Following my diary on the relationship of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the struggle for environmental justice, a comment requested a diary on the evolution of environmental justice terminology. This diary is a briet attempt to show (with relevant links for further reading) how the terms environmental racism and environmental justice have been used, debated, and contested in the roughly quarter of a century since the terminology came into use. This is by no means a comprehensive summary of environmental justice activities or scholarship, so any additions, corrections, or elaborations in the comments are highly encouraged.
Two terms, environmental racism and environmental justice, are frequently used to discuss the unequal distribution of environmental burdens in society. A quick summary distinction between the two used in the 1980s is that environmental racism is the explanation for inequities, that is, discrimination against people of color is the reason why people of color are inordinately exposed to environmental burdens. In contrast, environmental justice (then and now) may be seen as the method or set of methods used by communities and activists to overcome unjust environmental burdens. (Racism as cause, justice as the treatment.)
The landmark publication propelling the study of race-related environmental burdens was released by the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice in 1987. A series of conflicts, including the protest of a Polychlorinated Biphenyl (PCBs) dump in the African-American community of Warren County, North Carolina in 1982, led to the national study of patterns in toxic waste dumping. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, concluded that:
-- Race proved to be the most significant among variables tested in
association with the location of commercial hazardous waste
facilities. This represented a consistent national pattern.
-- Communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste
facilities had the highest composition of racial and ethnic residents.
In communities with two or more facilities or one of the nation's
five largest landfills, the average minority percentage of the
population was more than three times that of communities without
facilities (38 percent vs. 12 percent).
-- In communities with one commercial hazardous waste facility, the
average minority percentage of the population was twice the average
minority percentage of the population in communities without such
facilities (24 percent vs. 12 percent).
-- Although socio-economic status appeared to play an important role
in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities, race still
proved to be more significant. This remained true after the study
controlled for urbanization and regional differences. Incomes and
home values were substantially lower when communities with commercial
facilities were compared to communities in the surrounding counties
without facilities.
Commission for Racial Justice, United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York, NY, 1987), p. xiii.
The report was explosive and controversial, leading to questions about the statistical analysis and interpretation, and several more studies to assess the conclusions. (Most of these are not easily accessible online, but a few are cited in this encyclopedia entry.) One set of criticisms argued that the report missed that the majority of Americans of all racial and class backgrounds lived in close proximity to toxic waste sites, with urban residence being perhaps the strongest indicator. This criticism in turn generated controversy and ignored both proximate location within urban areas as well as the widespread siting of waste facilities in rural areas.
A second set of criticisms critiqued the placement of race above class as determinative factor in proximity to toxic waste sites. This criticism was largely rebutted by a slew of studies in the late 80s and early 90s (by, among others, Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton) that showed a strong conflation of racial identity to systemic denial of wealth relating to residential segregation uniquely afflicting African-Americans due to specific cultural, economic, and (beginning in the New Deal with federally-insured mortagages using residential security maps to "redline" undesirable neighborhoods) political forms of racial discrimination.
A related question about the report, however, had to do with classification. For the purposes of the report, all Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans were classified "minority" with little distinction as to the exposure to wastes within each group. Given significant demographic variation not only in the distribution of peoples of color spatially, but varying histories of the effects of segregation on peoples of different backgrounds threatened to obscure relevant differences within the monochromatic "minority" group in the report.
Regardless of how one felt about the report's methodology, it followed the Warren County protest in making the idea that environmental quality was an issue affected by racial discrimination, just as access to education, work, residence had been commonly perceived for decades.
The individual most closely associated with environmental racism as an academic subject is the sociologist Robert Bullard. Bullard wrote his dissertation in Houston in the late 1970s and grew interested in a local dump. His book Dumping In Dixie (first published in 1990 and subsequently updated in 1994 and 2000) grew out of his Houston studies and focused on the widespread problem of toxic waste dumps in both urban and rural African-American communities.
Bullard's use of the terms environmental racism and environmental justice is instructive for seeing how the meanings have evolved. In the first edition of Dumping In Dixie he places race at the forefront of the injustice. As the number of groups and individuals working on aspects of environmental justice grew and began talking to one another at meetings like the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summmit (and some of the leaders emerging in the late 80s and early 90s are represented in Bullard's 1993 anthology Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots), the issues of how race and class affected environmental quality became more complicated. Lois Gibbs (a white working-class woman who had become famous for leading a group of working-class housewives to protest the conditions at Love Canal, forcing Jimmy Carter's government to evacuate the area and leading to the creation of Superfund at the end of Carter's presidency), argued for more attention to class. Her experiences in upstate New York mirrored struggles affected communities (such as the "Cancer Alley" corridor of communities affected by Louisiana's petroleum industry -- the name was earned with some of the highest cancer rates in the United States affecting adults and children alike).
The 1991 summit drafted a Principles of Environmental Justice, which serves as a common set of goals and definition of the term. The principles are broad and inclusive, including the following:
- Environmental Justice affirms the sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from ecological destruction.
- Environmental Justice demands that public policy be based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from any form of discrimination or bias.
- Environmental Justice mandates the right to ethical, balanced and responsible uses of land and renewable resources in the interest of a sustainable planet for humans and other living things.
- Environmental Justice calls for universal protection from nuclear testing, extraction, production and disposal of toxic/hazardous wastes and poisons and nuclear testing that threaten the fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.
- Environmental Justice affirms the fundamental right to political, economic, cultural and environmental self-determination of all peoples.
- Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production.
- Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation.
- Environmental Justice affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy work environment without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment. It also affirms the right of those who work at home to be free from environmental hazards.
- Environmental Justice protects the right of victims of environmental injustice to receive full compensation and reparations for damages as well as quality health care.
- Environmental Justice considers governmental acts of environmental injustice a violation of international law, the Universal Declaration On Human Rights, and the United Nations Convention on Genocide.
- Environmental Justice must recognize a special legal and natural relationship of Native Peoples to the U.S. government through treaties, agreements, compacts, and covenants affirming sovereignty and self-determination.
- Environmental Justice affirms the need for urban and rural ecological policies to clean up and rebuild our cities and rural areas in balance with nature, honoring the cultural integrity of all our communities, and provided fair access for all to the full range of resources.
- Environmental Justice calls for the strict enforcement of principles of informed consent, and a halt to the testing of experimental reproductive and medical procedures and vaccinations on people of color.
- Environmental Justice opposes the destructive operations of multi-national corporations.
- Environmental Justice opposes military occupation, repression and exploitation of lands, peoples and cultures, and other life forms.
- Environmental Justice calls for the education of present and future generations which emphasizes social and environmental issues, based on our experience and an appreciation of our diverse cultural perspectives.
- Environmental Justice requires that we, as individuals, make personal and consumer choices to consume as little of Mother Earth's resources and to produce as little waste as possible; and make the conscious decision to challenge and reprioritize our lifestyles to insure the health of the natural world for present and future generations.
These principles were intentionally wide in scope, reflecting a movement that included members in rural and urban areas alike from a variety of backgrounds and a variety of historical injustices. The success environmental racism activists had in elevating discussion of the problems led to the taking of the Principles of Environmental Justice to the 1992 United Nations Commission on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. One example of the international growth of the environmental justice movement over the past two decades is the scope of Lois Gibbs's Center for Health, Environment, and Justice, which has worked to battle environmental hazards in communities within the United States and worldwide.
The dynamics that shaped the Principles of Environmental Justice affected Bullard's definitions, expanding the definition of environmental justice to make class much more central than the 1987 report did. In a 1999 interview, he said:
Now all of the issues of environmental racism and environmental justice don't just deal with people of color. We are just as much concerned with inequities in Appalachia, for example, where the whites are basically dumped on because of lack of economic and political clout and lack of having a voice to say "no" and that's environmental injustice. So we're trying to work with groups across the political spectrums; Democrats, Republicans, independents, on the reservations, in the barrios, in the ghettos, on the border and internationally to see that we address these issues in a comprehensive manner.
The focus on broad, inclusive terminology allows activists to make common cause with many of the institutions (such as the EPA and large environmental groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund and Sierra Club) that activists have criticized for ignoring the plights of affected communities in the past. Since a major problem in the movement is that pollution generally settles in communities that lack the political capital to oppose it (everyone may yell Not In My Back Yard -- NIMBY -- but only those who have leverage can keep it out of their neighborhoods), this approach tries to maximize political power.
In addition to activism, the movement has shaped academic study of the conditions creating these problems and tracking the precise health and economic consequences. This work has led to a third term, environmental inequalities. It became more widely adopted in the mid-1990s by researchers attempting a wide scholarly treatment of the growth of unequal environmental burdens. Historians in particular have used this term to get a more specific look at the dynamics at play in creating these disparities in different communities at different times. In part this grew out of critiques environmental historians such as Martin Melosi had of accusations that environmental activists had ignored the cities and their residents as they worried about the oceans, forests, and wilderness (areas generally accessible by the more affluent) as subjects worthy of environmental protection.
The argument here is that environmental historians such as Melosi, William Cronon, Samuel Hays, and Joel Tarr have since the late 1960s been concerned with environmental quality, the problems of pollution, and the responses to it from community members, engineers, and political figures in urban America. That said, the rise in consciousness of racial and class dynamics in the consideration of environmental quality spurred new, better focused, and valuable research over the past 15 years than anything published before the early 1990s.
A crucial book in this new research is Andrew Hurley's 1995 book Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-1980. Among other factors in the steeltown, Hurley found strong racial segregation of neighborhoods at the start of the period with African-Americans residing on the U.S. Steel company town's outskirts. Neighborhood change came as upper- and middle-class whites began leaving the highly polluted city as the industry declined, leaving the toxic air and water, and lowered property values to the African-Americans who moved in.
Work over the past decade shows the variety of approaches to environmental inequalities in scholarship. David Pellow's superb Garbage Wars looks at the long history and present inequalities in waste management (dumping, labor, and incineration) in the African-American communities in and around Chicago. That book and my own Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America both examine how recycling is not simply an environmental good reducing materials in landfills but a process which puts undue burdens on communities of color as scrap processing is largely done in or near residential neighborhoods and people of color perform the most dangerous tasks in processing the materials.
Sylvia Hood Washington's Packing Them In: An Archaeology Of Environmental Racism In Chicago, 1865-1954 lists a variety of public health hazards within the city's African-American neighborhoods during the ninety years of heavy industrialization. Her background in public health provides a detailed perspective of the specific respiratory maladies, cancers, and other illnesses linked to environmental pollution.
The environmental justice movement is now old enough that books on its history are coming out; two recent ones are Eileen McGurty's study of the 1982 protests Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice and Julie Sze's Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. These books indicate how established environmental justice activism has become in our understanding of environmentalism, in addition to showing how the injustices continue to endure, reflecting the scope of the struggle.
The question of how environmental inequalities grow requires much more attention. While the historical studies have given us a richer understanding of specific geographical, economic, political, and technological factors at work, they have done less to analyze the dynamics of racism at play in creating these burdens, often opting for a static, binary, black-white model of race. Geographer Laura Pulido has criticized this weakness over the past decade and advocated greater attention to critical race studies, in particular the construction of white privilege as it relates to environmental quality. That's where my work is going, and the goal here (as with most academic study on the subject) is to identify historical causes, consequences, and potential courses of action to aid the movement in the future.
If you've read this far and are curious about learning more about these and other terms, the readings linked above have much more to offer than this brief diary does. There is, to understate matters, much work left to do, but the progress of the past quarter century have allowed us a better understanding of the scope of the struggle. I hope that this diary has given at least some understanding of the terms involved, and leads to productive discussion either here or elsewhere.