able to live in homes that are distant from the worst effects of pollution, work at less dangerous jobs, and find ways to gain economically from the polluting industries. In contrast, migrant workers, often the majority of the people living in the villages, live in the most toxic geographic locations, work at the most dangerous jobs, and while making some money off of the industry also have to pay more for food, housing, healthcare, and education than legal residents.

Whether one is on the privileged side of this arrangement or the less privileged side, one is still breathing toxic air, eating poisoned food, and drinking contaminated water. So, how and why do they do it? The true value of Resigned Activism is the poignant way that it helps the reader understand the process of normalization and coping among people who have few good choices. While some academic and media accounts like to hold up the “environmental hero” who somehow beats the odds and gets the polluter to move out of town, Resigned Activism tells the story of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who fail to beat the odds and are stuck living in toxic conditions. It documents how they take pride in their ability to pay for their children's education, recognizing that they, like countless parents before them, are sacrificing their own lives so their children can have a better future. It captures the boredom and lack of opportunity in the farming villages, such that a few years of working in toxic conditions becomes worth the risk. It highlights the institutional barriers to environmental justice, where people with the power to improve the situation have little incentive or capacity to do so. It also highlights the limited power of the outsider, even one with knowledge and connections, to shift local dynamics in any meaningful way.

While the book describes the extreme case of living with pollution in China, many readers will find that they relate. The “resigned activism”—which is really more “coping” than any kind of activism—among these rural Chinese is exactly the same dynamic happening in even the richest countries in the world. If you look at air quality maps of the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, and elsewhere, you will see pockets of pollution. If you visit those places, you will also find locals and migrants coping with their toxic situation the best that they can. Residents in those rich countries roll up their windows on “bad” days or while driving past the “smelly” places. They do not organize. They do not demand better from their governments or their corporations. They just cope. So, while the stories from rural China might seem far away, they are not. Rural China is polluted because of products bought, sold, and thrown away all across the world. And, sadly, across the planet people are putting up with pollution in a variety of ways. Resigned Activism reveals this core truth about our lives today and reminds us all that perhaps we should not put up with it anymore.