Environmental Justice

During recent years, a large body of research has emerged suggesting that poor people and people of color suffer a disproportionate burden with exposure to environmental hazards and in particular accompanying the siting of waste management facilities. The term environmental justice itself is contested. Many proponents, be they community-based activists or public agencies (e.g., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), define it as a situation where no people, regardless of race, national origin, or income, are forced to shoulder an unequal burden and all are treated fairly with regard to the enforcement of environmental regulations.

In response to community demands for greater participation in the decision-making process, public agencies recently have begun to accept environmental justice as also entailing meaningful involvement by potentially affected communities in siting decisions affecting their health. As a result, environmental equity, consisting of both distributional equity and procedural equity, is commonly accepted as necessary to attain environmental justice. However, combining insight from the pollution prevention movement, and its focus on upfront toxic use reduction in place of pollution management, with organized labor's quest for greater democracy in the workplace, a number of scholars and community activists challenge this conventional understanding of environmental justice. For them, reliance on liberal notions of procedural and distributional equity, typically implemented through negotiation, mitigation, and fair share allocation among targeted communities, merely perpetuates the current production system that is, by its very structure, discriminatory and nonsustainable. These environmental justice advocates reject environmental equity as sufficient to attain environmental justice. In its place, they propose production justice, where the very structure of the production system itself is changed through democratic control over the decision to pollute and, by extension, over the decision to produce. Insofar as this requires class unity across political and national borders, the quest for progressive environmental justice has been inspired, but also severely hampered, by the globalization of capital.

Although the struggle against environmental contamination and dislocation by external forces began, at least in North America, with the arrival of Europeans and the subsequent war on native people and continued through slavery, resource extraction, and industrialization where both race and class were determining factors in risk exposure and community resistance, most observers date the modern environmental justice movement (EJM) back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. The class- and race-based components of the EJM can be traced, respectively, to local resistance at the predominantly white working-class community of Love Canal—America's most famous Superfund site—and, a few years later, to the arrests of more than 500 people for protesting the siting of a storage facility for PCB-contaminated soil in a poor African American community in Warren County, North Carolina. The latter protest was particularly important for development of the EJM because it led to the first nationwide survey of the demographic determinants of hazardous waste facility siting. Sponsored by the United Church of Christ (UCC), the study suggested that race, rather than income, was the single most significant determinant when accounting for disproportionate siting and, furthermore, that this was not mere coincidence but rather the result of what the report termed environmental racism.

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