Environmental Justice

Overview

Environmental justice is the concept that all people—regardless of race, color, national origin, or income—have an equal right to strong environmental protection and to be informed of and involved in decision-making. Environmental justice advocates seek to address, repair, and provide solutions to the historical and ongoing injustices—such as increased exposure to air and water pollution—that are disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and people of color as well as low-income communities.

A related concept, environmental racism, refers to practices and policies that cause different environmental harms across racial groups, such as siting industrial or polluting facilities in communities primarily composed of Black, Indigenous, or people of color.

Individuals, primarily people of color, started the environmental justice movement in the 1980s to address the inequity of environmental protection in their communities. The movement seeks to shed light on widespread environmental disparities and advocate for every American’s right to live in a clean and healthy environment.

To further environmental justice, government policies can seek to address, mitigate, and alleviate environmental costs by dismantling systemic injustices and barriers to environmental and economic progress.

• The modern environmental justice movement has its roots in Black people’s struggle for equal treatment during the 1960s civil rights movement. It emerged distinct from the mainstream environmental movement, which reflected the interests of white and wealthier communities.
• People of color are, on average, exposed to 1.5 times more hazardous pollution than white people, regardless of income, and they breathe 56 percent more pollution than they emit.
• Environmental justice communities are located across the United States, from communities in Appalachia whose economies are dependent on coal extraction to communities in California suffering the impacts of pollution from oil wells.

Read more: Climate Change | Fossil Fuels

History of the environmental justice movement

The environmental justice movement is generally understood to have begun in earnest in 1982, when Black residents of Warren County, North Carolina, mobilized a sit-in strike against a nearby landfill built to bury soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyl, a toxic industrial waste. The sit-in led to the arrest of over 500 environmentalists and civil rights activists. Though the sit-in failed to block the truckloads of contaminated soil, it catalyzed a new wave of environmental activism, research, and policy action.

After the Warren County sit-in, researchers began documenting the serious and widespread problem of environmental racism. In 1983, the U.S. General Accounting Office released a report demonstrating that three out of four toxic landfills in the country were located in communities with large populations of Black Americans with family incomes below the poverty level. In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice released a study stating that millions of Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities lived near toxic waste sites.

In 1990, the sociologist Dr. Robert Bullard published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. The book examined the deliberate siting of toxic waste sites, polluting industries, and other environmental hazards in communities of color in the South. It explored the racist practices behind these siting decisions and the resistance of affected communities.

Over the years, the environmental justice movement has brought public attention to these injustices, and has made advances through direct action and successful court fights. While grassroots efforts are at the heart of the environmental justice movement, local, state, and federal government policy needs to ensure all communities have access to a safe environment and a voice in the decision-making process. Yet longstanding systemic barriers impede progress to advancing fair and inclusive environmental policies and limit the full participation of Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities.

Severity and Range of Environmental Injustices

Communities facing severe environmental harms, such as high levels of air and water pollution, are often referred to as environmental justice communities. Low-income people and people of color are disproportionately likely to live in environmental justice communities.

Studies have shown that for decades, Black, Indigenous, and people of color are more likely to live near sources of hazardous air pollutants, such as landfills, airports, refineries, nuclear and fossil fuel power plants, and highways. These communities are also exposed to more unhealthy polluted air than white communities in the United States across nearly all emission categories.

Because of the cumulative impacts from pollution, Black Americans have higher rates of lung cancer and asthma, and are more likely to have and succumb to heart disease. Communities dealing with the impacts of many polluting industries over a long duration of time are referred to as legacy communities.

Environmental justice communities exist because of institutional and systemic racist policies, including redlining. Redlining is the now-illegal practice of denying entire Black and immigrant neighborhoods from accessing federally-backed housing mortgages and other loans, because they were unfairly deemed to be a higher credit risk. These policies led to public and private disinvestments in marginalized communities, making them even more marginalized. Further marginalization made these communities more likely to be bisected by highways or targeted as the sites for extractive fossil energy-based industries, such as toxic plants and pollution-emitting refineries. Redlining also made it more difficult for residents of communities of color to leave neighborhoods blighted by polluting industries. Because of these racist housing and land policies, households in environmental justice communities experience disproportionately high energy burdens and have less access to green spaces, which can make these neighborhoods even hotter.

Environmental justice communities are also more likely to be disproportionately harmed by the impacts of climate change, such as extreme weather. Due to an entrenched lack of resources and infrastructure, these frontline communities are experiencing climate change “first and worst.” The concept of climate justice, which acknowledges that there are unequal impacts on different groups of people, aims to address these inequalities through resilience and adaptation strategies and a just transition away from fossil fuels.

Environmental Justice Solutions

A survey of municipal environmental justice programs, conducted by the New School and the Natural Resources Defense Council, found impactful environmental justice policies centered around six broad strategies:

1. Bans: prohibiting land uses or industries that pose health or environmental risks in vulnerable communities;
2. Reviews: creating additional project reviews which assess the impact of development on communities;
3. Proactive planning: planning future development with environmental justice considerations in mind;
4. Targeting existing lands: addressing and mitigating existing land uses that disproportionately threaten environmental justice communities;
5. Public health regulations: enforcing regulations over activities that are potentially harmful to human health, including those releasing dust, odor, etc.; and
6. General environmental justice policies: enacting broad environmental justice programs that may include funding, local working groups, and other policies listed above.

Federal Policy Solutions

The federal government began to integrate environmental justice concerns into its operations for the first time in 1994 when President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations. The Order requires federal agencies to identify and address the disproportionate impacts of their actions on low-income people and people of color, to develop environmental justice strategies, and to collaborate to address environmental justice through an interagency working group. In 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched EJSCREEN—a tool to visualize the environmental and health indicators for different demographic groups (see EESI’s Congressional briefing about EJSCREEN).

The first comprehensive legislation on environmental justice, the Environmental Justice for All Act, was introduced in the House and the Senate in 2019 after a multi-year stakeholder engagement process, which allowed environmental justice communities and leaders to shape the legislation. The legislation did not become law during the 116th Congress. In 2021, the Biden-Harris Administration created the Justice40 Initiative, which is the first time the federal government has set a whole-of-government target for the level of federal climate and clean energy investments that are to go to Black, Indigenous, and communities of color and low-income communities.

Updated on November 24, 2021