About Environmental Justice
Social Movements, Policy, and Research
The Movement
Nationally, the environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980's as a result of the confluence of events and reports that brought the terms "environmental racism" and "environmental justice" into the public sphere and into policy discourses. Subsequent reports documented the "unequal protection" from environmental pollution by local, state and national regulatory agencies. Environmental racism describes the disproportionate effects of environmental pollution on racial minorities, while environmental justice is the name of the social movement that emerged in response to this problem. Because it describes the disproportionate balance between high levels of pollution exposure for people of color and the low level of environmental benefits they enjoy, environmental racism can be defined as the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and pollution burdens based on race.
There are numerous environmental justice organizations around the country working on a wide range of issues. The movement is structured around networks organized by geographic region, identity or issue. These include (but are not limited to):
- Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice
- Indigenous Environmental Network
- Asian Pacific Environmental Network
- Farm Labor Organizing Committee
The "founding document" that catalyzed the environmental justice movement is the Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted at the 1991 First People of Color Environmental Leadership summit and widely circulated.
The Policy - Federal, State and Local
The environmental justice movement gained mainstream political momentum when President Clinton signed an Executive Order on Environmental Justice in 1994 which mandated that all federal agencies generate agency-specific strategies to address the disproportionate pollution experienced by minority communities. In June 2005, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was removing race and class from special consideration in its definition of environmental justice, and set a controversial and abbreviated public comment period. Although EPA backed down from this position , it shows that the concept of environmental justice at the Federal Level is still quite vulnerable (see Environmental Justice in EPA's Strategic Planning Process).
States have varied widely in their environmental justice policies (see white paper on "The State of the States: Environmental Justice Programs and Policy" {PDF} working paper for the Ford Foundation, October 2004). One of the states that has gone the furthest is California. California Environmental Protection Agency’s (Cal/EPA) released a ground-breaking "Environmental Justice Action Plan" (EJ Action Plan) in October 2004. This Plan follows Cal/EPA's Intra-agency Environmental Justice Strategy which outlined the four main goals for their environmental justice policy, along with objectives, and criteria for achieving them: improving public participation and community-capacity building, environmental justice integration, research and data collection, and cross-media coordination and accountability.
The EJ Action Plan specifies a set of short-term, community-oriented projects, using the principles of "cumulative impacts" and the "precautionary approach" to guide them. The plan defines cumulative impacts as: "exposures, public health or environmental effects from the combined emissions and discharges in a geographic area including environmental pollution from all sources, whether single or multi-media, routinely, accidentally, or otherwise released. Impacts will take into account sensitive populations and socioeconomic factors where applicable and to the extent data are available." It defines the precautionary approach as "taking anticipatory action to protect public health or the environment if a reasonable threat of serious harm exists based upon the best available science and other relevant information even if absolute and undisputed scientific evidence is not available to assess the exact nature of the risk."
The Research
There is a large and growing literature on environmental racism, the environmental justice movement, and environmental equity. Its disciplinary locations are primarily located within sociology, natural resource policy, and environmental law, although environmental justice writings also appear within the disciplines of philosophy and environmental ethics, geography, and radical political economy. Excellent histories of the environmental justice movement have been published in recent years (i.e. Cole and Foster’s From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement). The literature is constantly expanding (one good on-line bibliography is: http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/EnvirPol/Bib/B07-TurnerWu.pdf)
Much of the best, most interesting and timely research emerges out of environmental justice organizations, academic resource centers or reports published by private foundations. Some highlights include:
- Building Health Communities from the Ground Up: Environmental Justice in California (2003)
- On Hurricane Katrina: In the Wake of the Storm: Environment, Disaster, and Race After Katrina
Written by Manuel Pastor, Robert Bullard, James Boyce, Alice Fothergill, Raquel Morello-Frosch, and Beverly Wright Russell Sage Foundation - Toxic Soup Redux: Why Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice Matter after Katrina.
Written by Julie Sze
Social Science Research Council - Reports from the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University