WASHINGTON, July 21 — The air and soil are not neutral. In low-income neighborhoods and communities of color across the United States, residents describe a pattern: hazardous waste sites, polluting industrial facilities, and resource extraction operations that seem to settle where people have the least political power to resist. This is the landscape that gave rise to the environmental justice movement, a social movement now decades old that challenges the unequal distribution of environmental harm.
The movement began in the United States in the 1980s, drawing heavily from the civil rights movement. Its early focus was environmental racism — the disproportionate burden of pollution and toxic exposure borne by Black and other marginalized communities within wealthy countries.
Hundreds of studies have since documented that exposure to environmental harm is not random: Black and racialized communities, as well as the LGBTQ community, are disproportionately affected by natural disasters and toxic hazards.
Defining Fair Treatment
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, in the development of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Over time, scholars have expanded that definition, adding dimensions that include gender, LGBTQ people, international environmental injustice, and inequalities that exist even within marginalized groups. By the time the movement achieved significant policy gains in rich countries, the environmental burdens themselves had begun to shift.
Extractivism — the large-scale removal of resources from the Global South — and the global waste trade have transferred pollution and ecological destruction to poorer nations. The movement has grown more global as a result, with some of its core aims now articulated by the United Nations.
It overlaps with movements for Indigenous land rights and with the emerging recognition of the human right to a healthy environment.
Local Conflicts, Global Movement
At the ground level, the global movement for environmental justice arises from local conflicts. Environmental defenders — often farmers, Indigenous community members, and local activists — confront multinational corporations over projects that threaten their land, water, and health. These are not abstract battles; they unfold in specific valleys, forests, and coastlines.
The goal is agency: giving marginalized communities real decision-making power over the environmental policies that affect their lives. Scholars have built an interdisciplinary body of literature around these struggles.
Fields such as political ecology, environmental law, and theories of justice and sustainability all inform the discourse. Key concepts have emerged from this work: ecological debt, environmental racism, climate justice, food sovereignty, corporate accountability, ecocide, sacrifice zones, and the environmentalism of the poor.
Indigenous Perspectives and Settler Colonialism
Two scholars have extended the environmental justice discourse in particular ways regarding Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialism. One critiques the dominant framework of distributive justice, arguing that it often assumes a capitalistic commodification of land — an assumption inconsistent with many Indigenous worldviews. Another explores environmental justice through the lens of colonialism, examining how catastrophic environmental impacts have disrupted Indigenous peoples’ traditional livelihoods and identities.
Their work pushes the movement beyond simple fairness in pollution distribution and into deeper questions about land tenure, sovereignty, and cultural survival. As of mid-2026, the environmental justice movement continues to evolve.
The questions it poses — about who bears the cost of industrial growth, who benefits from natural resources, and how land itself should be valued — remain unresolved. What is clear is that the conflict is not fading. On the ground, new local battles are emerging, and communities across the world continue to organize.
The movement’s next chapter will likely be written in those same sacrifice zones, where the fight for clean air, water, and soil is also a fight for recognition and power.
