Hazardous waste sites, polluting plants and extraction operations tend to land in the same kinds of places: poor neighborhoods and communities of color. Residents there have been saying so for decades. The environmental justice movement grew out of that complaint.
It started in the United States in the 1980s and took much of its energy from the civil rights movement. Its first target was environmental racism, the heavier load of pollution and toxic exposure carried by Black and other marginalized communities inside wealthy countries. Hundreds of studies have since argued that environmental harm is not spread evenly. Researchers also say Black and racialized communities, and LGBTQ people, are hit harder by natural disasters.
Early court fights
The terms “environmental justice” and “environmental racism” only entered common speech after the first cases reached court, one in Texas in 1979 and one in North Carolina in 1982. The Texas case, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corporation, challenged a decision to put a garbage dump in Northwood Manor in East Houston. Plaintiffs said race drove the choice. Robert D. Bullard was asked to compile data on every landfill, incinerator and solid waste site in Houston from 1970 to 1979. The case was lost.
What counts as fair
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines the term as fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, whatever their race, color, national origin or income, in making and enforcing environmental laws. Fair treatment, in the agency’s wording, means no group should bear a disproportionate share of the negative consequences of industrial, municipal and commercial operations.
Scholars have pushed past that definition. Some stress distributive justice, the equitable sharing of environmental risks and benefits. Others add procedural justice, meaning a real say in decisions, and recognition justice, which means acknowledging oppression and difference. Bullard describes three kinds of equity: procedural, geographic and social. Public hearings held in remote places at inconvenient hours, or run only in English, are his examples of procedural failure.
The movement itself widened over time to cover gender, LGBTQ people, international injustice and inequality inside marginalized groups.
A global fight
As rich countries won some gains, critics argued, the burdens moved to the Global South through extractivism and the global waste trade. The movement followed. Some of its aims are now stated by the United Nations, and it overlaps with campaigns for Indigenous land rights and for a human right to a healthy environment.
On the ground, the fights are local. Environmental defenders often face multinational corporations in resource extraction and other industries, and trans-national networks increasingly shape how those local disputes end. The stated goal is agency: letting marginalized communities decide the environmental questions that touch their lives.
Scholars have built an interdisciplinary body of work around this, drawing on political ecology, environmental law and theories of justice and sustainability. It produced a vocabulary: ecological debt, climate justice, food sovereignty, corporate accountability, ecocide, sacrifice zones, and the environmentalism of the poor.
Indigenous views
Kyle Powys Whyte and Dina Gilio-Whitaker have extended the discussion for Indigenous peoples and settler colonialism. Gilio-Whitaker criticizes distributive justice for assuming land can be commodified, a premise at odds with many Indigenous worldviews. Whyte looks at environmental justice through colonialism’s catastrophic effects on Indigenous livelihoods and identities.
The stakes are visible in specific places. Chaco Culture National Historical Park, sacred to the Diné people and part of the Navajo Nation, once hosted uranium mining and heavy oil and gas production. The mines are closed. Their effects on the health of the surrounding community continue, and members keep pressing for protection.
Indigenous territories make up 22% of the world’s land surface and hold about 80% of its remaining biodiversity.
