Using historical, ethnographic, and archival research, this chapter examines the intersection of environmental policies and community well-being through the lens of community psychology, particularly its attention to the entwinement of socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Focusing on the Gowanus community in Brooklyn, New York, which is midway through a federally mandated environmental cleanup as a Superfund site, we describe how advancing the collective well-being at the scale of the neighborhood can also entail challenging entrenched power structures that have supported systemic inequalities and working within a diverse group. The collective efforts of the Gowanus Canal Community Advisory Group illustrate how chronic toxic environmental degradation can be addressed within an extended collaborative process. We conclude that while endeavoring to improve the surrounding physical environment, the Group’s efforts have also strengthened collaborative engagement across groups to foster community well-being and social justice.

This chapter investigates the multiple ways that coal and oil generate story, revealing humanity’s abiding intimacy with unearthed matter throughout history. Spotlighting the influential term “petrofiction” coined by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (from Latin petra, meaning “rock”), it introduces authors, critics, and activists whose works interrogate fossil fuels’ lively and lethal geological agency. Recent tales of coal and oil often portray conjunctions between embodiment and environment that are unhealthy, chronic, and entrenched; furthermore, these detriments are predominantly borne by the poor, Indigenous peoples, and communities of color. Both Ida Stewart’s poem naming the many degradations caused by mountaintop removal mining (Gloss)and Ann Pancake’s novel narrating the failed containment of coal slurry impoundment dams (Strange as This Weather Has Been) confront the toxic enmeshment of human beings in the Appalachian coalfields. Petrocritical approaches magnify harms of coal and oil and point out their pivotal role in ongoing climate crises. Petrocriticism also suggests that paying attention to human and nonhuman voices inflected by coal and oil supplies the energy needed for ecological remediation, and for more just, and more inhabitable, futures.