Environmental Racism and Environmental Justice in North America

Environmental justice is a key concept in global sustainability as it forces the examination of how environmental protection aligns or conflicts with human rights and civil rights. Environmental justice states that, regardless of their race, ethnicity, class, gender, or any other background, all human beings have the right to a healthy environment. While this principle applies to everyone, in North America, environmental injustice has historically been inflicted upon communities of color, particularly Blacks and Indigenous peoples, making the discussion of environmental justice inseparable from that of environmental racism. This chapter, therefore, considers them together. Although a typical review of environmental justice starts with the Warren County toxic landfill case in the 1980s, considerable environment-related oppressions have occurred since the arrival of Europeans in North America. Accordingly, the chapter follows an expanded view of environmental injustice to include earlier examples. The chapter first provides the definitions of environmental racism and environmental justice. A large section of the chapter is dedicated to the major sites of injustice, including land appropriation, residential segregation, hazardous workplace conditions, use of Indigenous lands for nuclear weapon affairs, toxic landfills, hazardous industrial facilities, and injustices pertaining to energy, climate, and water. Then, the chapter concludes with brief discussions of environmental justice as advocacy and movement, policies, and scholarship.