Environmental Justice

Roots of the Movement

Activists credit the launching of this social movement to a poor, rural, mostly black community in Warren County, North Carolina, which organized against state designation of approximately 141 acres of their land as a landfill for transformer oil laced with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). After defeating Warren County residents in court, the state began trucking the contaminated soil into the county in 1982. Five hundred twentythree residents were arrested when they attempted to stop the trucks through nonviolent civil disobedience. Although they failed to stop the landfill, Warren County residents articulated their experiences as environmental racism, inspired research investigating the relationship between race, poverty, and toxic waste, and also initiated the social movement for environmental justice.

In 1987, after the Warren County protests, the United Church of Christ commissioned a study that concluded race was the most significant variable associated with the location of waste facilities. Then in 1991, the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit convened in Washington, D.C. Delegates issued seventeen principles of environmental justice to be applied nationally, calling for just public policy, clean cities, ethical uses of land and resources, universal protection from nuclear testing and the production and disposal of toxic wastes, economic self-determination for all people, the right of all workers to a safe and healthy workplace, and full compensation and reparations for victims of environmental injustice.

Movement activists argue that poor people disproportionately bear the costs of war and progress. Their communities are most likely to be the sites of dangerous experiments, toxic wastes, and unwanted facilities such as incinerators and power plants. Often residents are forced to accept contamination of their neighborhoods as the price for the creation of jobs. People who live in those communities thus experience threats to their resources, their livelihood, and their health. Activists have redefined the environment to include both natural and social resources, and they argue for equal access to jobs, housing, safety, sovereignty, schools, land, water, and air.

Scope of the Movement

Environmental justice activism is largely locally based, but activists work on environmental justice projects all around the world. They have protested corporations that mine for copper in Peru, where sheep die in the Mantaro Valley because of smoke and waste from the La Oroya smelter. In Brazil, they protested gold mining in the traditional lands of the Yanomami, where mining polluted the Orinoco River. Noisy machinery frightened away game, and Indians died in epidemics of flu and malaria. Gold and copper mining in the Star Mountains of Papua New Guinea devoured fertile croplands and pushed sediment and wastes into the Fly River system. Even [Page 459]after mining ceased, contamination continues as heavy rains leach metals from the tailings pile, and the Yonggom people downstream face health risks from exposure to arsenic, cyanide, copper, lead, zinc, and cadmium.

...