If you’re like me, the words “environmental justice” might bring to mind ideas of furious climate change debates, Greenpeace protests, or environmental activists working to ban straws, plant more trees, and save the bees. Until about a year ago, I had never heard of the idea of environmental justice. If you had asked me to define it, I likely would’ve given you a vague definition about saving the Earth from global warming.
The truth, however, is a little different. Environmental justice is wrapped up in issues of racial inequality, public health, and class differences. It began as an activist movement in the 1980s and quickly became an area of scientific research, starting in the southeastern United States and eventually spreading around the world. Rather than focusing on the environment for its own sake, environmental justice is concerned with people—how we interact with the environment around us and how it, in turn, impacts different groups of people in various ways.
So, what is environmental justice?
Both the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) define environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies.” In 1994, President Clinton signed an executive order requiring every federal agency to create environmental justice strategies to protect minority and low-income populations, and these regulations at the DOE and EPA were the result.
Essentially, this means that the federal government wants to include opinions from a wide variety of people groups when it makes decisions about the environment. Everything from air pollution regulations to the location of hazardous waste facilities is supposedly on the table. More importantly, though, environmental justice aims to ensure that no group of people—whether you divide them by race, income level, or another social distinction—suffers from negative impacts of the government’s environmental choices more than any other group.
This seems relatively simple, but in practice it’s been difficult. The environmental justice movement first made headlines in 1982, when Warren County, North Carolina became the site of a new hazardous waste landfill. The county’s residents had raised concerns to state officials about toxic waste leaking into their water supply, so when the government went ahead with the project, they staged protests in opposition. Ultimately, these protests were unsuccessful, and the hazardous waste was dumped as planned.
The protests in Warren County came at the same time as the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) movement was gaining steam. Suburban communities across the United States organized to keep unwanted projects—from new highways and infrastructure to toxic waste facilities—away from their neighborhoods. The goal was to keep communities healthier and free of pollution, and NIMBY was largely successful in doing so.
But these projects had to go somewhere, and communities that weren’t able to form NIMBY movements were often the unfortunate recipients. These neighborhoods were largely low-income communities populated by racial minorities, and they had very little economic or political power to keep these projects away.
Hence why the protests in Warren County made so many headlines. NIMBY neighborhoods were richer and whiter, and their concerns were listened to. Warren County, like so many other communities, was poorer, blacker, and ignored.
With that, the environmental justice movement was born. Strong research in the field started to appear in political and religious circles, starting with a 1983 report from Congress’s General Accounting Office that found that three in four hazardous waste facilities in the southeast were located in majority African-American communities. Four years later, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published a national report that found that race was the strongest factor in determining the location of a toxic waste facility, with income level being the next most important contributor. Three in five African and Hispanic Americans, and half of all Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans, were living in communities with at least one toxic waste site.
The initial research made one thing clear: communities populated by lower-income and minority groups suffer from environmental health hazards much more frequently than their whiter, richer neighbors.
What now?
Environmental justice issues continue to make headlines today, with the water crisis in Flint, Michigan being a prime example. In 2014, officials switched the city’s water supply to a new source and failed to treat it properly; the water was eventually found to be corrosive, and the city’s residents were exposed to severe lead poisoning. Flint is a majority-black city, and its story played out in a similar way to that of Warren County: residents noticed changes in their water and raised their concerns to the state government, who in turn ignored them and covered up the problem. This lead Dr. Robert Bullard, a leading researcher in environmental justice, to call the Flint crisis “a classic case of environmental racism”; he compared the situation to a recent natural gas leak in California and a coal ash spill in eastern Tennessee, in which both predominantly white communities were easily able to get help from their local governments.
For the most part, however, current environmental justice initiatives are largely community-based, stemming from local organizations and focusing on local problems. The Department of Energy provides a few opportunities for youth and students to get involved with environmental justice. Other leading organizations include:
- WE ACT (New York)
- Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles
- Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (Louisiana and the Gulf Coast)
- Indigenous Environmental Network
The NAACP also provides a list of key environmental justice organizations, and the United Church of Christ continues to provide information on environmental racism.
For Vanderbilt students, organizations like SPEAR and FutureVU’s Sustainability Leaders Program are great ways to get involved with environmental issues here on campus.
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Wonderful article. There is so much to be done. I’m proud of you for taking a strong stand.
Very interesting, how can you get the politicians to read it?