Environmental Justice

environmental justice, social movement seeking to address the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards among the poor and minorities. Advocates for environmental justice hold that all people deserve to live in a clean and safe environment free from industrial waste and pollution that can adversely affect their well-being. From a policy perspective, practicing environmental justice entails ensuring that all citizens receive from the government the same degree of protection from environmental hazards and that minority and underprivileged populations do not face inequitable environmental burdens. Although most environmentalists embrace environmental justice, a few traditional environmentalists have criticized the movement as an attempt to shift the focus away from important environmental issues toward more-anthropocentric concerns, such as racism, classism, and sexism.

Environmental justice started as a grassroots movement during the early 1980s in areas of the United States where the minority and underprivileged faced disproportionate environmental burdens. The movement was galvanized in 1982 in Warren county, North Carolina, where an African American community was selected to be the site of a hazardous-waste landfill following years of illegal dumping of polychlorinate biphenyl-laden oil along the community’s roads. The events in Warren county led to the coining of the term environmental racism, defined as minority communities’ being targeted for the placement of waste-generating or waste-storage facilities and discriminated against in the enforcement of environmental standards. The environmental justice movement grew to combine traditional environmentalism with the conviction that all individuals have the right to live in a safe environment.