The environmental justice movement (2023)

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March 17, 2016 Renée Skelton Mueller painting

The environmental justice movement, fueled primarily by African American, Latino, Asian, Islander, and Pacific Native Americans, addresses a statistical fact: the people who live, work, and play in America's most polluted environments often are poor colored people. Environmental justice advocates have shown that this is no coincidence. Black communities, which are often poor, are often the target of facilities that have negative environmental impacts, such as landfills, dirty industrial plants, or truck depots. The statistics unequivocally support what the movement rightly calls “environmental racism.” Communities of Color have struggled with this injustice for decades.

sparks of movement

Poor, rural, and mostly black Warren County, North Carolina seems an unlikely place for a political movement to birth. But when the state government decided the county would be the perfect home for 6,000 truckloads of soil spiked with toxic PCBs, the county became the focus of national attention.

Dump trucks first entered Warren County in mid-September 1982, heading to a newly constructed hazardous waste disposal site in the small community of Afton. But many frustrated residents and their allies, angry that state officials have dismissed concerns about PCB leaks into drinking water supplies, rushed to the trucks. And they were stopped and lay on the roads leading to the landfill. Six weeks of nonviolent demonstrations and street protests followed, and over 500 people were arrested, the first arrests in US history for the location of a landfill.

Warren County residents eventually lost the battle; the toxic waste ended up in this landfill. But her story of ordinary people taking desperate measures to protect their homes from a toxic attack has caught national media attention and ignited the imagination of people across the country who have suffered a similar injustice. The street protests and lawsuits by Warren County residents over the dumping operation are seen by many as the first major milestone in the national environmental justice movement.

Other communities of color organized to counter environmental threats off Warren County. In the early 1960s, Latino farm workers organized by César Chávez fought for labor rights, including protection from harmful pesticides, on farmlands in California's San Joaquin Valley. In 1967, African American students took to the streets of Houston to protest a garbage dump in their community that had killed two children. In 1968, residents of West Harlem, New York City campaigned unsuccessfully for the site of a sewage treatment plant in their community. But the Warren County protests were the first instance of an environmental protest by people of color to garner widespread national attention.

After the Afton protests, environmental justice activists looked around the country and saw a pattern: polluting facilities are often located in poor communities of color. Nobody wants to have a factory, a landfill or a diesel bus depot as their neighbour. But corporate decision-makers, regulators, and local planning and zoning authorities learned that these facilities were easier to find in low-income African American or Hispanic communities than in middle-income, mostly white communities. Poor communities of color often lacked connections to decision-makers in zone committees or city councils who could protect their interests. Often they were unable to afford the technical and legal expertise they would need to contest a subpoena. They often did not have access to information about how pollution from their new "neighbor" would affect people's health. And in the case of Latino communities, critical information in English-only documents was out of reach of affected Spanish-speaking residents.

Several studies published in the 1980s and early 1990s gave new credence to claims of environmental racism. Walter Fauntroy, a congressional delegate for the District of Columbia and then chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, attended the protests in Afton. When Fauntroy returned to Washington, he tasked the Congressional Accounting General's Office with determining whether communities of color were being disproportionately negatively impacted by the location and construction of hazardous waste sites within them. The GAO study, published in 1983, found that three-fourths of the hazardous waste sites in eight southeastern states were located primarily in poor, African American and Hispanic communities.

Further evidence of environmental racism came through the efforts of the United Church of Christ's Racial Justice Commission (CRJ), led by the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, who was also with the Afton protesters. With Chavis directing, the CRJ releasedToxic waste and race in the United States, a 1987 report that has become an indispensable tool for strengthening support for environmental justice action. The report, prepared by UCC Research Director Charles Lee, showed that race was the most important factor in determining where hazardous waste facilities were located in the United States. We also found that because of the strong statistical correlation between the reason and the location of hazardous landfills, the location of these assets in communities of color was not accidental, but the intended result of local, state, and federal land use policies. And in 1990, the sociologist Robert BullardThrown into Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Qualityanalyzed the struggles for environmental justice in various African American communities; The stories emphasized the importance of race as a factor in finding facilities that produce unwanted toxic substances.

find new allies

In the 1990s, leaders of the burgeoning environmental justice movement began to look to traditional, mostly white, environmental organizations for allies. These were groups that have long fought to protect nature, endangered species, clean air and clean water. But they had little or no involvement in the environmental struggles of people of color, who were constantly attacked by neighboring hazardous waste sites, garbage transfer stations, incinerators, landfills, bus and diesel truck repair shops. Industry sectors. Chicken processors, oil refineries, chemical manufacturers and radioactive waste storage areas. That year, several environmental justice leaders signed a widely circulated letter to the "Big 10" environmental groups, including the NRDC, accusing them of racial bias in policy development, hiring and the composition of their boards, and urging them to address issues. poisonous. Pollution in communities and workplaces of black and poor. As a result, some of the leading environmental organizations developed their first environmental justice initiatives, added people of color to their team, and decided to consider environmental justice in policy making.

Environmental justice leaders have also pushed their agenda within government. In 1990, a group of leading scholars and supporters of the movement sent letters to Louis Sullivan and William Reilly, both senior officials in the first Bush administration, to share some of their findings on the disproportionate impact of environmentally harmful facilities. The letters asked for meetings to discuss necessary government action. Sullivan, who is African American, ignored the letter. Reilly accepted the offer and met with the group later that year, a meeting that led to the formation of the US EPA's Office of Environmental Equity.

In October 1991, the growth of the environmental justice movement was evident when the first National Summit of People of Color Environmental Leadership was held in Washington, D.C. for three days. The summit brought together for the first time hundreds of environmental justice leaders from the US, Canada, Central America, the Marshall Islands and beyond to network and strategize. But the roster, which included Reverend Jesse Jackson, Dolores Huerta, Cherokee Tribe President Wilma Mankiller, and directors of the NRDC and the Sierra Club, also showed that environmental justice was embraced by many in the mainstream. . In addition, the Summit produced the Principles of Environmental Justice and the Call to Action, two key documents of the environmental justice movement.

National Recognition

When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, it was clear that environmental justice was becoming an increasingly important issue for leaders in a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Clinton appointed two environmental justice leaders, Rev. Benjamin Chavis and Dr. Robert Bullard, to his natural resources transition team, where they helped make environmental justice an important part of Clinton's stated environmental policy.

Environmental justice eventually became federal policy during the Clinton administration. Before leaders of the movement across the country, including then-NRDC Director of Environmental Justice Vernice Miller-Travis, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898 in the Oval Office on February 11, 1994, setting out their policies, or programs, for low-income people of color. It also directed federal agencies to look for ways to prevent discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in all state-funded programs that deal with health or the environment.

Today and tomorrow

Since dump trucks arrived in Afton, North Carolina more than 20 years ago, many community environmental justice organizations have sprung up. Today, many of these groups have become powerful and enduring forces for environmental protection and social change in their communities:

• Concerned Citizens of South Central (Los Angeles), a housing and community development company that led the fight against the now infamous LANCER incinerator in the late 1980s, provides leadership on environmental issues and a host of other social justice issues.
• West Harlem Environmental Action was formed in 1998 to address the North River Wastewater Treatment Plant site and has led action on many other environmental issues in New York City and upstate New York.
• Through the Louisiana Avatar Project, coordinated by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, rural parishes in Louisiana's Cancer Alley have made great strides in outreach, research and intervention in hundreds of environmental actions to protect communities from further degradation and destruction.
• The Mothers of East L.A., originally organized to block the site of a prison in the East Los Angeles community, turned their attention to opposition to a hazardous waste incinerator and then took on other local social and environmental issues.

Traditional environmental groups have also formed associations to support environmental justice organizations in many of their struggles. Groups like the NRDC often provide technical advice and resources to environmental justice organizations, provide expert testimony at hearings, and participate in litigation. These partnerships are ongoing success stories in many parts of the country.

Environmental justice remains an important part of the struggle to improve and maintain a clean and healthy environment, especially for those who have traditionally lived, worked and played closest to the sources of pollution.

Correction: On August 3rd, 2020 this story was updated with the correct name of the Los Angeles Incinerator project, LANCER.

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