Environmental Justice

History

Concerns about environmental justice, and the cost-benefit analyses of environmental risk that accompany them, have become a central component of decisions about how businesses and industries are regulated. All industrial and agricultural production impacts communities and citizens up and down the commodity chain. To grow tomatoes, for instance, raises environmental justice concerns for communities that drink water from sources tainted with agricultural runoff from fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides, for farm workers who are exposed to such toxic chemicals, and for consumers whose health may be adversely affected by eating tomatoes with high toxic chemical content. Yet these same populations also potentially benefit from the jobs, from economic growth, and from the food produced by the tomato industry. These relationships only increase in complexity in a world in which commodity chains flow across national boundaries and have a global environmental impact. Public policy, articulated in [Page 219]response to organizing or mobilization efforts on the part of any of the involved constituencies (farmers, agribusiness, farm workers, and consumers) can in turn serve to incentivize or discourage certain types of investment and production. Through fines and taxes, or pollution control caps and remediation efforts, public policy can, and has, significantly impacted environmental justice concerns of various communities and constituencies. Not surprisingly, however, environmental justice has not exactly been blind in the United States: according to studies, poor and minority communities are far more likely to reside in contaminated communities, and are far less likely (up to 10 times less) to be recipients of public and private remediation efforts.

The United States first began instituting rights to a healthy environment in 1970 with the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), followed by a series of legislations such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act. As people across the country developed a growing awareness of the dangers of pollution, contamination, and degradation, they began to demand effective environmental assessment and regulation. On a local level, the social justice and environmental concerns were often seen as connected. In Michigan in 1976, for example, members of environmental groups and workers unions gathered with local residents, farmers, and academics for a conference titled “Working for Economic and Environmental Justice and Jobs.” At the national scale, however, environmental legislation did not engage questions of justice. Amid the wealth of research on the environment and standards of conduct for individuals and businesses being generated during the 1970s, one crucial aspect remained overlooked: the inequitable distribution of the burdens of pollution and of access to environmental goods along with the political process that governs them.

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