Although the United States spends more per capita than any other nation on health care, its population’s health lags behind that of most industrialized nations. This comparative inferiority reveals itself in continuous and expanding gaps in mortality, morbidity, and disability between whites of high socioeconomic status (SES) and impoverished people of color (Brulle & Fellow, 2006). Although these health disparities are often related to individual health decisions such as smoking, nutrition, and exercise, these variables only explain a part of the discrepancies.
Environmental injustice and its effects must be incorporated into the existing research on disparities to increase our understanding of the causes and potential solutions for different demographic groups in the United States. This paper begins by examining the theoretical literature that explains the social origins of environmental racism and environmental justice, then finishes by discussing and evaluating the ramifications of the environmental justice movement in the United States.
The Origin
Beginning in the early 1970s, a significant body of literature has identified environmental inequities in the United States. In 1982, civil rights groups rallied to prevent the state of North Carolina from dumping 120 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB)-contaminated soil in Warren county, a county with the highest percentage of African Americans nationwide, which became emblematic of an issue that conventional middle-class white environmentalists ignored, namely that people of color and low-income areas faced considerably larger ecological threats than they did (NC DCR, 2013). This phenomenon of environmental racism and environmental injustice has captured the attention of policymakers. As a result, a significant corpus of literature showing environmental inequality in the United States arose.
In 1982, Benjamin Chavis, then the executive director of the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ (UCC), coined and defined the term environmental racism:
Environmental racism is racial discrimination in environmental
policymaking, the enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate
targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official
sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants
in our communities, and the history of excluding people of color from
the leadership of the ecology movements (UCC, 1987).
According to Chavis, environmental racism refers to any policy, practice, or instruction that disadvantages (whether intentionally or unintentionally) individuals, organizations, or communities based on race or color.
Subsequently, Robert Bullard, otherwise known as the “Father of Environmental Justice,” created and established the concept of environmental justice: “all individuals and communities are entitled to equitable protection under environmental and public health laws and regulations” (Borunda, 2021). Bullard’s ideology encapsulates that the environment spans all parts of our existence, including where we live, work, play, and attend school, in addition to the physical and natural world.
Bullard’s research on a 1979 lawsuit against a trash corporation suspected of discriminatory facility placement in an African American neighborhood in Houston, Texas, provided the impetus for his now-classic novel Dumping in Dixie, which he released in 1990. In 1983, Bullard published unprecedented research on instances of environmental racism, which examined the social and psychological effects of environmental racism on local communities as it established a connection between the siting of hazardous facilities and historical patterns of spatial segregation in the southern United States. He discovered that communities of color were being targeted intentionally for the disposal of society’s unwanted waste and that these practices were rooted in both historical and contemporary institutional racism.
Consequently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines Environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful participation of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, in the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (Weiss, 2022). This definition is the de facto official policy and legal criterion that environmental justice organizations must meet to get government attention, notwithstanding substantial changes in U.S. presidential administrations.
The Evolution
Numerous environmental justice scholars and activists credit the protests in Warren County, North Carolina, with establishing the environmental justice movement. Several civil rights organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, offered leadership and support for the marchers. The protests were among the first to bring attention to the environmental concerns of African Americans and other people of color.
The protests in Warren County were significant because they garnered national attention and sparked the following events that increased the visibility and momentum of the environmental justice movement. The following year, the GAO investigated the racial composition of the towns surrounding the four largest hazardous waste landfills in the South due to the demonstrations in Warren County. In all four instances examined by the 1983 GAO research, communities surrounding landfills were disproportionately African American. In three instances, most of the inhabitants were African Americans. The demonstrations in Warren County and the findings of the GAO investigation spurred the UCC Commission for Racial Justice to explore whether the regionally disparate siting of hazardous waste plants and landfills in the South was part of a nationwide pattern. Consequently, the UCC commissioned a national assessment on the racial and socioeconomic composition of communities surrounding hazardous waste sites in the United States.
In 1987, the UCC’s findings were published in a report titled Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The report revealed that the percentage of people of color in a given zip code was the most accurate predictor of where commercial hazardous waste facilities were located.
It was the first nationwide research on the racial and socioeconomic characteristics of communities closest to hazardous waste sites. It was also one of the first to apply sophisticated multivariate statistical techniques to analyze waste and social factors.
Bryant and Mohai organized the Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards at the University of Michigan in the same year as the publication of Dumping in Dixie (1990), bringing together researchers from across the country who were examining racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of environmental contaminants (Bryant & Mohai, 1991). The provided scientific analyses were well-documented and overwhelmingly supported the data offered in the GAO and UCC reports. The Conference proceedings were sent to the EPA, where Bryant and Mohai led the agency to conduct its own investigation of the evidence and policy proposal writing. Environmental Equity: Reducing Risks for All Communities was the title of a 1992 EPA report detailing its findings and recommendations.
Since 1990, scholars like Bryant and Mohai have produced extensive and sophisticated literature on the dimensions of differential environmental risks based on race and socioeconomic class position. They performed a meta-analysis of 16 empirical studies on race and class disparities in the distribution of environmental hazards, all of which found environmental disparities based on either race or income. In six of nine studies, race was a more important predictor than the income of where environmental hazards are located, confirming the UCC’s 1987 findings. Szasz and Meuser conducted a similar review with findings that race and class were significant determinates of proximity to known and prospective environmental hazards and the timing and extent of remediation actions in 1997 (Szasz & Meuser, 2000). In a more recent review of the literature regarding differential exposures to environmental pollution, Evans and Kantrowitz found that significant relationships exist between a community’s ethnic and class characteristics and levels of exposure to environmental risk (Evans & Kantrowitz, 2002). Subsequently, Ringquist conducted a meta-analysis of 49 quantitative studies of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of environmental hazards and concluded that “there is ubiquitous evidence of environmental inequities based upon race” (Ringquist, 2005).
The second outcome of the 1990 Michigan summit was the establishment, later renamed the Office of Environmental Justice, within the EPA of an Office of Environmental Equity. Environmental Equity: Reducing Risks for All Communities is a 1992 report by the Environmental Equity Workgroup of the EPA. The report was extensively disseminated and immediately spurred the U.S. Congress to commence environmental justice hearings. As the first formal admission by the federal government of the existence of environmental inequities and the significance of correcting them, the study provided environmental justice concerns further weight and increased public attention.
By 1994, public awareness of environmental injustice had grown to the point where President Bill Clinton issued an executive order requiring all federal agencies, not just the EPA, to consider environmental justice concerns in all rulemaking. Several bills were also introduced in the U.S. Congress and various state legislatures. Meanwhile, the EPA maintained its efforts to construct a workable environmental justice strategy, relying primarily on Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In order to apply Title VI, the agency is merely required to demonstrate that action by industry or government regarding a polluting plant would result in a disproportionate outcome and not that the conduct was motivated by discriminatory intent. However, a 2001 Supreme Court decision (Alexander v. Sandoval) put doubt on the usefulness of applying Title VI to future environmental justice cases as the strategy of employing legal measures to achieve justice in areas of environmental inequity was unsuccessful (Alexander v. Sandoval, 2001).
The Ramification
Throughout the United States, communities of color, as well as poor and working-class white communities, have given rise to a variety of environmental justice-focused organizations. The communities where these populations live, work, and play were disproportionately impacted by various toxic and hazardous pollution and other environmental hazards. In response to these local health risks, community-based organizations arose to form a formidable grassroots organizing force. As Bullard explains, “In many instances, grassroots leaders emerged from groups of concerned citizens (many of them women) who see their families, homes, and communities threatened by some type of polluting industry or government policy” (Brulle & Fellow, 2006).
Thus, the Environmental Justice Movement was formed, and a framework for social transformation was developed to contain the following terms (Brulle & Fellow, 2006):
1. incorporates the principle of the right of all individuals
to be protected from environmental degradation,
2. adopts a public health model of prevention (elimination of
the threat before harm occurs) as the preferred strategy,
3. shifts the burden of proof to polluters and dischargers who
do harm or dis- criminate or who do not give equal protection
to racial and ethnic minorities and other “protected” classes,
4. allows disparate impact and statistical weight, as opposed to
“intent” to infer discrimination, and
5. redresses disproportionate risk burdens through targeted action
and resources.
Depending on the neighborhood in which they developed, efforts to oppose environmental unfairness took on many forms. Anti-Toxics and Citizen-Worker movements emerged in the white working class. In communities of color, it took the form of the Environmental Justice Movement or the People of Color Environmental Movement. Environmental justice groups typically take the shape of a decentralized movement made of multiple local community organizations. Moreover, these local organizations have built networks, such as the Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste and the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, that enable them to engage in coordinated joint actions at the state, regional, and national levels.
The rise of environmental justice movements has had a considerable impact on local politics, litigation, and state and national politics. Unquestionably, the Environmental Justice Movement has achieved its most resounding successes at the level of grassroots community fights. Some examples include shutting down major incinerators and landfills in Los Angeles and Chicago, preventing the construction or expansion of polluting operations (such as the chemical plant proposed by Shintech Corporation in Louisiana), and making improvements and abatements at existing sites (such as the North River Sewage Treatment plant in Harlem). The Environmental Justice Movement has unquestionably succeeded in engaging environmental justice politics where it counts.
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