Environmental Justice

Race and Class as Predictors

All three studies found that, after accounting for class effects, race remained an independent predictor of the distribution of commercial hazardous waste facilities and other environmental dangers. A range of subsequent case studies presented similar arguments that Native Americans and Latin Americans faced disproportionate impacts from environmental hazards. Additional studies on toxic releases, occupational exposure, waste facility siting, and unequal enforcement also found a race and ethnic effect in the creation of unequal environments.

All these studies contributed an evidence base for social movements protesting environmental racism. Indeed, the phrase environmental justice was, through the mid-1990s, far less commonly used because the [Page 443]focus of so much early work was primarily on the question of race and ethnicity. The 1980s and 1990s were also the time of numerous civil society movements against environmental racism, generally local in focus and generally led by women.

The first such movement to get national attention was the fight, led by local resident Dollie Burwell, against the 1982 landfilling of 32,000 cubic yards of PCB-contaminated soil in predominately African American Warren County, North Carolina. The same year, Hazel Johnson founded People for Community Recovery, which has been fighting ever since to call attention to, and mobilize action against, the high rates of cancer, asthma, skin rash, and kidney and liver problems in her predominately African American neighborhood in Chicago's Southside. Since then, literally hundreds, if not thousands, of local organizations have formed to protest issues of environmental racism, especially in the African American and Latino communities. In addition, several national groups, such as the Environmental Justice Coalition and the National Black Environmental Justice Network, work on these issues.

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