Since the turn of the century, the environmental movement in the United States has been dominated by predominantly white organizations (5). The movement’s whiteness was premised and fortified upon a legacy of overt racism that evolved into institutionalized racism (6). At the turn of the century, it was unthinkable that ethnic minorities would be granted access to fishing and hunting clubs that were featured in the early wilderness preservation and conservation movements—precursors to modern-day environmentalism (7). Considered one of the most progressive of the early environmental organizations (and currently the largest), the Sierra Club deliberately excluded African Americans, Jews, and other minorities through a policy of “sponsorship” that allowed established members to exclude nonwhites and non-Christians (8).  National parks and public beaches, created through the efforts of early environmental campaigns,  banned access based on race (9).

In the midst of the de facto, institutionalized racism of mainstream environmental organizations, the United States was accumulating a toxic legacy of catastrophic proportions. This legacy was partly the result of unfettered industrialization and a consequence of poorly understood effects of chemical pollutants. It was widely assumed that everyone shared the burden of hazardous and toxic wastes equally. This assumption was found to be untrue.

In 1982, U.S. Congressional Delegate Walter Fauntroy—arrested during protests that year to stop the siting of a hazardous waste landfill in predominantly African-American Warren County, North Carolina—asked the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) to “determine the correlation between the location of hazardous waste landfills and the racial and economic status of the surrounding communities in the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region IV (which includes North Carolina)”.  The GAO results were startling. It concluded: “Blacks make up the majority of the population in three out of four communities where landfills are located” (10). The GAO study, while important, was limited by its regional focus. Thus, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC-CRJ) attempted to ascertain whether the GAO results had national implications. The 1987 UCC-CRJ report—Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States revealed that race was the most significant factor in determining the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities. The report noted that communities with the greatest number of commercial hazardous waste facilities had the highest composition of racial and ethnic residents; in addition, the study found that three out of every five African-American and Hispanic-American citizens lived in communities with uncontrolled waste sites. It also reported that minority communities were disproportionately targeted for hazardous waste facilities (11). Several years later, in 1992, the National Law Journal issued a special report, Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law, which stated that “there is a racial divide in the way the U.S. Government cleans up toxic waste sites and punishes polluters. White communities see faster action, better results, and stiffer penalties than communities where blacks, Hispanics, and other minorities live . . . unequal protection often occurs whether the community is wealthy or poor” (12). These findings, coupled with the legacy of de facto racism within the U.S. Green movement, inspired UCC–CRJ Director Ben Chavis’ concept of environmental racism.

This particular racism was the genesis moment for a broad-based, grassroots movement for environmental justice. Proponents of the movement have argued for the need to eliminate biased, unjust, and inequitable conditions and decisions long rooted in a broad array of domains including land use planning, transportation policy, housing, and public health—all of which can have adverse, discriminatory environmental consequences (13). The movement’s principal champions have worked to (re)conceptualize racial and ethnic dimensions of environmental problems and the environmental facets of economic and social justice concerns; in these efforts, they have worked to redefine and expand the notion of what represents an environmental problem (14). They are addressing social and economic injustice simultaneously with the environmental concerns. Those arguing for environmental justice maintain that while all people have a right to be protected from environmental degradation, communities disproportionately burdened by pollution and benefiting last from cleanup efforts by government agencies should be disproportionately targeted for remediation efforts and resources (15). The focus on resolving the discriminatory aspects of environmental degradation and mitigation efforts, however, compels us to rethink our understanding of global environmental problems and existing proposals to solve them.

References and notes

7. Stephen Fox, John Muir and His Legacy: The American Conservation Movement (Little Brown, Boston, 1981), p. 351.

8. Op. cit. 5, p. 76. Many Sierra Club chapters maintained this policy well into the 1960s.

9. Marc R. Poirier, “Environmental Justice and the Beach Access Movements of the 1970s in Connecticut and New Jersey: Stories of Property and Civil Rights,” 28 Connecticut Law Review 719 (1996), pp. 741–742.

10. U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO), Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (GAO/RCED-83-168) (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1983), p. 1.

11. United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Waste and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Wastes Sites (Public Access, New York, 1987), p. 9.

12. National Law Journal (NLJ), Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law, A Special Investigation (NLJ, Washington, D.C., 1992), p. S1.

13. For environmental justice responses to (a) land use planning and housing, see R. Bullard et al., eds., Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy (UCLA Center for African Studies Publications, Los Angeles, 1994), p. l; (b) transportation, see E. Mann, Driving the Bus of History—The Bus Riders Union Models a New Theory of Urban Insurgency in the Age of Transnational Capitalism (Verso, London, forthcoming, 1998); (c) public health, see National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), NIH, Symposium on Health Research Needs to Ensure Environmental Justice: Executive Summary and Proceedings, February 10-12, 1994, Arlington, Virginia (NIEHS: Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 1994).

14. For a thorough presentation of "Principles of Environmental Justice" and their ramifications for many aspects of environmentalism, see Charles Lee, ed., Proceedings: The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit (United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, Washington, D.C., 1991).

15. Robert Bullard, "Conclusion: Environmentalism with Justice," in Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, Robert Bullard, ed. (South End Press, Boston, 1993).