essay writing on environmental justice

Environmental Justice: Pollution Essay

Environmental justice is a relatively recent social movement that aims to include marginalized communities that are unduly affected by the climate crisis in environmentalist activism. People of color living in the global south and urban ghettos are disproportionately affected by the climate emergency due to institutional neglect and unfavorable industrial, governmental, and commercial policies. However, the environmentalist discourse has so far been dominated by affluent white people from the developed West. In response, various organizations have begun advocating for equal environmental protection and local community involvement. Therefore, environmental justice seeks to be inclusive and meaningfully involve all affected communities in the decision-making process regardless of ethnicity, race, or income status.

One phenomenon that environmental justice is combatting is the disproportionate amount of air pollution in neighborhoods populated by black people. A haunting example is the death of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old mixed girl who died of a fatal asthma attack and cardiac arrest because of the unlawful levels of toxic fumes near her home in London (Laville, 2020). However, the issue of environmental racism transcends national boundaries and is likely to be repeated in other regions of the world. Black people in the United States are 75 percent more likely to live near facilities that produce hazardous waste (Villarosa, 2020). They are also exposed to 1.5 times more sooty pollution, which causes respiratory issues, cardiovascular discuses, COVID-19, and premature death (Villarosa, 2020). Nevertheless, African-Americans continue to be severely underrepresented in environmental nonprofits, government agencies, and NGOs. This trend is exactly the type of issue that environmental justice is attempting to overcome by funding educational programs and giving local community leaders the opportunity to participate in the decision-making process.

Laville, S. (2020). Ella Kissi-Debrah: how a mother’s fight for justice may help prevent other air pollution deaths. The Guardian.

Villarosa, L. (2020). Pollution is killing black Americans. This community fought back . The New York Times.

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ORDINARY PEOPLE. EXTRAORDINARY IMPACT.

The 2024 Goldman Prize winners will be announced Monday, April 29. Learn more.

What environmental justice means—and why it matters.

January 4, 2022

Environmental activism isn’t just about protecting the natural world—it’s also about protecting people. Nowhere is this concept better illustrated than with the environmental justice movement. At its most basic level, environmental justice asserts that environmental issues and social justice are inextricably linked.

What is Environmental Justice?

Environmental justice is the idea that people of all cultures, races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds deserve fair protection from environmental and health hazards, as well as equal access to the decision-making processes behind environmental policies and development.

Historically led by Black, Latino, Indigenous, and low-income communities, the environmental justice movement in the United States has a few separate but connected goals:

Highlight the fact that historically marginalized groups of people—generally low-income and/or Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities—are disproportionately affected by pollution, climate change, and other environmental dangers.
Work to stop corporations, businesses, and government bodies from placing landfills, chemical plants, oil refineries, and other pollution-causing sites in or near marginalized communities; help create a cleaner, healthier, and safer environment for these groups.
Give disenfranchised communities the ability and tools to participate in policy decision-making about the environments in which they live and work.

In an interview with Earth First! Journal , pioneer of the environmental justice movement Dr. Robert Bullard summarized, “The environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. And so we can’t separate the physical environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do.

The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement

The environmental justice movement isn’t new. Historically oppressed groups have fought for their environmental well-being for years, but the concept didn’t gain widespread meaning and momentum in the United States until the latter half of the 20th century. Among its many goals, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s prompted activists of all kinds to reckon with a difficult reality: African Americans were often experiencing severe health effects as a result of living in close proximity to toxic landfill sites and polluted areas.

In 1968, Black activists came together during the Memphis Sanitation Strike to fight for better working conditions for Memphis garbage workers. The strike marked the first time a group of people in the United States collectively opposed unfair environmental practices. Then, over a decade later, in 1979, a group of Black homeowners in Texas formed the Northeast Community Action Group to oppose a proposed landfill near their local schools. Their lawsuit cited environmental discrimination and set a precedent for activists to come.

However, it wasn’t until a 1982 protest in Warren County, North Carolina—when over 500 Black civil rights activists gathered to protest a landfill in their community—that the fight for environmental justice finally attracted national attention and spurred mainstream coverage and research.

The Evolution of the Movement

Over the past several decades, elected officials and the larger public have become increasingly aware of unfair environmental practices manifesting as environmental racism and class discrimination.

A 1987 study was the first of its kind to highlight the significant correlation between race and toxic waste site locations. The report found that over 15 million African Americans, 8 million Latinos, and half of all Asian/Pacific Islanders and Indigenous Americans resided in communities with at least one abandoned or uncontained toxic waste site.

Since then, countless groups and councils have formed to address environmental inequities, including the Indigenous Environmental Network , the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice , and the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council . In 1990, Dr. Bullard published Dumping in Dixie , the nation’s first book on environmental injustice. Then, in 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order to funnel federal resources into addressing the poor environmental conditions in minority and low-income populations.

Policy-makers have increasingly joined the efforts to create change, enacting new laws and bringing oversight to the issue, but individual grassroots activists are still the driving force behind the environmental justice movement. A large number of Goldman Prize winners have been part of that movement and have helped push the nation—and the world—forward.

For 13 years, teacher-turned-activist Margie Richard (United States, 2004) led a community campaign to fight against the Shell refinery that released toxic chemicals into the air near her home in Louisiana. Thanks to her tireless work, Shell agreed to reduce its emissions by 30% in 2000.

Activist and high school student Destiny Watford (United States, 2016) mobilized her community to prevent an incinerator from being built in her Baltimore neighborhood. Grandmother Sharon Lavigne (United States, 2021) held peaceful protests to stop the construction of a plastics manufacturing plant next to the Mississippi River, and continues to campaign against industrial projects in her community.

Sharon Lavigne joins community members in adding flowers to a fence around the Buena Vista Cemetery, the burial site of enslaved ancestors

Environmental Justice Today

Today, the environmental justice movement also focuses on the ramifications of a global and insidious threat: climate change. A 2021 report from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows how climate change is harming vulnerable populations in the United States.

The report found that African Americans are 34% more likely to live in areas with high rates of childhood asthma, and 40% more likely to live in areas with extreme temperature-related deaths.

Recently, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to establish the first White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council , as well as the Justice40 Initiative , which will work to ensure that 40% of clean energy and climate investments go to disadvantaged communities.

There’s still a long way to go in the fight for environmental justice, but there is progress. Thanks to grassroots activism and increased public awareness about climate change and other environmental issues, more elected officials, corporations, and concerned citizens are making strides to ensure that everyone has access to a clean environment.

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Environmental justice.

Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard Rebecca McWilliams Ojala Ballard Florida State University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1347
Published online: 22 November 2023

The Environmental Justice Movement emerged in the 1980s as a political framework uniting diverse struggles by multiply marginalized communities (especially communities of color) against disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Since then, environmental justice has expanded to encompass not just the pollution and hazardous waste issues that first inspired it but a range of other environmental health concerns and environmental rights, and it is best understood as an extensive network of political projects that extends in time and space beyond its 1980s US origins. Despite a common narrative situating environmental justice as one relatively recent stage of the environmental movement, environmental justice has important historical precedents in the organizing work of minoritized communities outside of mainstream Western environmental thought or politics. Similarly, beyond social movements, philosophical work on environmental justice puts pressure on many assumptions of Western environmental thought, revising environmental critiques of anthropocentrism to situate human concerns in multispecies contexts and centering Indigenous and non-Western ways of understanding and living in relation to land. Environmental justice issues have been represented in diverse literatures and across genres (nonfiction prose, literary fiction, poetry, drama, popular and speculative genres, etc.) since the emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement in the 1980s. However, the concerns of the Environmental Justice Movement are evident in earlier literary works as well, particularly those by variously minoritized writers, and literary scholarship on environmental justice has often focused on reclamation and canon revision, seeking to identify the presence of environmental and especially environmental justice themes in literary works not previously articulated as environmental because they did not fit neatly into “nature writing.” Climate change produces a range of environmental justice problems relating to exposure, vulnerability, dispossession, and displacement, and 21st-century literature’s increasing engagements with climate change have led to both the telling presence and the telling absence of climate justice concerns. Environmental justice ecocriticism thus does not merely trace connections between the Environmental Justice Movement and literature explicitly responding to it but operates as an interpretive framework that considers the full range and broader implications of literature’s engagement (or lack thereof) with issues affiliated with environmental justice.

environmental
ecocriticism
anthropocentrism
multispecies
anticolonialism

Political Movements for Environmental Justice

“Environmental justice” is often used synonymously with “the Environmental Justice Movement.” The latter refers to a historically specific social movement whose formal origins are often tied to a series of 1982 protests in Afton, in Warren County, North Carolina, roughly twenty miles from the state’s northern border with Virginia. The 1982 protests responded to an event that had been unfolding since 1978 , when a man seeking to dispose of industrial waste containing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls, toxic industrial chemicals common in manufacturing before they were banned in the United States in 1979 ) illegally dumped more than 30,000 gallons of PCB-contaminated oil along roadsides in a number of rural counties in North Carolina. The perpetrator saw relatively lenient legal consequences; meanwhile, the illegally discarded oil soaked into roadside soil. When the state finally set out to address the thousands of truckloads of PCB-contaminated soil collected from 240 miles of road, it soon targeted Afton as the site of its proposed PCB landfill—a decision clearly motivated by the demographics of the poor, largely Black community and not by ecologically informed standards for safe site selection (including groundwater proximity and soil permeability). Political stakeholders ignored concerns from scientists and community members that the proposed landfill would contaminate groundwater supplies, a risk which loomed especially large since plans for the landfill ignored basic safety protocols which might have kept the waste from leeching out. In 1982 , as trucks carrying the contaminated soil approached the proposed disposal site, national civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United Church of Christ (UCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) worked with local residents to stage massive protests in the wake of failures to forestall the project through legal means. Marches, demonstrations, and lie-ins blockading the trucks lasted six weeks, and more than five hundred protestors were arrested. The event captured the attention of national media outlets and sparked widespread interest and outrage about the newly named problem of environmental racism , or the exposure of communities of color to pollution and other sources of environmental harm. Articulating the concept of environmental racism was a crucial step for the Environmental Justice Movement: it reframed environmental exposure not as something unfortunate but random but, rather, as a function and a form of institutional racism. Though racism is not the only issue environmental justice takes up, the Warren County protests established race as a crucial axis along which environmental harm is disproportionately distributed and racism as an explanation for who is rendered disproportionately vulnerable to environmental harm through exposure to the effects of environmental extraction, pollution, and degradation.

Though the Warren County protests failed to stop North Carolina from establishing the PCB landfill—which would eventually lead to contamination disasters, deleterious health issues, and belated cleanup efforts lasting more than a decade—the national spotlight the protestors had strategically worked to cultivate succeeded in attracting broader interest in environmental racism. In an effort to confirm the structural nature and scope of the problem, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, a SCLC leader and one of the wrongfully convicted “Wilmington Ten” activists whose convictions were eventually overturned, and who had been centrally involved in the 1982 protests, led the research and publication of a landmark 1987 study by the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites . 1 The study confirmed what many minority communities had been asserting for years: race was the most significant factor associated with exposure to toxic waste, and hazardous siting could only be interpreted as intentionally targeting communities of color. “Frontline” communities (those most directly and immediately experiencing environmental harm) and “fenceline” communities (those living adjacent to major pollutants and sources of environmental risk), in other words, tend to be composed of people of color.

The Environmental Justice Movement picked up more steam in the 1990s. In 1990 , sociologist Robert Bullard, whose wife had led a 1979 legal effort to resist the siting of a landfill in Houston on the grounds that it was a violation of anti-discrimination civil rights guarantees, published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality , 2 adding to a growing academic consensus and critical conversation. In the same year, movement leaders began to call out the racial failures of the “Big 10” mainstream environmental groups (including Greenpeace, the National Audubon Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, the Sierra Club, and others), citing racial bias in their hiring practices and a damning lack of policy attention to exposure to environmental hazards and its disproportionate distribution along racial lines; others reached out to officials in the US presidential administration of George H. W. Bush, with some degree of success. In October 1991 , the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice sponsored the four-day First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, DC, which saw wide participation and produced the “Principles of Environmental Justice,” a document with seventeen core tenets of environmental justice that continues to circulate widely and inform movement work. In 1994 , US president Bill Clinton, who had appointed Chavis and Bullard to positions on his transition team, signed Executive Order 12898, formalizing federal attention to the problem of environmental racism and racial disparities in environmental health. Throughout the remainder of the 1990s and into the 21st century , the Environmental Justice Movement has continued to expand beyond its earlier, US-based, hazardous-waste-disposal-focused origins. In the early 21st century , the Environmental Justice Movement also encompasses global (particularly Global South) movements, workplace as well as domestic exposures, and issues as diverse as land sovereignty and dispossession, resource extraction, vulnerability to natural disasters, environmental aesthetics and access to greenspace, and infrastructural exposure; and it increasingly attends to how intersecting identity categories such as gender, ability, age, and class inflect racialized forms of environmental harm. (As the section “ Environmental Justice in Anthropocene Literature ” will address, the Environmental Justice Movement has also shaped responses to climate change, which, like so many other environmental hazards, disproportionately affects the multiply marginalized.)

Environmental justice has a broader political history beyond the Environmental Justice Movement, however. Most immediately, the emergence of the movement in the 1980s is often read as part of a genealogy of various social movement precursors in the United States. Despite a still-too-common narrative that situates environmental justice as an outgrowth or stage of the mainstream environmental movement—an issue explored in more detail in the section on “ Philosophical and Ecocritical Implications of Environmental Justice ”—the US Environmental Justice Movement developed from African American civil rights activism not only in its attention to the structural conditions of anti-Blackness but also in terms of the protest strategies, national organizations, and individual relationships that shaped its early emergence. Other important antecedents include a number of local antitoxics movements such as the one at Love Canal, a New York suburb near Niagara Falls which made national headlines in 1978 when residents realized their idyllic community had been built on top of a landfill replete with toxic industrial wastes and identified this as the reason for previously unexplained patterns of cancer, birth defects, and other adverse health outcomes. Such political projects stemmed from the broader concern with the long-term effects of chemical exposure launched in 1962 with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ; while the antitoxics movement did not always focus on the intersection of social marginalization and environmental exposure, tending sometimes toward elite “NIMBYism” (short for “Not In My Backyard”), it did inform the Environmental Justice Movement’s account of environmental racism. Other proto-environmental-justice struggles were focused specifically on the racialized dimensions of space: the Latina group Mothers of East Los Angeles, for instance, organized in the 1980s around resistance to the establishment of a prison in their community, linking that project to the building of the highway system through the neighborhood years before and later extending their efforts to encompass resistance to the construction of waste incinerators in Latinx and Black neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area. Still others focused on racially determined exposure beyond the home: Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, for instance, worked from the 1960s onward with the United Farm Workers and its antecedents and took on exposure to pesticides as a labor issue for farm workers (with particular attention to pesticide exposure as a feminist reproductive issue). Even further back, US public health movements from the turn of the 20th century encompassed urban health and occupational welfare, while for centuries, continuing into the present, Indigenous communities in both Global South and Global North countries have resisted settler colonial land theft and environmental destruction.

In other words, the Environmental Justice Movement should not be studied without recognizing the political history of environmental justice both avant la lettre and beyond the boundaries of US politics. The Warren County protests provided the terminology and formalized a coherent understanding of the Environmental Justice Movement, and they thus remain one important center of gravity, but it would be demonstrably false to suggest they are the origin of political movements for environmental justice, which are grassroots, diverse, and globally as well as historically extensive. Another center of gravity might be the Zapatista movement, which began in 1994 in the Mexican state of Chiapas, and its calls for various forms of land sovereignty and resistance to extractivism. Another might be the Indigenous groups in Ecuador who filed a class action lawsuit against Texaco in 1993 in response to disastrous petroleum pollution in the Lago Agrio oil field from the 1960s onward. Another might be Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People and the 1990 presentation to the Nigerian government and the United Nations of the Ogoni Bill of Rights protesting and demanding redress for the devastating ecological, cultural, and economic effects of oil extraction in the Niger Delta. Another might be the 1989 lawsuit, brought by the island nation of Nauru and settled in 1993 , holding the Australian government responsible for environmental damage due to phosphate mining. Another might be Pan-African resistance to the exporting of toxic waste from the West to Africa for disposal in the 1980s and 1990s. Another might be the 1984 chemical accident at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, exposing more than half a million people to toxic gas. Another might be militarism in the Pacific Islands, from the US seizure of the Hawaiian island of Kahoʻolawe in 1941 as a military testing site that would continue in use during the Vietnam War and catalyze decades of Native Hawaiian resistance via the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana movement, to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific group that emerged in the 1970s, contesting decades of nuclear testing in the Pacific by Western powers. Yet another might be a century of organized efforts by the United States and Canadian governments to force Indigenous tribes off of oil-rich land to make room for petro-extraction, and the diverse ways these communities fought back. These are among the many global projects of resistance to environmental racism and its intersections with capitalism and imperialism.

Another way to put this is to say that environmental justice is most usefully understood as a political framework for identifying, drawing global connections among, and collectively contesting the structural forces which establish certain spaces—and the communities who live, work, and play in them—as “sacrifice zones,” areas marked by the powerful as disposable in the service of profit. In other words, though the Environmental Justice Movement began in 1982 , environmental justice itself did not. There is an important distinction between the Environmental Justice Movement and the more inclusive, less US-centric concept of environmental justice as a framework for interpreting structural inequity, one uniting a variety of movements at the intersection of environmental harm and political marginalization.

Philosophical and Ecocritical Implications of Environmental Justice

Western environmentalism’s narrative of its own history tends to center, and to identify as an origin, mainstream environmental philosophies and aesthetics. It also tends to situate environmental justice as a relatively recent development within the larger context of environmentalism in general. According to this narrative, contemporary environmentalism begins in the West, often with the late 18th - and early 19th-century preoccupation with nature and the natural during the Romantic period, progresses through the preservationist and conservationist commitments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as the management of natural resources and environmental services began to be institutionalized by imperial and settler colonial states, and coheres in the 1970s into a concern with protecting a degraded natural world for its own sake; concerns about the effects of environmental degradation on human health and well-being (and their uneven distribution along lines of social power) are framed as one among a number of recent shifts within environmental thought.

This (admittedly somewhat oversimplified) account of environmentalism produces particular understandings of environmental philosophy and aesthetics. It tends to prioritize ecocentrism or biocentrism over anthropocentrism and to frame environmental concerns as altruistically protecting nature and not as fighting for the rights of human communities, including one’s own. In the realm of aesthetics, it tends to value representations of wilderness or “untouched” nature as a counterbalance to human civilization and development. Environmental justice, however, offers a very different set of philosophical, ethical, and aesthetic commitments, which also carry with them distinct aesthetic and ecocritical values. Environmental justice has major implications not only for philosophical thought related to environmentalism and the nonhuman but also for ecocriticism—environmental approaches to literary interpretation. As ecocritic and cultural studies scholar T. V. Reed argued in 2002’s “Towards an Environmental Justice Ecocriticism,” an environmental justice framework requires not only different political values from other forms of ecocriticism but also different aesthetic and critical emphases, different corpora and canons, and different ethical stakes with respect to literary analysis. 3 Environmental justice, in other words, is not merely an area of concern or set of issues to be represented within ecocriticism but a call to rethink various foundational premises of the study of literature and environment. There are at least three major philosophical areas—wilderness/ecocentrism; (multi)species; anticolonialism—in which environmental justice has differentiated itself from mainstream environmental thought not as a new stage of mainstream environmentalism but as a different tradition altogether. These areas also inflect the study of environmental literature and culture through an environmental justice framework. While its major philosophical interventions are foundational to the way the environmental justice framework has been articulated in distinction to mainstream environmental thought, the point is not that they represent a “new stage” which began to emerge in the 1980s. Instead, as the 1991 “Principles of Environmental Justice” indicate, these philosophical tenets speak to longstanding philosophical, ethical, and political work by marginalized communities, with intellectual genealogies that are largely separate from hegemonic forms of Western environmentalism.

Against Anthropocentrism: Two Variations

One crucial way in which environmental justice has articulated its differences from mainstream (Western) environmental thought concerns a rejection of the preoccupation with “wilderness,” whether as a physical space hegemonically (and fictively) constructed as “untouched by human influence” and thus marked for enhanced political attention and protection, or as a cultural value and aesthetic distinguishing anthropocentric from biocentric values. Historian Ramachandra Guha’s 1989 essay “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique,” published in Environmental Ethics , played a crucial role in establishing this point. 4 Guha took aim at “deep ecology,” a radical environmental philosophical-political movement, dominant within environmental discourse during the previous decades, which called for a shift from anthropocentric ethics to biocentric ones,. Though deep ecology masquerades as universal, Guha suggested, it is actually quite provincial, tied specifically to the histories and values of the United States; radical environmental thought, his essay showed, looked very different in other national contexts, even in Global North countries like Germany. Further, Guha argued, deep ecology’s fetishizing of wilderness preservation had little to do with the most pressing contemporary environmental crises of overconsumption and militarization, and indeed served primarily to distract from the structural elements of those problems, thus leading to policies which exacerbated social inequality and furthered US imperialist aims. Finally, Guha critiqued and corrected deep ecology’s appropriative misreading of the Asian philosophical and historical roots to which it often laid claim. In “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation,” then, Guha sought to unsettle deep ecology’s positioning of biocentrism as an unproblematic environmental value in order to clear space for radical forms of environmental thought that focused less on the aestheticized ethics of wilderness and more on the political analysis of broadly Western and specifically US environmental harm.

Within a US framework, environmental justice has similarly rejected the preoccupation with wilderness. Take, for instance, environmental historian William Cronon’s 1995 essay “The Trouble with Wilderness: Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” which also critiques the US tradition of equating “wilderness” with “environmentalism.” 5 Though Cronon, unlike Guha, focuses explicitly on how a Western environmental genealogy culminates in American wilderness culture, the two come to allied if not identical conclusions. They both argue that deep ecology’s emphasis on wilderness is ultimately a problematic US export, and that the idea of wilderness inevitably serves the interests of the powerful elite who do not protect wilderness so much as produce it by forcibly removing Indigenous inhabitants from environments that have long been shaped by human-nature interaction, have long enabled human thriving, and have only recently been identified as “untouched” wilderness in need of top-down protection. Consequently, they both argue that environmentalism, if it were to identify non-“pristine” spaces as equally worthy of protection and care, would be not only more effective in terms of protecting nonhuman nature from human degradation but also more just in terms of human concerns. Though Guha and Cronon are only two examples, they represent two important claims of the environmental justice critique of wilderness. First, emphasizing wilderness obscures the real nature of the environmental dangers and devastations of global industrial modernity. Second, human concerns, particularly in relation to social justice, can and indeed should be part of any environmental politics: anthropocentrism need not be a dirty word.

Guha and Cronon illustrate environmental justice’s rejection of purist biocentrism, or, put differently, its rejection of the rejection of anthropocentrism. In this context, the next major distinction under discussion might seem to be something of a contradiction: namely, the turn toward multispecies thinking. There is an important difference, though, between the deep-ecology-inflected construction of strictly non human nature and an environmental justice approach to thinking the more- than-human. The former collapses “the human” into a homogenous unity and evacuates it to emphasize an imagined version of untouched nature separate from the concerns of human difference and justice. The latter contends that humans and nonhumans cannot be cleanly separated and that the same structures, processes, and ideologies which cause disproportionate environmental harm to socially marginalized humans also wreak havoc on nonhuman beings and environments; it thus calls for the recognition of multispecies intimacies and the extension of a justice framework to multispecies collectives.

Feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway offers a useful illustration of the way environmental justice and the multispecies turn have intertwined. From her publications on primatology in the 1980s and 1990s; to her theorization, in the 1985 / 1991 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” of the cyborg as a figure which crosses the fundamental Western boundary of human/animal as well as other, related boundaries (living/machine and physical/non-physical); to her scholarship addressing human-canine interactions in 2003’s Companion Species Manifesto and 2007’s When Species Meet ; to her most recent work on multispecies kinship and community in the Anthropocene (as in 2016’s Staying with the Trouble ), Haraway offers a consistent example of how multispecies work within an environmental justice framework can move beyond the human without replicating the human/nature binary of deep ecology. 6 For Haraway, as for many theorists of the multispecies turn, turning away from a certain kind of anthropocentrism does not mean disavowing or deprivileging human questions of difference and justice. In fact, multispecies thinking in an environmental justice context is often based on the premise that a comprehensive approach to human issues of environmental justice requires engaging the more-than-human. The multispecies ethnography of anthropologist Anna Tsing, for instance, engages nonhuman species to examine the complex entanglements, violence, and possibilities of modernity and capitalism, as in 2015’s The Mushroom at the End of the World , which uses the matsutake to trace the ecological and social manifestations and impacts of commodity chains and probe (per the book’s subtitle) “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.” 7

Multispecies environmental justice work often overlaps with feminist and queer politics, linking multispecies intimacies to queer and feminist disruptions of empiricism, subjectivity, and embodiment, as well as to ecofeminism’s interest in the intersections of “nature” and our ideas about it with social constructions and experiences of gender and sexuality. 8 Even beyond an explicitly feminist context, however, questions of environmental justice are frequently articulated through a multispecies lens: in What is Critical Environmental Justice? , for instance, sociologist and scholar of both ethnic and environmental studies David Naguib Pellow frames the project of environmental justice in relation to multispecies relationships and agencies, emphasizing that justice cannot be materially understood without mapping how environmental harm travels through more-than-human assemblages. 9

These pressures from environmental justice philosophy have also inflected ecocriticism. Environmental justice ecocriticism redirects environmental aesthetics away from a fetishizing of nonhuman “purity” and toward an interest in the representational dimensions of environmental problems and experiences beyond wilderness spaces. It thus articulates an ecocritical approach whose proper range of study is more capacious than “nature writing” and which is more sensitive to a wide range of places as “environments” capable of marking a text as “environmental literature.” It also attends to the presence and representation of more-than-human worlds and intimacies, especially in relation to how they both reveal and shape differences in human experience. In other words, an environmental justice framework shapes considerations of anthropocentrism not only in philosophy and critical theory but also in ecocritical attention and interpretation.

Decolonizing Environmental Justice

The first two major theoretical distinctions between environmental justice and mainstream environmental thought concern revisions and re-imaginings of the meaning and stakes of anthropocentrism. The third is rooted in the anticolonial project of working outside of Western cosmologies, epistemologies, and histories. This project not only takes aim at the mainstream environmental movement and its legacies of imperialism, racial capitalism, and militarism, which critics of wilderness-based environmentalism have also called out; it also puts pressure on any expressions of environmental justice which too readily accept the basic operating terms of settler states and capitalist logics.

Often articulated from an Indigenous studies perspective, this pressure takes varied forms. For instance, environmental studies scholar Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi) analyzes the presentist discourses of environmental catastrophe which obscure the centuries-long nature of the settler-produced climate crisis Indigenous communities have experienced acutely. 10 Geographer Max Liboiron (Red River Métis/Michif) asserts that settler colonialism shapes much of the scientific practice associated with environmentalism and environmental justice and articulates the importance of anticolonial scientific models. 11 Similarly, scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Mississauga Nishnaabeg) calls for centering (rather than decontextualizing and selectively appropriating) Indigenous knowledge and relationships to land in environmental justice efforts. 12 Beyond these North American examples, global decolonial work has sought to disentangle environmental justice from the norms, values, and assumptions of settler colonialism and capitalism so as to put pressure on how environmentalism’s and environmental justice’s understandings of humanity echo what, to follow Caribbeanist philosopher Sylvia Wynter, might be understood as the overrepresentation of Western conceptions of Man. 13

There are important philosophical alliances, then, between environmental justice and the postcolonial. In the realm of ecocriticism, these alliances have been particularly strong. Postcolonial ecocriticism, even when not explicitly taking up political questions of environmental justice or their representation in literary and cultural texts, shares with environmental justice ecocriticism an investment in redefining the terms and intellectual genealogies through which the concept of “environmental” literature is defined. Attending to ways of living in relation to land that predate, were produced within and against, and continue to resist and evade colonialism, anticolonial environmental scholarship situates particular instances of environmental justice in extensive histories of empire and racism. Postcolonial ecocritics have reshaped the environmental canon, directing critical attention to literary and cultural objects which engage the environment but might not read as “environmental” through a Western lens; they have used this new canon to redefine environmentalism itself, engaging anticolonial thought and cultural practices through literary works. In and beyond ecocriticism, postcolonial environmental thought calls attention not only to specific environmental harms but to the broader structures, systems, and indeed cosmologies informing those harms, a perspective that has become especially pointed in the context of climate change.

Literatures of Environmental Justice

Scholars and actors invested in environmental justice have frequently turned to literature and the arts for their ability not only to represent environmental justice issues for audiences but also to generate political and emotional investments in addressing those issues. In her contribution to The Environmental Justice Reader , “From Environmental Justice Literature to the Literature of Environmental Justice,” American studies scholar Julie Sze argued for the importance, to the generally social science–dominated discipline of environmental justice, of artistic texts and interpretive humanities methods: “Cultural texts, such as novels,” Sze argued, “broaden the emerging academic field of environmental justice studies by enhancing our understanding of the experience of living with the effects of environmental racism . . . and connecting environmental justice with other intellectual and activist fields.” 14 Sze’s intervention set the tone for 21st-century work on environmental justice and culture, explicitly highlighting aesthetic objects for their ability not just to document environmental harm but to represent it in uniquely compelling and theoretically rich ways.

This critical approach has found fertile ground for its activities. Since the emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement in the 1980s, a large and growing number of literary works have addressed inequalities of environmental exposure, the violation of environmental rights, and the experience of participating to various degrees in political projects of resistance to environmental injustice. Many of these works are in the genres of narrative nonfiction, memoir in particular, with writers documenting environmental exposure and injustice with more or less explicit references to their personal involvement in the issues they cover. American science writer Rachel Carson is an early and important example of such a figure: her 1962 work Silent Spring translated scientific accounts of the deleterious ecological and human health effects of the indiscriminate use of pesticides into vivid, compelling prose. 15 Though Carson herself was fighting breast cancer, which would cause her death in 1964 , she took pains to conceal this fact, in no small part out of fear her vociferous critics in the petrochemical industry would be able to use it to discredit her warnings of the carcinogenic effects of pesticides as personally motivated and overblown. Silent Spring is written not as a memoir but as a work of nonfiction nature writing. In later decades, however, environmental justice writers would tend toward much more explicitly personal disclosures of their investments in the issues about which they wrote. Environmental humanities scholar Rob Nixon calls such figures “writer-activists,” arguing that they use prose (especially nonfiction) to document environmental harms and create social change. His 2011 book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor looks at many examples of Global South writer-activists, such as Kenyan activist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, who established Kenya’s Green Belt Movement in the 1970s, and Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who co-founded the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People in 1990 and was executed in 1995 after years of protesting the Royal Dutch Shell oil company and its destruction of the Niger Delta: their autobiographical writings, such as Saro-Wiwa’s 1995 diary of his time as a prisoner before his execution, A Month and a Day: A Detention Diary , and Maathai’s 2006 memoir Unbowed , link structural accounts of environmental racism and state complicity to personal stories which help to galvanize empathy and outrage. 16 Similarly, environmental health memoirs such as 1991’s Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place , by US environmentalist Terry Tempest Williams, and 1997’s Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment , by US biologist Sandra Steingraber, weave the memoirists’ own experiences with cancer into broader accounts of chemical and nuclear exposures causing cancer clusters and of state failures to address these issues. 17 In this way, environmental justice shifts the parameters of environmental nonfiction away from the wilderness-focused “nature writing” of figures such as John Muir and toward narratives that regard human lives and environments affected (often deleteriously) by humans as worthy of attention. In particular, the genre of memoir engages deep ecology’s rejection of anthropocentrism insofar as it is organized around human life, even as environmental justice memoirs intimately address the more-than-human world.

In addition to memoir and other nonfiction, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have also seen a proliferation of fiction which weaves fictionalized accounts of real environmental justice issues and movements into characters’ lives. Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) addresses extractivism and Indigenous land sovereignty in all of her works, including through discussion of the global nuclear complex in 1977’s Ceremony and multiple plotlines dealing with hemispheric movements for environmental justice in 1991’s epic Almanac of the Dead . 18 Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) frequently incorporates Native North American environmental justice issues into her fiction, from 1990’s Mean Spirit , which revisits the violent exploitation of the displaced Osage in the 1920s, when oil was discovered on their new territory, to 1995’s Solar Storms , which describes the destruction of the Boundary Waters area by a fictionalized version of the hydroelectric dams of the James Bay Project, tto 1998’s Power , which follows human-animal entanglements in Florida,to 2008’s People of the Whale , which takes up Indigenous fights for water rights in the Pacific Northwest. 19 Chicana writer Ana Castillo’s 1993 novel So Far from God includes industrial workplace exposure to harmful substances among the many issues women of color face, while the 1995 novel Under the Feet of Jesus by another Chicana writer, Helena María Viramontes, centrally features the injustice of migrant farm workers’ exposure to pesticides. 20 American-Canadian author Ruth Ozeki’s fiction takes up wide-ranging questions of environmental harm, including factory farming and hormones in 1998’s My Year of Meats and agribusiness in 2003’s All Over Creation . 21 Maori author James George’s 2006 novel Ocean Roads traces global legacies of nuclear and other military devastations, emphasizing nuclear testing in the Pacific Islands. 22 British-Indian writer Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People offers a picaresque take on the aftermath of the Bhopal disaster. 23 Cameroonian-American novelist Imbolo Mbue’s 2021 novel How Beautiful We Were follows an African community’s fight against an American oil corporation. 24

These texts are only a small sampling of literary engagements with the global Environmental Justice Movement: while they are some of the most commonly studied and taught examples of “the literature of environmental justice,” they are by no means the only such works. Even in these brief examples, however, what should be evident is the extent to which the literature of environmental justice takes up the philosophical commitments of environmental justice. These authors reject wilderness as the only truly “environmental” aesthetic and expand the boundaries of “environmental literature” beyond wilderness writing, paying attention to environments as varied as the city, the farm, the factory, and the mine. They unpack the social construction and multispecies contexts of the “human” in Western humanism, showing the intimacies between human and nonhuman animals and the ways in which human environmental degradation affects marginalized humans and nonhumans alike. Finally, they incorporate decolonial thought by narrating the lasting violence of empire, presenting conflicts which are explicitly linked to environmental racism and colonialism, directing narrative energy against those systems, and dealing with cosmological and ethical systems beyond those of the West.

In addition to these works of literary fiction, which tend to represent “ordinary” characters dealing with fictionalized versions of historically grounded environmental justice issues in a real-world context, genre fiction has also begun to include environmental justice themes. In the United States in particular, one of the most prevalent genres in which environmental justice appears is mystery fiction. Chicana author Lucha Corpi’s Cactus Blood ( 1995 ), African American novelist Percival Everett’s Watershed ( 1996 ), and African American mystery novelist Barbara Neely’s third entry in the popular Blanche White series, Blanche Cleans Up ( 1998 ), all explore environmental justice themes through the conventions of noir and detective fiction, as protagonists investigate various environmental devastations and seek redress against corruption and suppression. 25 Speculative fiction is another genre where environmental justice issues have often been represented outside of specific, historically grounded events: Afrofuturist writers such as Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and N. K. Jemisin frequently take up the questions of exposure, embodiment, and extraction that motivate movements for environmental justice, situating those issues in speculative futures or alternate worlds. Meanwhile, beyond fiction, environmental justice is also a common theme in contemporary poetry (as evidenced by the curation and publication of anthologies like 2018’s Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology , which features many of the most prominent modern and contemporary poets who write about these issues) and in contemporary drama (as in Chicana playwright and activist Cherríe Moraga’s 1992 play Heroes and Saints , which represents pesticide exposure among Mexican immigrant farm workers). 26

The examples above are all literary works produced since, and indeed in conscious dialogue with, the emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement. However, just as it is important to look beyond the Environmental Justice Movement and see environmental justice as a political framework embracing global social movements that did not explicitly identify themselves as pursuing environmental justice, it is also important to register environmental justice ecocriticism as an interpretive framework which can help to identify environmental justice themes and concerns in a wider array of literary works. Some of these predate the Environmental Justice Movement: there are many 19th-century realist narratives dealing with pollution and associated public health issues of industrial modernity, as well as 20th-century works that explicitly address devastations that a 21st-century perspective might characterize as issues of environmental justice, including the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster in US poet Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead ( 1938 ), the Dust Bowl in US novelist John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath ( 1939 ), and conflicts between colonial and local land use and agricultural practices in South African writer Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather ( 1968 ), to name only a few. 27

Indeed, one of the major thrusts of environmental justice ecocriticism has been the work of literary reclamation. Environmental justice ecocriticism is often invested in making the case for the presence and importance of environmental justice frameworks in newly expansive archives, including pre-1980s literary and cultural genealogies as well as contemporary texts which have been excluded from the canon of environmental literature because they were produced by minoritized writers whose understandings of “environmental” had more to do with the framework of environmental justice than with the assumptions of mainstream Western environmentalism. 28 This ecocritical project takes shape both in works of literary criticism and in projects of curation and collection such as Ghost Fishing and poet and critic Camille Dungy’s 2009 anthology Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry . “For years,” Dungy writes in the introduction to Black Nature , “poets and critics have called for a broader inclusiveness in conversations about ecocriticism and ecopoetics, one that acknowledges other voices and a wider range of cultural and ethnic concerns,” but because “the poetry of African Americans only conforms to these [Western nature writing] traditions in limited ways,” because “in a great deal of African American poetry we see poems written from the perspective of the workers of the field,” these calls were not heeded and ecopoetics lacked an understanding of a specifically Black environmental literary imagination. 29

In other words, environmental justice ecocriticism, rather than targeting a subset of environmental literature, often engages with the environmental and social ideas of a much broader corpus of texts. Furthermore, since environmental justice ecocriticism has, since its inception, been in dialogue with cultural studies, the field puts pressure not just on the “environmental” but also on the “literary” boundaries of “environmental justice literature,” widening the frame in order to take up for analysis a variety of cultural objects and aesthetic texts which do not fit neatly within the canonical strictures of the literary. 30 In short, to work in environmental justice ecocriticism is to take seriously the nuanced relationship between environmental justice and the literary, attending not only to how literary works represent specific issues of the Environmental Justice Movement in a variety of literary genres and through a variety of relationships to documentary or the “real,” but also to the ways in which historically, geographically, and formally diverse cultural objects reflect and refract the more capacious political frameworks of environmental justice for distinct political ends.

Environmental Justice in Anthropocene Literature

Climate change presents, if not new, at least newly inflected issues of environmental justice. Broadly, “climate justice” refers to the structural understanding that climate change is neither equally produced nor equally experienced by all humans: the Global North has been and continues to be disproportionately responsible for the carbon consumption and emissions driving climate change, and vulnerable populations are disproportionately likely to suffer from the effects of climate change. These effects include land loss from sea level rise, geographic and infrastructural vulnerability to heat waves, hurricanes (whose strength is impacted by warmer temperatures) and wildfires (which occur during a greater part of the year), poor air quality, food and water shortages, and exposure to pathogens whose reach and danger are enhanced by changing climate conditions—all of which lead to increased threats to poor people, people of color, and people with disabilities. Climate justice, then, is a framework that insists on the importance of recognizing human difference, power, and justice in the context of climate change: like environmental justice, it attends to how environmental harm produced by the powerful rebounds onto marginalized human populations.

Climate justice is very much a feature of many literary engagements with climate change. Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower ( 1993 ) and Parable of the Talents ( 1998 ) 31 are often identified as among the earliest works of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction. These critical dystopian novels, set in a near-future United States, weave global warming into the characters’ daily lives as well as into the macro-scale political features of the dystopian world, paying particular attention to how environmental devastation has rendered the already socially marginalized even more vulnerable to interpersonal and structural as well as environmental violence. Butler’s early attention to climate justice echoes through many climate-focused works of speculative fiction from the 1990s onward. For instance, science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 near-future novel The Ministry for the Future addresses climate justice both in its exposition of the unequal harm that climate change inflicts across different human populations and in its titular establishment of an intergenerational structure seeking to secure climate justice for future generations. 32 Beyond speculative fiction, contemporary environmental literature often addresses issues of climate justice, as in Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel Salvage the Bones , which narrates a Mississippi family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina, or Craig Santos Perez’s (Chamorro) 2020 poetry collection Habitat Threshold , which situates the Anthropocene in historical and present networks of colonialism and racial capitalism. 33

Even so, climate justice is too frequently relegated to the background even in literature that addresses climate change. Increasingly, as the effects of anthropogenic climate change have become more evident and public awareness of the phenomenon has increased, it seems that (nearly) all Anthropocene literature is environmental literature—that the boundaries between “environmental literature” and the rest of the contemporary canon have begun to erode. But if climate change has permeated contemporary literature, the same cannot be said of climate justice, at least not to the same degree. Too often, Western conversations about the Anthropocene represent climate change as something that unites humankind, sweeping aside differences as if all humans face the same crisis—a perspective historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has put into critical conversation with the commitments of postcolonial studies. 34 Some literary engagements with climate change reproduce this perspective—as, for example, in speculative fictions or storylines within literary fiction that situate climate violence as something which may befall even the privileged in the future, rather than as something already affecting the less powerful in the present.

Climate change thus presents an especially striking example of the importance of decolonial thought to an environmental justice framework. For, particularly in the context of climate change, environmental justice ecocriticism often aims to identify or interpret not only the presence but also the telling absence or misrepresentation of climate justice in literature about climate change—to emphasize the ways literary objects reinforce varied rather than monolithic perspectives on the Anthropocene. 35 Climate change, in short, contributes new dimensions of political and environmental harm to the intersections of environmental justice and literary study, even while staying within environmental justice ecocriticism’s commitment to widening the frame and questioning the assumptions of mainstream environmentalism.

Discussion of the Literature

The study of environmental justice in literature was first articulated in the early 2000s in terms of a second “wave” of ecocriticism, one that was moving away from an earlier orientation toward deep ecology and biocentrism and toward engagement with different kinds of environmental spaces, experiences, and ethics. Literature scholars Joni Adamson, Mei Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein’s 2002 edited collection, The Environmental Justice Reader , is a benchmark in the emergence of environmental justice as a humanistic field of study, encompassing essays on social movement history and ethnography, ecocritical approaches and literary engagements with environmental justice, and pedagogical approaches to environmental justice from a humanities perspective. 36 The Reader established the lines along which a great deal of subsequent humanistic environmental justice scholarship would proceed, in particular the way it modeled various forms of the critical expansion of the parameters of critical attention which would continue to drive environmental justice ecocriticism. One foundational dimension of this expansion concerned disciplinary boundaries. Environmental justice scholarship is necessarily interdisciplinary, and environmental justice ecocriticism often both draws from and addresses other environmental studies disciplines. In other words, environmental justice ecocritics argue not just for the presence of environmental justice issues in literature but for the political impact and significance of literary representations of environmental justice issues. Julie Sze’s essay in the 2002 Reader illustrates this trend, which continues to shape the way environmental justice ecocriticism not only engages with environmental science, policy, and social history in its interpretation of culture but also shows how cultural objects exert agency in those fields. 37

Another common move of environmental justice ecocriticism concerns the expansion of the boundaries of the “environmental literature” which is the object of ecocritical attention. Environmental justice ecocriticism follows environmental justice politics in emphasizing the thought and work of minoritized groups and individuals—not making an assimilationist argument for their “inclusion” in a broader environmental movement, but seeing what environmentalism looks like and how it changes when it begins from these histories and subject positions. The Reader includes essays on Pacific Island, Nigerian, and other Global South environmental figures, movements, and cultural fields as well as work on US ethnic politics and literature. In the years that followed its publication, environmental justice ecocritics began tracing genealogies of environmental justice thought and literature that predated the emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement, as well as pursuing the (often related) project of articulating Indigenous, postcolonial, and Global South forms of environmental thought that emerged outside of Western frameworks. US examples of this trend include Jeffrey Myers’s Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature ( 2005 ) and Paul Outka’s Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance ( 2008 ). 38 Major works in Global South and postcolonial ecocriticism (which has important overlaps with environmental justice ecocriticism: see “ Decolonizing Environmental Justice ”), include Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism ( 2006 , revised 2015 ), Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee’s Postcolonial Environments ( 2010 ), focusing specifically on Anglophone Indian novels, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley’s edited collection Postcolonial Ecologies ( 2011 ), Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor ( 2011 ), Cajetan Iheka’s Naturalizing Africa ( 2018 ), the edited collection Latinx Environmentalisms ( 2019 ), and Jennifer Wenzel’s The Disposition of Nature ( 2020 ). 39 Environmental justice ecocriticism has also expanded its reach in terms of conceptualizing marginalization, attending to disability and sexuality as well as race, ethnicity, gender, and class. 40

Drawing on its foundational interest in articulating how literature and literary studies can contribute meaningfully to interdisciplinary and extra-academic projects, environmental justice ecocriticism has given significant and sustained attention to the difficulties of communicating about environmental harm in effective and compelling ways. Literary scholars have taken up sociologist Ulrich Beck’s concept of the “risk society” in relation to environmental health and harm in works such as Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet ( 2008 ), which examines how literary works represent the new planetary scale of environmental risk, and Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures ( 2010 ), which names the phenomenon of “transcorporeality,” the permeability of the human body to nonhuman matter, and shows how writers have grappled with it. In a similar vein is Nixon’s work on slow violence, which reshaped environmental justice ecocriticism, with its titular concept becoming a way to name various forms of environmental injustice that operate gradually rather than directly. Though not primarily focused on environmental justice, Timothy Morton’s use of the concept of the “hyperobject” 41 also fits into this category of ecocritics grappling with problems of scale and representation. More recently, ecocritical work on literature’s political utility has begun to take up questions of affect 42 and, in the emergent field of empirical ecocriticism, to work across disciplines to measure the effects of environmental literature. 43 These new developments extend longstanding investments in the interdisciplinary significance of environmental justice ecocriticism for shaping public engagement with environmental justice.

Introduction

1. root causes of climate change and climate injustices, 2. climate justice: distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions, 3. injustices of climate responses, 4. the pursuit of climate justice, questions for classroom discussions, acknowledgments, competing interests, climate justice in the global north : an introduction.

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Prakash Kashwan; Climate Justice in the Global North : An Introduction . Case Studies in the Environment 5 February 2021; 5 (1): 1125003. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2021.1125003

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This essay provides a broad-based and jargon-free introduction to climate justice to foster critical thinking, engaged discussions, and profound reflections. It introduces the reader to three dimensions of justice—distributional, procedural, and recognitional justice—and shows how each relates to climate justice. A unique contribution of this essay is to identify and discuss the following three blind spots in the debates on climate justice: (1) the tendency to focus heavily on post hoc effects of climate change while ignoring the root causes of climate change that also contribute to injustices; (2) assuming incorrectly that all climate action contributes to climate justice, even though some types of climate responses can produce new climate injustices; and (3) although scholars have studied the causes of climate injustices extensively, the specific pathways to climate justice remain underdeveloped. This essay concludes by showcasing a few examples of the ongoing pursuits of climate justice, led by social justice groups, local governments, and some government agencies.

Climate change is an existential threat to human civilization. The increased frequency of climate-related disasters has been responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in different parts of the world. 1 Yet climate change does not affect everyone equally; its consequences are distributed unequally between world regions, countries, and social groups within countries.

Countries that make up the Global North, or the “developed countries” (For a useful discussion of the vocabulary of developing versus developed countries, see https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/04/372684438/if-you-shouldnt-call-it-the-third-world-what-should-you-call-it .), have benefited significantly from the energy-intensive industrial development responsible for warming the earth’s atmosphere. However, the poorest countries pay a steep price, especially highly vulnerable small island nations (e.g., Kiribati, the Solomon Islands, Papa New Guinea, Haiti, and Guinea-Bissau) contributing the least to the climate crisis. Therefore, global policy experts often describe climate justice as an international issue.

The rapidly increasing emissions from China, India, and other middle-income countries cause concern, especially for the poor, who must bear the worst consequences of deteriorating land, water, and air quality. However, the climate crisis unfolding now is a result of the accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the earth’s atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, to which middle-income countries have contributed very little. According to one estimate, the United States alone has contributed nearly 35% of the total cumulative global CO 2 emissions since 1750. 2 Irrespective of where one stands on this debate, nationality and international borders are only two of several factors contributing to various types of climate injustices. Differences in income and wealth, race, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexual identities within countries also contribute significantly to climate injustices.

This essay’s primary goal is to introduce readers to climate justice questions within the Global North. Debating these questions in our backyard is vital because a focus on the poor people in the Global South detracts from a deeper understanding of inequalities and injustice at home. Equally important, a focus on the Global North allows for a better understanding of the root causes and the here-and-now nature of the currently unfolding climate crisis. The socially discriminatory effects of climate change are evident from the reportage of climate-related disasters in the United States and elsewhere, especially beginning with Hurricane Katrina [ 1 ]. Therefore, it is useful to think of climate justice as a framework to recognize and redress the unequal distribution of costs and burdens of climate change and climate responses of various types. Moreover, climate justice also requires ensuring that those affected most severely by climate change participate in brainstorming, developing, and implementing climate responses.

Attaining a substantive and deep understanding first requires recognizing three blind spots in climate justice discussions. One, even though the leading cause of climate change is related to energy-intensive lifestyles, most climate change discussions, including those on climate justice, often focus on the effects of climate change. A comprehensive explanation of climate justice requires avoiding such post hoc tendencies and centering our discussions on climate change’s root causes. Two, very often “radical” climate response is equated with climate justice, which does not hold in all circumstances. As the discussions below show, some radical climate responses may contribute to new kinds of injustices. Three, even though understanding the sources and the effects of climate injustices is necessary, such understanding does not translate easily into the specific actions needed to realize climate justice in practice. Accordingly, this essay concludes with a brief discussion of several ongoing pursuits of climate justice.

An in-depth inquiry into the historical trajectory of climate change and climate denialism of the past half century shows that the concentration of political and economic power has been a significant cause of the current climate crisis. The distribution of power influences how environmental amenities (e.g., clean air) and problems (e.g., pollution) are valued and distributed within national boundaries. The current economic system and the patterns of consumption it promotes are responsible for environmental degradation and environmental injustices [ 2 ]. For example, a select few multinational corporations control nearly all the global food business and consume 75% of the entire food sector’s energy requirements—but feed a much smaller proportion of the world’s population[ 3 ]. More broadly, the wealthiest 10% of the world’s population produces almost as much GHG emissions as the bottom 90% combined [ 4 ]. The extent of income inequalities within the United States and the UK shows that these inequalities are not merely due to the differences in national economic growth, which advocates of the free market often present as a solution to poverty and underdevelopment. For instance, income growth over the last few decades has lowered the well-being of large parts of the U.S. population while supporting profligate consumption among the wealthiest [ 5 ]. Such a lopsided distribution of economic growth benefits is responsible for increased precariousness among large sections of the Global North population, the climate crisis, and the myriad climate injustices.

One manifestation of the imbalances in political and economic power is corporate climate denialism, which powerful corporations engineered to protect the status quo’s benefits. Fossil fuel multinational corporations based in the United States have known since the early 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels caused global warming and climate change. The documents made public during the ongoing lawsuits against Exxon Mobil show that instead of acting on their knowledge of global warming, major fossil fuel corporations orchestrated a campaign of climate denialism [ 6 ]. These campaigns sowed seeds of doubt among the public and allowed the federal and state governments to continue supporting the fossil fuel industry’s expansion.

Data from the Washington-based Environmental and Energy Study Institute suggest that as of the year 2019, the U.S. government awarded approximately US$20 billion per year in direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. Eighty percent of these subsidies went to the natural gas and crude oil industries, while the coal industry received the remaining 20%. 3 Similarly, the European Union subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by an estimated 55 billion euros (or approximately US$65 billion) annually. These subsidies give fossil fuel corporations enormous power over governments in economically underdeveloped countries, such as Nigeria and Angola, where fossil fuel extraction occurs. Therefore, fossil fuel subsidies exacerbate international inequalities that date back to European colonization and continue to shape developmental disparities today [ 7 ].

The adverse environmental and public health impacts of fossil fuel subsidies cost the global community an estimated US$5.3 trillion in 2015 alone [ 8 ]. The costs of environmental toxicity burdens fall disproportionately on the poor and marginalized community groups who lack the political and economic power to hold the business and political actors to account. The situation is especially problematic in some of the poorest oil exporting countries, such as Angola and Nigeria. However, as the vast scholarship on environmental justice shows, the poor and racial minorities in the United States also suffer the worst consequences of environmental pollution from landfills, toxic waste dumps, and petrochemical facilities [ 9 ]. One particularly hard-hit area is a stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which hosts many highly polluting petrochemical facilities. Because of the pollution caused by the petrochemical industries, residents there have such high rates of cancer that the areas is known as the “Cancer Alley” [ 10 ]. Cancer Alley has been a focal point of the U.S. environmental justice movement for over three decades [ 11 ]. However, there has been no perceptible change in the extent of environmental injustices in the Cancer Alley and other Petrochemical hubs. These toxic hot spots create dangerous new hazards in the face of the calamities linked to the climate crisis.

Hurricane Laura made landfall in Louisiana in August 2020 with a wind speed of 150 mph, which made it the strongest Category 4 hurricane on record since 1856. A Yale University report suggested that climate change may explain the rapid intensification of Atlantic hurricanes, such as Laura, which caught the forecasters and the public off guard. 4 That results in even more severe impacts on the poor because they are least well prepared to confront these crises. These calamities are especially dangerous for communities living in areas such as Cancer Alley. Well into the second day after the deadly winds from Laura had died down, the residents of Mossville were grappling with the effects of toxic gases released from a fire that erupted during the storm in a chlorine plant owned by BioLab in Westlake, Louisiana. 5 Mossville constitutes an archetypical case of the confluence of environmental and climate injustices. Still, it is also a testimony to the deeply entrenched and ongoing effects of the history of slavery in the United States.

Mossville was founded in 1790 by formerly enslaved and free people of color, who sought refuge in a swamp to escape the oppression of segregation. They made it into a community that practiced agriculture, fishing, and hunting for generations. However, successive rounds of zoning decisions by White elected officials transformed Mossville into the “ground zero of the chemical industry boom.” 6 Industry owners forced most residents to sell off their properties. At the same time, those who stayed had no choice but to suffer the consequences of prolonged exposure to industrial pollution and toxic contamination. 7 Mossville’s struggles are not just a domestic issue either. The Lake Charles Chemical Complex responsible for devastating effects on the local environment and the health and well-being of Mossville residents is under the management of the South African Synthetic Oil Limited (SASOL). The apartheid-era South African government, hamstrung by international sanctions, established SASOL in 1950 to transform coal into fuel and chemicals using a technology developed by engineers in the Nazi-era Germany. 8 This environmentally degrading technology is no longer in use, but SASOL’s record of social and environmental impacts remains appalling.

The fossil fuel industry is also tightly coupled with the defense industry, which aids the U.S. foreign policy goal of controlling the supply of oil, rare minerals, other extractive industries, and strategic shipping lanes crucial for transportation. 9 It is common knowledge that the Bush administration’s desire to control oil supply was one of the primary motivations for the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq. The Department of Defense is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States and the world’s single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels [ 12 ]. The so-called military-industrial complex 10 exists to influence political decisions to support state subsidies for the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. In other words, political and administrative decisions, not some random mistakes or unavoidable trade-offs, are responsible for endangering the health of the planet and the lives of poor racial minorities in areas like Cancer Alley and communities like Mossville.

Tragically, the Black communities who suffer the most from these environmental injustices are also subject to myriad other injustices, such as the police brutalities that have catalyzed a global Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Social scientists Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze argue that the phrase “I can’t breathe,” which became a rallying cry for the BLM, points to the environmental and social conditions through which “breath is constricted or denied” [ 13 ]. The military-industrial complex is responsible, in more than one ways, for producing the “embodied insecurity of Black lives” [ 13 ]. For example, a Department of Defense program called “1033” enables local police departments to purchase “surplus” war zone equipment, including the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles. 11 The Ferguson Police Department deployed some of this military-grade equipment on the streets of Ferguson to suppress public protests against the police shooting and killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. 12 Investigations by the Public Accountability Initiative, a nonprofit corporate and government accountability research institute, show that police foundations that support local police departments are partially funded by fossil fuel corporations such as Chevron, Shell and Wells Fargo. Their report concluded: “Many powerful companies that drive environmental injustice are also backers of the same police departments that tyrannize the very communities these corporate actors pollute” [ 14 , 15 ].

These complex links between social, environmental, and climate injustices are reminders that it may not always be useful to consider social, environmental, and climate injustices in isolation from one another. 13

“Climate justice” is commonly thought of as the unfair distribution of costs and burdens of climate change. However, two other dimensions of justice spelled out by justice theorists are equally important: procedural and recognitional justice. This section explains each of these three dimensions and their relation to pursuits of climate justice.

2.1. Distributional Effects of Climate Change

Distributional justice focuses on a fair distribution of costs and burdens of climate change and the societal responses to climate change. Vulnerability to climate change is a result of a lack of protection against risks linked to natural events. If everyone in society were equally protected, the costs and burdens related to a disaster would not fall disproportionately on some social groups. However, individuals and groups, such as racial minorities, homeless people, people with disabilities, single moms, and poor people, are more vulnerable to the effects of disasters. These vulnerabilities are a result of policies and programs that push racial minorities and other socially marginalized groups into poverty and destitution. Exclusionary zoning laws and redlining policies during the New Deal era illustrate this point well. The term “redlining” referred to the practice of drawing red lines on urban planning maps to identify African American neighborhoods as being “too risky to insure mortgages.” 14 These maps informed the actions of the Federal Housing Administration, the Veterans Administration, and Home Owners Loan Corp., thereby depriving African American towns and neighborhoods of public investments. The members of minority communities could not buy properties in some areas because the administration “reserved” these neighborhoods for affluent White families [ 16 ].

This history of urban segregation and racially prejudiced urban and suburban developments is why inner-city neighborhoods lack basic civic amenities and infrastructure that middle-class neighborhoods take for granted. These historical legacies translate into increased vulnerabilities in the context of the climate crisis. For example, an estimated 400,000 New Yorkers who live in the New York City Housing Authority’s public housing developments bore the worst effects of Hurricane Sandy in October–November 2012. The floods that occurred because of Hurricane Sandy greatly exacerbated rampant mold problems in these projects, with far-reaching health impacts for residents with respiratory illnesses [ 14 ]. The quality and affordability of housing for minorities are also among the causes of “energy poverty” or high energy burden, which is the percentage of income a person or household spends on energy [ 17 , 18 ]. Energy poverty makes it difficult to cope with the impacts of storms and floods while also leaving the energy-poor families vulnerable to the shocks related to increased energy prices that could result from a transition to renewable energy.

The problem is equally or even more severe in the predominantly African American rural areas. For instance, a 2017 report in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene found that among 55 adults surveyed in Lowndes County, Alabama, 34.5% tested positive for hookworms. The presence of this intestinal parasite is a sign of extreme poverty. Specifically, it results from an inadequate sewage system with cracked pipes of untreated waste that contaminate drinking water. In some places, this results in open pools of raw sewage, which flush human feces back into kitchen sinks and bathtubs during the rainy season [ 19 ]. Environmental and climate justice activist Catherine Flowers argues that the intensification of heavy rains and floods because of the ongoing climate crisis is overwhelming the broken sewer systems and undermining poor African Americans’ lives and livelihoods [ 20 ].

The distributive injustices of the economic system have become even more pronounced in the presence of large and increasing wealth and income inequalities. These distributional inequalities affect entire regions and local juridisctions, undermining their ability to provide civil amenities in the aftermath of a natural disaster and ensure human security. A stark reflection of these distributional consequences is that the poor and the marginalized experience the most devastating impacts of a climate disaster, that is, the loss of human lives.

2.2. Procedural Rights

Another important dimension of climate justice is procedural justice, which refers to whether and how the groups most affected by climate change have meaningful opportunities to participate in brainstorming, designing, and implementing climate responses. Historically, African Americans and other racial minorities have been under-represented in environmental and climate movements. The U.S. environmental justice movement has been calling attention to this issue for a quarter of a century, yet the problem of a lack of diversity persists. Research on 191 conservation and preservation organizations, 74 government environmental agencies, and 28 environmental grant-making foundations shows that racial minorities constitute 16% of staff and board members. Once recruited, members of minority communities tend to concentrate in lower ranks, trapped beneath a glass ceiling [ 21 ]. Although environmental institutions have made significant progress on gender diversity, such gains have mostly accrued to White women [ 21 ]. Such an under-representation in environmental movements leads to the exclusion of minorities from policy-making processes, which also creates the mistaken assumption that racial minorities are too poor to care about the environment or climate change. However, nationally representative surveys show that people of color, including Hispanics/Latinos, African Americans, and other non-White racial/ethnic groups, are more concerned than Whites about climate change [ 22 ]. Even so, higher levels of awareness are not sufficient to foster meaningful participation, which requires carefully designed processes that facilitate respectful engagement between members of marginalized groups and decision makers, such as city leaders [ 23 ].

The involvement of those affected most by climate change is essential for two key reasons. First, there are legal, statutory, political reasons for ensuring broad-based participation. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development sets out three fundamental access rights: access to information, access to public participation, and access to justice as key pillars of sound environmental governance [ 24 ]. Agenda 21 has subsequently been integrated into various national, provincial, and local statutes and continues to be a source of learning for the ongoing debates about just transition [ 25 ]. The access rights are also in conformity with recognizing political and civil rights as the essence of universal rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A second reason for ensuring local participation has to do with the substantive effects of an inclusive process. Those most affected by the climate crisis are also likely to contribute the most insightful ideas about how best to address the vulnerabilities that produce climate injustices in the first place. For example, the Office of Sustainability in the city of Providence, RI, partnered with the city’s Racial and Environmental Justice Committee to make sure that the city’s climate action plan adhered to the Just Providence Framework developed previously by the city residents and leaders. 15 This process turned out to be so successful that the city’s Climate Action Plan metamorphosed into a Climate Justice Plan. Additionally, the city’s Office of Sustainability adopted a system of governance that is based on collaborating actively and routinely with community-based organizations. 16

2.3. “Recognitional” Justice

The promises of procedural justice remain unfulfilled in many cases because people from all social groups are not always recognized as legitimate actors, whose understanding of a problem and whose interests and priorities should inform the design and implementation of policies and programs [ 26 ]. On the other hand, marginalized groups are subject to mis recognition, which Nancy Fraser refers to as an institutionalized pattern of cultural values that “constitutes some social actors as less than full members of society and prevents them from participating as peers” [ 27 ]. Thus, the twin concepts of recognition and misrecognition are related to patterns of “privilege and oppression,” which manifest in the form of “cultural domination, being rendered invisible, and routine stereotyping or maligning in public representations” [ 26 ]. In a very profound way, recognition and misrecognition are the foundational questions of climate justice with wide-ranging consequences. As David Schlosberg has argued, a lack of respect and recognition often leads to a decline in a person’s or a group’s “membership and participation in the greater community, including the political and institutional order” [ 28 ]. Therefore, a lack of recognition presents a formidable barrier against addressing procedural and distributional concerns.

The following example illustrates how questions of recognition manifest in climate policy contexts. Harvey, a category 4 hurricane, struck Houston in August 2017. Maria, a category 5 hurricane, struck Puerto Rico in September. A review of public records from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and interviews with more than 50 people involved with disaster response revealed that the Trump administration’s response was far more swift in Houston than Puerto Rico, which experienced far greater destruction [ 29 ]. Many Puerto Ricans believed that this was more evidence that the president viewed them as “second-class American citizens” [ 30 ]. On numerous occasions, President Trump criticized Puerto Rico for being a “mess” and its leaders as “crazed and incompetent,” which constitutes an instance of misrecognition [ 31 ]. The Governor of Puerto Rico Tweeted, “Mr. President, once again, we are not your adversaries, we are your citizens” [ 31 ]. The Governor of Puerto Rico felt that the Trump administration did not recognize their rights as U.S. citizens, which influenced how the federal government responded to the most devastating climate-related disaster to date in the United States. Such lack of recognition or misrecognition is not new; it did not start with the Trump administration. Even though Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, the national political process treats them as subordinates. They do not have voting representation in the U.S. Congress or the Presidential elections. Unfortunately, a more detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this essay. Still, other scholars show how the environmental and climate injustices experienced by the people of Puerto Rico result from a long history of colonialism, occupation of large parts of the island’s territory by the U.S. Navy, and the neoliberal policies imposed on the island [ 32 , 33 ].

African American citizens in the United States have had very similar experiences, even though the political process does not disadvantage them formally. The dominant narratives used in media and political discourse, which often describe African American men as aggressive, angry, and prone to criminal violence, reinforce longstanding prejudices against racial minorities. Such negative constructions of social identities lead some to perceive the presence of African American men in the wilderness, or even in parks, as suspicious or threatening. A May 2020 incident involving an African American birder in New York’s Central Park illustrates the point. The birder asked a White woman jogger to leash her dog, as the law required. However, instead of following the park rules, the woman called the cops on the birder. A video recorded by the birder and circulated widely on social media showed the woman repeatedly telling the cops on the phone that “there’s an African American man threatening my life” [ 34 ]. Afterward, several other African American birders and hikers shared similar racial profiling experiences on social media with hashtags like #BirdingWhileBlack and #HikingWhileBlack. A common theme evident in each of these experiences is that many White people in the United States do not perceive or recognize Black people as birders, nature photographers, or hikers [ 35 , 36 ].

Other social groups, such as indigenous people and Latinx, are also often subject to prejudices and profiling, which contribute to the negative construction of their identities and instances of misrecognition in society and politics [ 37 ]. As Nancy Fraser argues, misrecognition and negative stereotyping can contribute to the institutionalization of prejudiced norms within public policies and programs, for example, via the zoning and redlining practices that sacrifice the interests of negatively portrayed groups. Notwithstanding the racialized histories of urban development in the United States and elsewhere, some commentators argue that the considerations of social justice will muddle the efforts to decarbonize the economy “quickly and efficiently.” 17 This argument draws on the perspective that there are significant trade-offs between climate action and climate justice.

One relevant example is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which many see as a boon for providing abundant natural gas supplies crucial to the “transition” away from the dirty fuel of coal. They argue that the relatively more climate-friendly energy available from natural gas, coupled with economic benefits that local communities gain in the short term, must be weighed against the risks of adverse public health and environmental consequences. 18 Yet, laws that protect the privacy of proprietary data hinder public access to information about the health and ecological consequences of the chemical cocktails used in fracking, even though such information is vital to the goals of public health and environmental protections. Overall, a broader systems approach suggests a significantly more extensive set of adverse consequences, including the “impacts from the decline in water quality on soil, land, and ecosystem productivity (crops/animal health); effects of fracking-related air pollution on pollinators; effects on the development of local, alternative food systems; and, fracking-related boom-bust dynamics” [ 38 ]. The range of these negative consequences raise questions about the narratives of trade-offs in fracking .

Some proponents of a speedy transition to renewable energy also cite the supposed tradeoff between efficiency and equity to argue for allowing competent energy companies to develop, install, and own industrial-scale renewable energy grids. However, this view ignores the many benefits of wide-ranging consultations and collaborations with local communities that could enhance the public acceptance and efficacy of renewable energy infrastructure [ 39 ]. Somewhat ironically, some of the most challenging trade-offs may be witnessed in communities most vulnerable to climate change, for example, indigenous communities that seek to secure their “sovereignty by the barrel” because the compulsions borne out of marginality constrain their choices for economic development. 19 Such a “take it or leave it” scenario of limited choices reflects longstanding disadvantages, which the ongoing climate crisis is likely to exacerbate. Overall, it is crucial to investigate the arguments about potential trade-offs in a nuanced way so that some parties do not weaponize these arguments [ 40 ].

Climate response has three components: mitigation, which refers to actions that help reduce emissions of GHGs; adaptation, which refers to measures that reduce vulnerability to the consequences of climate change; and resilience, which refers to the properties that enable a socioecological system to withstand the shocks of climate change. Although adaptation and resilience are closely intertwined, adaptation actions are generally thought of as responses to climate change impacts, while resilience actions are anticipatory. Each of these three types of “climate responses” has important implications for justice. Additionally, we briefly consider the importance of taking an intersectional approach to understanding climate action’s justice effects.

A central component of the efforts to mitigate climate change is to curtail carbon emissions linked to energy-intensive consumption. However, in democratic societies, one cannot merely ban or arbitrarily restrict energy-intensive activities, not least because many of these activities are a source of employment and other means of economic wellbeing for many lower-income families. The next best option is to put a price on carbon emissions, commonly referred to as “carbon tax,” which many scholars and practitioners see as one of the most effective means of climate mitigation. If we lived in a world of economic and wealth equality, a carbon tax would simply realign economic incentives without imposing excessive burdens on specific social groups. However, in the presence of massive economic and wealth inequalities, a carbon tax would affect poor and/or racial minority households very differently compared to others. Unless subsistence items, such as food, water, and energy were protected from the inflationary effects of carbon taxes, even a moderate level of the carbon tax could make these items too expensive for the poor in the United States.

In Paris, the Yellow Vest protestors cited economic inequalities and the unfairness of the gas tax that President Emmanuel Macron announced in 2019 as one of the main reasons for the protests. The protestors felt that it was unfair to ask low- and middle-income folks to “make sacrifices while rich people aren’t paying taxes anymore.” This feeling of unfairness contributed to “a sense of despair, as well as a sense of social injustice” [ 41 ]. The adverse effects of climate mitigation are not always contained within the national borders, though.

Carbon offsets projects, including some that may be funded by environmentally conscious consumers paying an airline a little extra to offset the emissions linked to their air travel, have been implicated in the dispossession and displacements of indigenous groups in different parts of the world. 20 Such projects may be less problematic when implemented within the Global North, characterized by the security of property rights and a robust rule of law. These conditions do not apply to most terrestrial carbon offset projects in Africa or Asia. Over 95% of forestlands are legally defined as public lands, even though most of these lands have been used customarily by indigenous peoples and other rural populations. Under those conditions, the financial returns linked to carbon offset projects incentivize powerful government agencies and private actors to set aside these lands for carbon offset projects, including in countries where customary land tenures are protected under the statute. The international community has developed social safeguards and other codes of conduct to regulate offset projects. However, research by the Center for International Forestry Research, the Oakland Institute, and the Rights & Resources Initiative shows that international offset projects contribute to widespread human rights violations [ 42 , 43 ].

Similarly, a large-scale switch to renewables, including electric or hybrid batteries, windmills, and solar panels, could lead to a sudden spike in demand for rare minerals, such as copper and cobalt. The mining of these minerals also often contributes to gross human rights abuses, including child labor and the degradation and depletion of natural resources, such as water, forests, and pastures crucial for local livelihoods in the Global South [ 44 ]. For these reasons, some scholars argue that industrial-scale renewable energy infrastructure can be as exploitative as the fossil fuel industry practices have been. Noticeably, this argument applies to industrial-scale renewable infrastructure. Renewable energy resources can also exist in the form of “energy commons,” which give local communities real stakes in making decisions about siting, pricing, and profit-sharing [ 45 ]. Such democratization of energy infrastructure is crucial for implementing a transition plan that suits the site-specific requirements.

Some consider climate adaptation, that is, the measures designed to deal with the climate crisis, to be synonymous with climate justice. The argument is that if the worst consequences of climate change fall on the poor and the marginalized, any interventions meant to adapt to climate change would necessarily help the poor. Yet not all climate adaptation measures are created equal. For example, coastal adaptation measures in response to sea-level rise should help sustain rather than disrupt subsistence and artisanal fishing, which are the mainstay of livelihood strategies for many coastal frontline communities. More broadly, as Dean Hardy and colleagues argue, “the land facing inundation is racialized land…that has been appropriated, settled, cultivated, and distributed through a long history of deeply racialized projects” [ 46 ]. They argue that sea-level rise adaptation planning must recognize the reality of such “racial coastal formations” and must commit to “resist the reproduction of and reinvestments in racial inequality in responses to climate change” [ 46 ].

The failure to address racial inequalities means that many urban climate adaptation interventions, such as public transit systems, public parks, and improved civic amenities, may increase property prices or rentals, which makes some areas unaffordable to their current residents. These changes lead to urban gentrification, which refers to the changes in a neighborhood’s composition because of changes in property values. It is called climate gentrification when such changes are related to climate change [ 47 ]. The framework of climate gentrification helps illuminate the social determinants of vulnerability. For example, as the rising sea levels and frequent flooding threaten expensive properties on Miami’s famed beaches, wealthy people invest in properties inland. The flux of new investments and new wealthy residents makes the previously low-income neighborhoods too costly to afford for low-income groups [ 48 ]. As human geographer Jesse Ribot has argued, “vulnerability does not fall from the sky” [ 49 ]. Considering that socioeconomic deprivations contribute to climate change-related vulnerabilities, any efforts to address climate injustice must address such disadvantages.

The discussions above demonstrate that climate injustices are not just about the “climate system” or “global warming” but are rooted firmly in the unequal patterns of vulnerabilities shaped by the distribution of social and political power and economic inequalities. Climate change’s social consequences manifest in outcomes related to urban development patterns, energy prices, urban transportation, food production, and food markets. By implication, the pursuit of climate justice also requires addressing these various sectors of the economy and society. The following are some examples of how local governments, civic groups, academic institutions, and social movements seek to pursue climate justice.

The fossil-fuel divestment movement popularized by 350.org has grown to secure commitments to divest more than US$14 trillion worth of investments made by more than 1,230 institutions, including religious institutions, pension funds, university endowments, and large charitable foundations. College students from several universities in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have made significant contributions to the global fossil fuel divestment movement’s ongoing success [ 50 ]. The decline of the fossil fuel industry, including the state-owned oil corporations in some of the largest oil producing countries, will undoubtedly lower environmental pollution and contribute to environmental and climate justice. Another example from the energy sector is the 2019 Tennessee Valley Energy Democracy Tour, which focused on building a collective grassroots vision for an egalitarian energy future in the communities impacted by the New Deal era projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. 21 This tour served as a good reminder of why we need to pay attention to the historical legacies of unequal development and socioeconomic marginalization. Transformative reforms in state-level energy policies and programs are other crucial elements necessary for fostering an inclusive clean energy action. The Washington-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance scores and ranks states on their energy policies, specifically their devolution and inclusiveness [ 51 ]. Such rankings create useful resources for grassroots actors and could help foster healthy competition among states.

Climate justice interventions related to urban areas include the Miami City Commission’s resolution directing the city managers to research urban gentrification and ways of stabilizing property tax rates in lower income areas located further inland [ 52 ]. City governments can act to institutionalize other means of fostering a healthy urban ecosystem. In 2019, the Boston City Council voted unanimously to enact a Good Food Purchasing Program (GFPP) for a more equitable food purchasing system at public institutions. Seven other cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Cincinnati, have also adopted GFPP policies [ 53 ]. These initiatives help urban populations cut down on their reliance on imported food items that leave a significant carbon footprint. In doing so, they also undercut the stronghold of industrial agriculture, which is a large consumer of fossil fuels and one of the major causes of global climate change [ 54 ]. Equally important, food ordinances can help improve the profitability of urban and peri-urban agro-ecological farming, which is associated with multiple social, economic, environmental, and climate-related benefits [ 55 ]. More broadly, instead of privatizing urban infrastructure or having monopolistic state control, reimagining the city as a “commons” gives urban residents a collective stake in a city’s resources [ 56 ]. Democratizing urban governance—that is, allowing urban residents a meaningful say in the conduct of the ongoing affairs in a city—is an important prerequisite for incorporating concerns of ecology and environment into our urban imaginations.

La Via Campesina , a transnational social movement, promotes agroecology and food sovereignty by engaging with all relevant actors, including the United Nations at the global level and peasant federations at the subnational level. They have been instrumental in the successful enactment of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. La Via Campesina engages with 182 organizations representing an estimated 200 million farmers from 81 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Another example of a grassroots network that has made a global impact is the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), founded in 1990 in Bemidji, MN, to address environmental and economic justice issues. IEN has also been one of the key actors in the global climate justice movement, mainly via its participation in the annual United Nations Climate Change meetings. The IEN has recently launched a People’s Orientation to a Regenerative Economy: Protect, Repair, Invest and Transform to put indigenous sovereignty and values at the front and center of collective efforts toward a sustainable future [ 57 ].

These are some examples of interventions from various actors and agencies invested in the pursuits of climate justice. Each of the examples cited above addresses a specific policy and programmatic area relevant to the daily lives of the people at the frontlines of climate change. However, the energy-intensive luxury consumption in the Global North and in some sections of the Global South that contribute significantly to the climate crisis does not receive adequate attention from policy makers. Our collective efforts to address climate change are unlikely to succeed if we fail to reduce consumption, especially the consumption of goods and services linked to “luxury emissions,” such as privately owned planes. The average carbon footprint of the wealthiest 1% of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest 10% [ 58 ]. On the other hand, large sections of populations in the global South are still grappling with the provision of necessities such as nutritious food, safe drinking water, and a reliable supply of clean energy. Hundreds of millions also lack access to amenities such as sanitation systems, schools, and hospitals, as reflected in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The emissions related to these activities are called “survival emissions” [ 59 ]. Some climate policy discussions tend to obfuscate these distinctions using the language of “human footprint” and “population problem” [ 60 ]. Such framings create a false equivalence between luxury consumption and survival emissions, while accounting for these distinctions provides policy guidance for climate policies that can be both just and efficient.

As the discussion on fossil fuel subsidies demonstrates, the patterns of consumption and deprivation are products of political and economic structures. National policies and the actions of powerful state and non-state corporate actors have severe consequences for what happens at the local level. Any high-level reforms would not necessarily translate into a realization of climate justice without social and political mobilization at the grassroots level. For over three decades, environmental and social justice movements have struggled to bring these issues to the public agenda both in the United States and globally. Advocates of climate justice would benefit from building on the insights and lessons from these movements [ 61 ]. Additionally, transformative reforms in the economy and society, executed via the federal or state-level agencies, are also equally important. We must seek to address the limits of liberal state, which are responsible for the entrenchment of racial capitalism and the climate crisis [ 62 ]. Climate justice calls for wide-ranging reforms and concerted actions in the cultural, social, economic, and political spheres.

What separates climate action advocacy from climate justice advocacy?

Is it too much to expect climate justice advocates to also address questions of social injustices of race, gender, and sexual identity, among others?

In your assessment, are links between the military-industrial complex, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the outcomes of environmental and climate justice that this essay suggest a bit “over the top”? Why or why not?

Do the simultaneous pursuits of climate response and climate justice necessarily entail trade-offs? What factors must be considered in assessing the extent of a trade-off in any given situation?

How does the consideration of a plurality of values to define human well-being affect our assessment of trade-offs in climate action/climate justice debates?

How could we reorient our food systems to promote socially just climate responses?

What role can municipal governments play in promoting climate justice?

Are the arguments about “city as a commons” or “energy commons” part of utopian thinking that cannot be translated into pragmatic policy reforms?

What roles do consumers and citizens play in advancing the goals of climate justice?

Could you think of examples of policies and programs not discussed above that might also contribute to climate justice? For each example, please explain the specific contribution to climate justice.

The author acknowledges the generous and insightful comments by Sikina Jinnah on the first two drafts and comments by Betty Hanson on the penultimate draft. The original impetus for this pedagogical note came from a new course I developed at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. I am thankful to the students who took the class in spring 2019, who engaged vigorously with the note and contributed to its expansion to its present form.

The author has declared that no competing interests exist.

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

An additional 250,000 deaths a year are attributed to climate change, though that number continues to be contested by others who argue that the global death toll related to the ongoing climate crisis is likely to be much higher. https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/health/climate-change-health-emergency-study/index.html .

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/4/24/18512804/climate-change-united-states-china-emissions .

https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs .

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/08/climate-change-is-causing-more-rapid-intensification-of-atlantic-hurricanes/ .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/08/28/hurricane-laura-chemicals-pollution/ .

https://www.sierraclub.org/change/2016/09/climate-justice-and-climate-apartheid .

The author owes the knowledge of these international connections to the screening of the documentary Mossville: When Great Trees Fall as part of Scalawag’s “Breathing While Black” virtual event on June 25, 2020. See https://www.scalawagmagazine.org/about/ ; and http://www.mossvilleproject.com/ .

https://slate.com/business/2006/10/the-nazi-germany-apartheid-south-africa-invention-that-could-make-oil-obsolete.html .

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/26/10-ways-climate-crisis-and-militarism-are-intertwined .

https://www.britannica.com/topic/military-industrial-complex .

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/08/13/ferguson-police-michael-brown-militarization-column/14006383/ .

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/08/the-pentagon-gave-the-ferguson-police-department-military-grade-weapons/376033/ .

https://mn350.org/2020/06/black-lives-matter-there-is-no-climate-justice-without-racial-justice/ .

https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america .

https://grist.org/article/providence-shows-other-cities-how-environmental-justice-is-done/ .

Anon. 2019. The City of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html .

https://www.aeaweb.org/research/fracking-shale-local-impact-net .

https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/sovereignty-by-the-barrel-tribe-takes-control-of-oil-production-4F796kUAo0S2GrEx3TfGbw .

https://redd-monitor.org/2016/10/19/five-responses-to-the-aviation-industrys-carbon-offsetting-scam/ .

The tour was co-organized by Appalachian Voices, Science for the People, Statewide Organizing for Community eMpowerment (SOCM), Working Films, and a group of community members and organizers in the greater Knoxville area. http://appvoices.org/2019/11/26/re-envisioning-public-power-in-the-tennessee-valley/ .

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Municipalities may pass right to know by-laws (as was done in Toronto)
Provinces may pass a Toxic Reduction Act (as was done in Ontario)
Canada may pursue regulation of toxic substances as under CEPA
The international community may control some toxic or hazardous substances under treaties like Stockholm or Basel

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Environmental Justice Essay Collection

These essays were submitted by faculty in preparation for the InTeGrate Environmental Justice workshop in April 2013.

Results 1 - 10 of 31 matches

Global Corporate Social Responsibility Julie Rothbardt, Monmouth College Dr. Julie Rothbardt, Department of Political Economy and Commerce, Monmouth College Defining CSR Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been defined by interest groups, organizations, and academicians in ...

Creating Empathy for People in Difficult Environmental Situations Angie Gumm, St. Mary's Parish Catholic School Angie Gumm, Friends University As an adjunct, I have had a limited opportunity so far to teach classes with a large environmental justice emphasis. The biggest opportunity was at Iowa State University, teaching ...

Using GIS to investigate Environmental Justice Abu Badruddin, Cayuga County Community College Abu Badruddin, , Cayuga County Community College I have been teaching GIS and remote sensing courses with the inception of our GIS program. I always intended to bring students to my GIS classes from across the ...

Teaching Environmental Justice with Rhetorical Theory: Ecofeminist Wayfinding, Emplacement, and Agency Lisa Phillips, Texas Tech University Lisa L. Phillips, , Illinois State University Thus far I have experienced environmental justice pedagogy as a student more than as a teacher. As a graduate student in English Studies with a focus on rhetorical ...

Identifying the Spatial Injustice of the Environment Andrew Scholl, Kent State University-Main Campus Andrew Scholl, , Wittenberg University Trained as a physical geographer I came to the issue of Environmental Justice when I started teaching a 100 level Environment and Society course. This is a general education ...

"I don't know what I don't know" terri plake, Northwest Indian College Terri Plake, , Northwest Indian College "I don't know what I don't know," is often on my mind as I teach students at the tribal college in the Pacific Northwest. I believe that I learn as much ...

Engaging Students in Research-Led Learning on Environmental Justice Sya Kedzior, Towson University Sya Buryn Kedzior, Towson University I prefer to teach and learn about environmental justice by having students engage in active research in the local community. By doing research, collecting and analyzing data, ...

Crossing Disciplinary and Movement Divides: Towards an Integrated Environmental Justice Pedagogy Bhavna Shamasunder, Occidental College Bhavna Shamasunder, Occidental College, Urban and Environmental Policy Department, March 2013 As an undergraduate, I majored in Biology and Ethnic Studies. As I progressed in my biology degree, I began to loathe ...

The Uneven Burden of Risk: My Approach to Teaching Environmental Justice Anna Versluis, Gustavus Adolphus College Anna Versluis, , Gustavus Adolphus College I address environmental justice in the 200-level Nature and Society course that I teach annually at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, MN. This course is required ...

Finding the Origin of Environmental Injustice in a Broad Social and Historical Context Josefina Li, Bemidji State University Josefina Li, , Bemidji State University I have just begun my teaching career at Bemidji State University as a Ph.d candidate from the University of Missouri- Kansas City. In Kansas City, the economic department ...

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Environmental Injustice, Essay Example

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What is Environmental Injustice?

Gosine and Teelucksingh defines Environmental injustice as unequal distribution of environmental hazards whereby people of color, lower socio-economic status, and low-income are disproportionately affected by environment degrading practices such as pollution, the sitting of toxic waste dumps and Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) (Gosine and Teelucksingh ,43).

Review cutter’s definition of Environmental discrimination, equity?

Cutter defines environmental discrimination equity as a phenomenal where racial minority group’s bare disproportionate burden of environmental hazards, which is a solid evidence of discrimination. She argues further that environmental discrimination, equity has a strong connection between the location of the commercial hazardous waste facilities in the community and the total number of the minority residents in those communities’ racial minority and low socio-economic status. This implies that, environmental discrimination is equated to the percentage of racial minority in the community where environmental hazardous waste facilities are located (Cutter, 1995, 111).

What is environmental racism?

Dr. Benjamin Chavis (1982) defines environmental racism as the racial discrimination in making policies concerning the environment and unequal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. It is an intentional targeting of the people of color communities for toxic waste facilities and the authorized sanctioning of a life threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in people of color communities. The exclusion of people of color from leadership in environmental movement is the manifestation of environmental racism in history.

What are the connections between environmental racism and environmental equity?

The connection between environmental equity and environmental racism is discrimination in environmental maters based on color, low income, and low socioeconomic status in the community (Cutter, 1995, 120).

What is Value dualism?

Plumwood provides that value dualism is a disjunctive pair where the disjuncts are viewed as opposing each other and exclusive, and which puts higher value on one disjunct than the other. Value dualism usually deals with comparison of two ideas, systems, power or gender and placing a higher value on one than the otherwise making one idea better than the other does (p 42).

What is Plumwood- the logic of dualism?

Plumwood –logic of dualism is ideological, systematic and material. By ideological we mean it is encompassed with a real of ideas and power, by systematic we mean it is institutionalized and by material we mean it is connected to thing which are either human or in human. The realms support one another and the logic becomes hegemonic(p 46-50).

What is eco feminism?

According to Maria Miles and Shiva (1994), Eco feminism is closely connected to women and nature based on the shared history of oppression by patriarchal institutions. It is distinct from other ethical systems as it shows the correlation between a moral agent and other entities. The correlations define who one is. Patriarchal institutions degraded women in the society, therefore feminizing the earth and nature led to environmental injustice from patriarchal institution known as eco feminism.

What is queer feminism?

Greta Gaard suggests that Queer eco feminism is the intersection of eco feminism and queer theories. Queer eco feminism provides that the core root of eco feminism is the understanding that the many systems of oppression are mutually supporting (Gaad, 1997, 105).

What is political ecology?

Rocheleau et al.(1996) It is the understanding of the complex relationships between nature and the society through a careful analysis of access and control of resources and their implications for sustainable environmental health and livelihoods, and explanation of environmental conflicts under the lines of knowledge, power, and practice and politics, justice and governance. Its mainly focused on the correlation between political, economical, and social factor with environmental issues and changes. Politics and power are centrally placed in understanding of environmental issues. Also, it situates gender as variable which is critical in shaping access and control to resources, interacting with class race, caste, culture, and ethnicity to streamline processes of ecological change (p 4).

What are the forms of resistance?

The forms of resistance include; environmental activism and local/ grassroots activism in Canada and internationally (steady 2009).

Environmental justice essay

The social justice expression of environmental ethics is referred to as environmental justice. The movement of environmental justice emerged to fight the unfair distributing of toxic, hazardous and harmful waste facilities, which were disproportionally, located in poor color communities. This movement expresses distinct the environmentalism by working tirelessly to improve the protection of human communities rather than wild nature (steady 2009).

Environmental justice idea draws a lot from civil rights, public health, abor and community organizing efforts, and environmental justice movement reflects this. Therefore, the movement devotes itself in addressing the unfair distribution of environmental hazards and resources and promotes efforts to prevent environmental degradation from affecting low-income communities. The movement upholds the traditional environmentalism’s efforts to protect nature by, making the poor and marginalized in the community and the society the objects of special concern. The members of environmental justice movement argue that it is unjust and unfair for politically, socially, and economically marginalized, low-income communities of color to bear heavy burden of polluting practices/ activities (Cole, and Sheila, 2001). Gosine and Teelucksigh suggest that race makes people more likely to experience environmental injustice than economic status. They support this by giving an example of the destruction of Africaville and water crisis in Kashechewan environmental racism in Canada.

Origin of environmental injustice

Environmental degradation is tied to the disproportionate burden placed on the disenfranchised members of the community who include; women, the poor and minorities. Deep ecology, ecological feminism and bioregionalism are among the several philosophies which have emerged to explain how environmental exploitation come into being while endangering the health of a given group of people in the name of economic development. In this essay, a brief review of deep ecology philosophy is examined and how it brought about environmental justice. Deep ecology is an ecological philosophy that puts humans within the context of ecological systems instead of placing them outside or central o the system. Additionally, humans are considered equal to other components in the ecological system rather than being superior or more important. This philosophy is science based in that is connected to the ecological system. This philosophy has been supported by tenets which when considered holistically bring about the ecological consciousness of humans in the environment. Rather than the current industrial risk analysis thinking, deep ecology requires inclusive open thinking. Industrial risk analysis focus is predominantly used in determining whether to allow a polluting industry to develop or continue or when looking for a place to damp the hazardous waste (steady 2009).

Thus, environmental injustice originated from looking at deep ecological philosophy from one perspective of humanity being equal to all components in the ecosystem while leaving the other, which is the value of humanity. Other philosophical theory like eco feminism states that feminization of nature is what brought about degradation of people and the environment without regret. Popular environmental slogans like “I love your mother” which equate the earth and nature to a woman have negative effects to the environment in patriarchal society that does not respect women. This could also be the cause of environmental degradation leading to environmental injustice (Maria Miles and Shiva 1994).

Solutions to achieving environmental justice

By carefully studying the roots of environmental injustice, it is apparent that the solution to the injustice must include legal remedies or go beyond. The solutions will be both philosophical and practical to spearhead environmental justice. To bring about environmental justice, environmental lawyers must be conversant with civil rights so that they can successfully litigate for environmental law by merging civil rights law and environmental law into one coherent area. The title VI of the civil rights Act, NEPA prohibits intentional discrimination. Utilization of their clause in cases involving environmental justice will reduce the effect of environmental degradation and promote environmental justice. Although some local government have argued that the clause hinders redevelopment, it has been proven beyond no reasonable doubt by research studies that laws governing intentional discrimination do not hinder development.

In addition to litigation by the use of equal protection, development of other civil rights based on color, economic status, or gender can promote environmental justice. The easiest way of stopping environmental injustice is to stop placing people at risk by mandating industry and the government to continue using risk analysis as a method of determining whether pollution should be allowed or the project that will have negative effects to the community shall proceed.

Alternative methods of determining whether a project should proceed should be sort. Precautionary principle shall apply in case the project is discovered to threaten the health of people in the society and in this case the, the proponents of the project should carry the burden instead of the community or the general public. To promote environmental justice eco feminists must work towards destroying the oppression systems that bring about the degradation of the earth and marginalized /disenfranchised people (Cutter, 1995, 70-87).

In our societies today, there are still many instances of environmental injustice at work. For this problem to e solved we have to look at it in broader perspective by bringing together all the aspects of human life; political, social and economical. The fundamental cause of environmental degradation is our culture of oppression and disrespect to the earth. In order to remedy this disrespect, we must start recognizing the respect of people, their civil rights to live in a safe and healthy environment and the dignity of humanity in general. Environmental justice is very much attainable if proper legal, philosophical and practical approaches are used to address environmental injustice.

Works cited

Cole, Luke W. and Sheila R. Foster. “From the Ground Up; Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement. New York: New York University Press. (2001).

Karen J. Warren, “The Power and Promise of Ecological Feminism”, Environmental Ethics 12, no. 2 (1990), pp. 121–45.

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A large dam with a spillway stretches in front of a reservoir

Native American voices are finally factoring into energy projects – a hydropower ruling is a victory for environmental justice on tribal lands

Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Saint Louis University

Associate Professor, School of Earth and Sustainability, Northern Arizona University

Disclosure statement

Emily Benton Hite has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. She is affiliated with Save the World's Rivers and the Global River Protection Coalition.

Denielle Perry is affiliated with the Global River Protection Coalition, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Coalition and the IUCN WCPA Freshwater Specialist Group.

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The U.S. has a long record of extracting resources on Native lands and ignoring tribal opposition, but a decision by federal energy regulators to deny permits for seven proposed hydropower projects suggests that tide may be turning.

As the U.S. shifts from fossil fuels to clean energy, developers are looking for sites to generate electricity from renewable sources. But in an unexpected move, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission denied permits on Feb. 15, 2024, for seven proposed hydropower projects in Arizona and New Mexico.

The reason: These projects were located within the Navajo Nation and were proposed without first consulting with the tribe. FERC said it was “ establishing a new policy that the Commission will not issue preliminary permits for projects proposing to use Tribal lands if the Tribe on whose lands the project is to be located opposes the permit.”

We are a cultural anthropologist and a water resource geographer who have studied tensions between Indigenous rights, climate governance and water management in the U.S. and globally for over 20 years. In our view, the commission’s decision could mark a historic turning point for government-to-government relations between the U.S. government and tribal nations.

How might this new approach shape future energy development on tribal lands throughout the U.S.? Given the federal government’s long history of exploiting Native American resources without tribal consent, we’re following FERC’s actions for further evidence before assuming that a new era has begun.

Extraction on tribal lands

Around the world, many Indigenous communities argue that their lands have been treated as sacrifice zones for development . This includes the U.S., where the federal government holds 56.2 million acres in trust for various tribes and individuals, mostly in western states.

The trust responsibility requires the U.S. government to protect Indigenous lands, resources and rights and to respect tribal sovereignty. Consulting with tribes about decisions that affect them is fundamental to this relationship.

Energy resources on U.S. Native lands include coal, oil, uranium , solar, wind and hydropower . There is a long history of coal and uranium mining in Navajo territory in the Southwest, and tribal lands now are targets for renewable energy projects . Large fractions of known reserves of critical minerals for clean energy, like copper and cobalt, are on or near Native lands .

Signs on a wire fence read 'Danger,' 'Abandoned Uranium Mine' and 'Restricted Area'

Many past energy projects have left scars. Navajo lands are studded with abandoned uranium mining sites that threaten residents’ health. Over 1.1 million acres of tribal lands have been flooded by hundreds of dams built for hydropower and irrigation. Fossil fuel pipelines like Dakota Access in North Dakota and Line 5 in Wisconsin and Michigan carry oil across Native lands, threatening water supplies in the event of leaks or spills.

Hydropower project impacts

The seven permits FERC denied in February 2024 were requested by private companies seeking to build pumped hydropower storage projects . These systems pump water uphill to a reservoir for storage. When power is needed, water is released to flow downhill through turbines, generating electricity as it returns to a lower reservoir or river.

Currently there are over 60 pumped storage proposals pending across the U.S. Pumped storage typically requires constructing massive concrete-lined tunnels, powerhouses, pipelines and transmission systems that can damage surrounding lands .

Withdrawing water for hydropower could disrupt rivers and sacred sites that are culturally and spiritually important for many tribes. These projects also threaten water security – a critical issue in arid western states.

Colorado River water is already over-allocated among western states, which hold legal rights to withdraw more water than is in the river. As a result, many pumped storage projects would require groundwater to fill their reservoirs. The proposed Big Canyon project in Arizona , for example, would require up to 19 billion gallons of groundwater, taken from aquifers that support local springs and streams.

Infographic showing a pumped storage system

FERC’s trust responsibility

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is an independent agency that licenses and oversees interstate transmission of electricity, natural gas and oil; natural gas pipelines and terminals; and hydropower projects. Under a 1986 law , the agency is required to consider factors including environmental quality, biodiversity, recreational activities and tribal input in making licensing decisions.

However, the U.S. government has a long record of carrying out projects despite Native opposition . For example, under the Pick-Sloan Plan , the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built five dams on the Missouri River in the late 1950s and early 1960s that flooded over 350,000 acres of tribal lands. Tribes were not consulted , and communities were forcibly relocated from their ancestral homelands.

In 2000, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13175 , directing federal agencies to engage in “regular and meaningful consultation and collaboration with tribal officials” in developing federal policies that affect tribes. Each agency interprets how to do this.

In his first week in office in 2021, President Joe Biden reaffirmed this responsibility and nominated U.S. Rep. Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior – the first Native American to head the agency that administers the U.S. trust responsibility to Native Americans and Alaska Natives.

FERC’s new direction

Tribes have called FERC’s record of consultation with Native Americans “ abysmal .” Recently, however, the agency has started to make its operations more inclusive.

In 2021, it created a new Office of Public Participation , a step its then-chair, Richard Glick, called “long overdue.” And in 2022, the agency released its Equity Action Plan , designed to help underserved groups participate in decisions.

In canceling the projects in February, FERC cited concerns raised by the Navajo Nation , including negative impacts on water, cultural and natural resources and biological diversity. It also stated that “To avoid permit denials, potential applicants should work closely with Tribal stakeholders prior to filing applications to ensure that Tribes are fully informed about proposed projects on their lands and to determine whether they are willing to consider the project development.”

Aligning clean energy and environmental justice

Many more energy projects are proposed or envisioned on or near tribal lands, including a dozen pumped storage hydropower projects on the Colorado Plateau. All 12 are opposed by tribes based on lack of consultation and because tribes are still fighting to secure their own legal access to water in this contested basin under the 1922 Colorado River Compact.

We recently analyzed FERC’s handling of the Big Canyon pumped hydropower storage project , which would be located on Navajo land in Arizona, and concluded that the agency had not adequately consulted with the tribe in its preliminary permitting. In the wake of its February ruling, the agency reopened the public comment period on Big Canyon for an additional 30 days, with a decision likely later in 2024.

The Biden administration has set ambitious targets for halting climate change and accelerating the shift to clean energy while promoting environmental justice . In our view, meeting those goals will require the federal government to more earnestly and consistently live up to its trust responsibilities.

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Environment,
Social Issues
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Environmental justice

“environmental justice”Environmental issues such as global warming and climate change, air, water, and land pollution, ozone depletion, species on the verge of extinction, and many other human-induced ecological changes that mankind is now facing are for real and need urgent action. These problems are the direct consequences of inadequate and thoughtless use of limited natural resources by modern society most of which have served to satisfy the needs of only a small percentage of the planet’s population. While all experts agree that environmental issues pose a serious problem which the present and all future generations will have to deal with, some are also concerned about the fact that global ecological changes have been mostly the result of the activities carried out by only a small number of wealthy nations who are not at all the ones that bear the disastrous consequences of those changes.

Experts refer to it as environmental injustice (Costi, pp. 289-309).Environmental InjusticeWilliam Rees and Laura Westra, among others, also refer to environmental injustice as eco-apartheid and argue for the necessity of restoring environmental justice and ecological sustainability through international cooperation. They argue that the modern economic theory and political economy equating human welfare with constant income growth have turned out to be a complete failure that has led to consumer lifestyles in the West and become the main cause of global ecological decay.

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Over-consumption by the rich countries at great ecological cost which have produced more waste than useful products has led to environmental problems from which the poor, not the wealthy countries suffer. This model of development continues to enrich the former and impoverish the latter, and also destroys the planet’s fragile ecosystems on which the poor are directly dependent for their livelihoods (Rees & Westra, pp. 100-104).To better explain the existing environmental injustice, Rees and Westra provide a detailed ecological footprint analysis in which they estimate the demand of a defined population on the planet’s natural resources that are required to satisfy its basic needs.

They maintain that the ecological footprint of a nation (or population) is the area of land and water ecosystems (regardless“Page # 2”of their location) that the nation needs for the production of the resources it consumes and the assimilation of the waste it produces. By applying ecological footprint analysis to the populations and territories of the world’s nations, they demonstrate that the ecological footprint imposed by many wealthy nations on the planet is several times larger than their populations and territories they inhabit. These are the countries such as the USA, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, Sweden, Spain, Australia, and others whose ecological footprints exceed their equitable share of global carrying capacity by at least hundred per cent. The considerable purchasing power of the rich nations allows them to appropriate the productive capacity of the world’s poor which are not used, thus, the poor countries’ export-oriented production satisfies the rich countries’ demand and not local needs.

But if the production is exported to the rich, the ecological damage that it causes remains with and afflicts the poor (Rees & Westra, pp. 109-110).All in all, Rees and Westra further explain, the wealthy fifth of the Earth’s population benefits from over eighty per cent of global economic output. This over-consumption by the wealthy nations is the main cause of scarce ecosystems degradation which will not be sufficient to support today’s global population for a long period of time.

Besides, approximately three billion newcomers are going to arrive within the next forty years (Rees & Westra, p. 112).America, the anti-heroThe United States of America, whose equitable portion of global carrying capacity is less than five per cent actually appropriates almost twenty-five per cent of the Earth’s carrying capacity. It is the leading nation among the world’s biggest polluters of the environment and the world’s largest consumer.

Additionally, it does not bear the direct consequences of global ecological degradation stemming from the exploration of natural resources around the world necessary for the production of the products and services it consumes (Rees & Westra, p. 118). What is more, the United States does not take the environmental issues as seriously as other countries do calling them exaggeration, and refuses to acknowledge the necessity to revise many of its economic policies which contribute to damaging the planet’s ecosystems.“Page # 3”Indeed, the USA refused to ratify the Kyoto protocol to join the international effort to restrict emissions responsible for global warming.

It is one of the principal consumers of fossil fuel generated energy and emitters of carbon dioxide. The U.S. governments have often been criticized for their negligent attitude to environmental issues and for not actively implementing modern alternative energy saving technologies (Duncan, 2006, p.

22). It is not surprising that many have viewed the United States as the most reckless and thoughtless polluter in the world and its policies as environmentally unjust (Rees & Westra, pp. 110).Environmental justice: a panacea?What Rees and Westra suggest is that some ways of relieving the impoverishment of the world’s poor have to be discovered and consumers in the world’s richest countries should reduce their ecological load on the planet creating, thus, more space for growth in the underdeveloped countries.

They also propose that since the affluent nations are the principal careless consumers and negligent polluters of the Earth whose lifestyle directly or indirectly harms the innocent poor nations, it is the former that are to assume responsibility for the consequences of their activities (Rees & Westra, pp. 112-116).Without a doubt, Rees and Westra raise a very important issue of ecological degradation and the environmental crisis which threatens to undermine modern society if immediate action is not taken. They emphasize the existence of environmental injustice which is the main reason why it is the world’s poor who suffer from the degradation, not the world’s rich.

Both these facts are too obvious and few would not acknowledge them. However, the researchers seem to be too much concentrated on the need to restore this environmental justice and argue for the redistribution of the shares of ecological footprints imposed on the earth among the world’s nations based on their populations and territories. This, of course, would protect the poor countries from eco-violence and perhaps help economic growth in the developing world. But will this approach protect the poor from poverty and suffering? In the short run, perhaps.

But not in the long run as it will only postpone the problem and not resolve it.“Page # 4”Environmental justice should have been restored decades ago when humankind was just starting to seriously destroy the planet’s ecosystems and pollute the environment. Now that we face the forthcoming global ecological crisis, environmental justice is “a” but not “the” main issue on the agenda. Restoring it will protect the world’s poor for a short period of time but will not protect the planet’s ecosystems from human-induced degradation.

Even if the international community succeeds in shifting human load on the Earth from the rich nations to the poor ones, the overall demand on the planet’s natural resources will be somewhat reduced but only for a short time period until developing nations become developed ones. Rees and Westra emphasize the necessity for the fairer redistribution of natural resources among the world’s nations but they seem to neglect the fact that due to the forthcoming environmental collapse it is more vital to reduce their use by all means, especially for producing products or services that are not essential for humankind.Rees and Westra point out that additional billions of people will arrive within the next few decades, mainly in the developing world, and that they will only further increase global suffering and poverty unless environmental justice is restored. They are right to emphasize that the global population already exceeds the planet’s carrying capacity by approximately forty per cent and that there simply will not be enough resources to support the whole population.

However, their concern about restoring environmental justice is unlikely to be helpful in this situation. They call for the need of international effort to restore environmental justice, but it seems more urgent to concentrate the international effort on reducing current population growth rates in the developing world and resolving social issues such as, for example, universal education.In his book “Plan B 3.0.

” Lester Brown demonstrates that in the developing world children without any basic education are very likely to remain in poverty all their life and that it leads to the widening gap between the rich and the poor and becomes a serious source of social instability. He also argues for the need to provide more accessible family planning services to women in developing countries before they start their families. The key to social issues such as extreme“Page # 5”poverty, hunger, infectious diseases, and many others, Brown emphasizes, is the necessity to accelerate the reduction of high population growth rates in the developing world. It is feasible and countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, or to some extent Thailand and China which succeeded in significantly cutting their population growth prove that they only benefited from this achievement and became able to modernize, accelerate their economic growth and productivity, and better provide for their citizens.

Another good example is Iran which succeeded in reducing its population growth rate to almost the lowest one among developing countries in only one decade (Brown, 2007, pp. 131-151). As it can be seen, restoring the environmental justice as it is suggested by Rees and Westra is far from being the only and most efficient approach to fight poverty and suffering in the developing world.By contrast, Rees and Westra are right to point out that international effort is necessary to distribute more fairly the remaining natural resources among the nations.

But this effort, support, and experience is also needed to help local governments in the developing world better cope with their social and ecological problems and accelerate the shift to smaller families. With the assistance of the international community, smaller and educated developing nations will be able to better manage their resources (Brown, 2007, pp. 131-151).Another important argument provided by Rees and Westra is the necessity to stop pursuing constant economic growth which leads to over-consumption in developed countries, attempts to achieve constant economic growth at the expense of environmental considerations in new democracies, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, and the accelerated exhaustion of the planet’s eco-systems in general (Rees & Westra, pp.

101; Costi, pp. 289-309). However, Rees and Westra do not provide clear details how to implement this policy, which methods are to be to used, at which stages over-production and over-consumption have to be stopped and then reduced, how to define which products and services are to be considered basic and necessary for modern society and which not, etc. BIBLIOGRAPHY:Brown, L.

R. (2007). Plan B 3.0.

Retrieved April 10, 2008 from the World Wide Web: www.earth-policy.orgCosti, A. Environmental Protection, Economic Growth, and Environmental Justice: Are They Compatible in Central and Eastern Europe? 289-309Duncan, E.

(2006, September 9). The heat is on. The Economist, 1-24Rees, W. E.

, & Westra, L. When Consumption Does Violence: Can there be Sustainability and Environmental Justice in a Resource-limited World? 99-121

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