Environmental Justice

Environmental justice refers to both a protest movement that emerged in response to unequal [Page 231]exposure to waste and a set of principles developed out of that movement. Growing out of a realization of social inequities relating to waste, the environmental justice movement has spurred consciousness throughout the United States and around the world about the racial and economic dimensions of waste production and management.

The term environmental justice has roots in the U.S. civil rights movement in both the rhetoric and organizational strategies used. Of particular note is the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike of 1968, which attracted international attention when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. supported the strike (and was ultimately assassinated while participating in it). In 1982, an African American community in rural Warren County, North Carolina, protested that state's siting of a toxic waste dump. The residents were joined by national civil rights figures, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) Joseph Lowery.

While the protest was unable to stop the site's development, it inspired similar protests as well as research into the relationship between waste and race. Five years later, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice published a study, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Social Economic Characteristics of Communities of Hazardous Waste Sites” that concluded that race was the dominant factor in the siting of waste in the United States.

Scholars and activists across the nation mobilized during this period, with sociologist Robert Bullard (who had worked on these issues in Houston as early as 1979) emerging as a leading advocate and scholar. Bullard advised the Clinton administration as it took office, upon which the Environmental Protection Agency established environmental justice guidelines.