Environmental Justice

Environmental justice refers to the movements aimed at ensuring that people of color, low-income individuals, women, and indigenous communities are not disproportionately harmed by environmental risks and harm. Environmental justice has many historic roots but is seen as culminating in the 1980s and 1990s. Movements include the struggle of working-class communities and communities of color against environmental hazards from toxins and pollution, indigenous mobilization against the exploitation and commoditization of natural resources, farm workers organizing against pesticide exposure, and international struggles against the exporting of hazardous materials, rapid overindustrialization, and climate change, among others. Because of cultural inequities, women can face heightened risk and harm, but they also often take a lead in environmental justice struggles.

Environmental justice movements differ from the environmental movement in many ways. The environment is understood not as nature per se, but as where people live, work, and play. The movements are often grassroots, responding to incidences of environmental injustice as they occur. The law is often regarded as suspect because of its historic abuse in upholding inequality, and litigation is seen as only one strategy in a broader array of tactics including direct action, community mobilization, and political participation in local decision-making processes.

Environmental justice issues are a result, and therefore an extension, of social inequalities. During the Civil Rights Movement, activists noted the prevalence of waste and toxic chemicals near communities of color and saw such environmental pollution as a civil rights violation. In 1987, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice researched the issue and issued a report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which found that toxic waste facilities were disproportionately placed in minority communities. Later studies found both race and income to be strong predictors in the siting of locally unwanted land uses, such as landfills, incinerators, and abandoned toxic waste dumps. Race has also been correlated to disproportionately higher levels of air pollution, contaminated local food, and child lead poisoning. Such discriminatory risk-or environmental racism-has its roots in the history of residential segregation, redlining, zoning practices, discriminatory access in local planning decisions, as well as unequal regulatory enforcement.

Environmental justice was given another boost by the growth of the antitoxins movement set off by the [Page 490]Love Canal incident of the late 1970s. A neighborhood in New York, the primarily white, working-class Love Canal community unknowingly had toxic waste buried beneath their local school. After an investigation by resident Lois Gibbs, whose son suffered multiple illnesses, awareness grew of the hazard and attention was drawn to the slow response of government agencies, as well as the prevalence and danger of abandoned toxic waste sites throughout the country. In 1980, Congress passed the Superfund Act, which holds polluters accountable for cleaning up such sites, although the program has since suffered from a lack of funding.

The struggles of farm workers and Native Americans have also been identified as incidences of environmental injustice. As part of their organizing efforts in the late 1960s, activists such as César Chávez of the United Farm Workers began organizing for stronger work contracts, including the right not to use and be habitually exposed to certain pesticides such as DDT. Native Americans are sometimes referred to as early environmental justice activists, having long fought against overdevelopment and continuing to struggle against hazardous resource extraction and toxins in their communities, as well as for equal access to natural resources.

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