Environmental Justice

Framework

The civil rights movement established a framework for addressing disparities caused by the perceived weakness or inferiority of select groups of people and their lack of access to power structures. Predicated on the acknowledgment of environmental racism, environmental justice defines environmental rights as civil rights. Environmental racism is the social injustice represented by the disproportionately large number of health and environmental risks cast upon communities of color. Historically, communities of color have been unable to accrue sufficient financial, political, and legal resources to organize and oppose the sitting of toxic facilities. Polluting industries are also attracted to low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color because land values, labor, and other costs of doing business are lower. Globally, this can be seen in actions such as the export of electronic waste from developed nations to developing ones. Companies may perceive these communities to be the paths of least resistance.

Legal History

In the United States, the civil rights movement laid the groundwork for environmental justice through the use of litigation and mass movements as instruments of change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided a legal remedy to discriminatory actions with respect to African Americans and women by encouraging desegregation and prohibiting discrimination in public facilities, government, and employment.

Lawsuits set the framework for congressional action, created remedies for impacted communities, and galvanized a national movement. Ralph Abascal's 1969 lawsuit filed on behalf of six nursing migrant farmers in California eventually led to congressional hearings and the banning of the toxic synthetic pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichlo-roethane (DDT) in 1972. In the early 1970s, U.S. Public Health Services determined lead poisoning disproportionately impacted African American and Hispanic communities, and the President's Council on Environmental Quality acknowledged [Page 264]that racial discrimination adversely impacted poor urban communities and degraded the quality of their environment. The 1979 lawsuit Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation was the first U.S. suit to charge that the decision to issue a permit for a solid waste facility constituted racial discrimination, violating the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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