The Environmental Justice Movement - Part One

TITLE: The Environmental Justice Movement – Part One

AUTHORS: Renee Skelton and Vernice Miller, with contributions by Courtney Lindwall

COPYRIGHT: Natural Resources Defense Council, https://www.nrdc.org/stories/environmental-justice-movement(accessed 4/19/25)

PERMISSION TO USE granted by the NRDC per online guidelines.

The Natural Resources Defense Council was founded in 1970 as the first national environmental advocacy group to focus on legal action. The NRDC helped pass the 1972 Clean Water Act and has since grown to more than three million members and online activists utilizing the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and other environmental specialists to:

·      confront the climate crisis,

·      protect the planet’s wildlife and wild places, and

·      ensure the rights of all people to clean air, clean water, and healthy communities.

On August 22, 2023, the NRDC published an article titled “The Environmental Justice Movement.” It is a well-written summary of “an important part of the struggle to improve and maintain a clean and healthful environment.”

THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT – PART ONE

Environmental justice is an important part of the struggle to improve and maintain a clean and healthful environment, especially for communities of color who have been forced to live, work, and play closest to sources of pollution.

The environmental justice movement—championed primarily by Black people, Latines, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous People—was born of a statistical fact: Those who live, work, and play in America's most polluted environments are commonly people of color and those living in poverty. Because of environmental justice advocates, we now know this as environmental racism, and it’s precisely what communities of color have been battling for decades.

What is environmental justice? 

Environmental justice essentially means that everyone—regardless of race, color, national origin, or income—has the right to the same environmental protections and benefits, as well as meaningful involvement in the policies that shape their communities. But rarely has this been the reality for people of color and those with low incomes. That’s because virtually all environmental injustice is shaped by the same patterns of racism and inequality that have existed in the United States since its founding and continue to influence every facet of our society, from education to housing to health care.

For example, to this day, majority-white and wealthy communities are where investments into infrastructure are more likely to be made, where environmental laws are more likely to be properly enforced, and where polluters are more likely to be held accountable or kept away entirely. By comparison, the most marginalized communities are routinely treated as the areas where highways can be built, waste can be stored, industrial warehouses and facilities can be concentrated, and where natural resources can be readily exploited or destroyed.

What’s worse, the most affected communities often experience multiple environmental threats at once. A single resident may drink lead-contaminated tap water and go to school near a soot-producing, coal-fired power plant. When such threats compound, and are exacerbated by other social and economic vulnerabilities, residents face even higher health risks. This is why the environmental justice movement has long worked to change these unjust patterns.

How Warren County protests led to a national movement

The story of how the environmental justice movement became a national one can generally be traced back to Warren County, North Carolina. In the late 1970s, the state’s government was deliberating where it could store 6,000 truckloads of soil laced with toxic PCBs. It decided on rural, poor, and overwhelmingly Black Warren County. That quickly became the focus of national attention. 

Residents were furious that state officials had dismissed concerns over PCBs leaching into drinking water supplies. Many veterans of the Civil Rights Movement—often affiliated with Black churches—shared their sentiments and showed up. Among them were Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. and Reverend Joseph Lowery, then of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Reverend Leon White of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. The dump trucks still rolled into Warren County in mid-September 1982, headed for a newly constructed hazardous waste landfill in the small community of Afton. But the same frustrated residents and their allies stopped the trucks by lying down on roads leading into the landfill. Six weeks of marches and nonviolent street protests followed, and more than 500 were arrested—the first arrests in U.S. history over the siting of a landfill.

Other communities of color had organized to oppose environmental threats before Warren County. In the early 1960s, Latine farmworkers organized by Cesar Chavez fought for workplace rights. In 1967, Black students took to the streets of Houston to oppose a city garbage dump in their community that had claimed the lives of two children. In 1968, residents of West Harlem, in New York City, fought unsuccessfully against the siting of a sewage treatment plant in their community. But the Warren County protests and accompanying legal challenges are considered by many to be the first major milestone in the national movement for environmental justice.

The people of Warren County ultimately lost the battle, and the toxic waste was deposited in that landfill. But their story—one of ordinary residents driven to protect their homes from a toxic assault—fired the imagination of many across the country who had lived through similar injustices. These events even inspired a new faction within the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, several early environmental justice leaders came out of it. They understood that the environment was another front in the struggle for justice, and they brought with them many of the same tactics—like marches, petitions, coalition building, community empowerment, litigation, and nonviolent direct action.

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