Developing the Vision of Environmental Justice: A Paradigm for Achieving Healthy and Sustainable Communities
By Charles Lee
INTRODUCTION
Environmental justice presents a new paradigm for achieving healthy and sustainable communities. It represents a new vision, based upon community-driven processes, with an essential core of transformative public discourse about healthy, sustainable, and vital communities. It flows from 500 years of struggle for survival by people of color in a multi-racial and multi-cultural society in which dominance has been appropriated by one racial group. By its very nature, environmental justice is a critique of traditional views of environmentalism, science, and social policy.
Environmental justice addresses the logistic distribution of benefits and burdens in modern industrial society. Throughout the history of the United States, there has existed an “inextricable link between exploitation of the land and the exploitation of people.” Numerous communities scattered across the nation are suffering from the negative consequences of industrial production and modern society. Indeed, some communities are more equal than others. But where racial discrimination exists in education, employment, housing, health care delivery, and voting rights, it should be no surprise that it affects environmental issues as well. Over the past decade, the environmental justice movement has redefined the environment as “the place where we live, where we work, and where we play.” Further, the environmental justice movement has contributed to an understanding of the profound value of public participation and accountability in formulating public policy and environmental decision making. The environmental justice concept has reshaped discourse about public health and environmental risks to include path-breaking issues of multiple, cumulative, and synergistic risk. Finally, environmental justice presses for community-level analysis of environmental protection.
Environmental justice is predicated upon a wide-ranging critique of the current environmental protection paradigm. Environmental sociologist Robert Bullard notes:
[T]he current environmental protection paradigm has institutionalized unequal protection; traded human health for profit; placed the burden of proof on the “victims” rather than on the polluting industry; legitimated human exposure to harmful substances; promoted “risky” technologies such as incineration; exploited the vulnerability of economically and politically disenfranchised communities; subsidized ecological destruction; created an industry around risk assessment; delayed cleanup actions; and failed to develop pollution prevention as the overarching and dominant strategy.
Environmental justice developed nationally in three major phases. Analysis of these areas reveals the origins of the environmental justice movement and explains the future agenda of the movement.
The first phase covered events originating in Warren County, North Carolina, which culminated in the 1987 release of the landmark United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The report was the first national study on the demographic patterns associated with hazardous waste site location. This phase changed the debate about the connection between race and the environment.
The second phase covered events rooted in communities of color. These events culminated in the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. This phase changed the debate about what constitutes the environmental movement itself.
Currently, we are in a third phase characterized by a multiplicity of emphases and tasks consonant with a movement that is blossoming on many different levels. This phase is changing the debate about what constitutes healthy and sustainable communities.
Environmental justice presents a new paradigm for achieving healthy and sustainable communities. It represents a new vision, based upon community-driven processes, with an essential core of transformative public discourse about healthy, sustainable, and vital communities. It flows from 500 years of struggle for survival by people of color in a multi-racial and multi-cultural society in which dominance has been appropriated by one racial group. By its very nature, environmental justice is a critique of traditional views of environmentalism, science, and social policy.
Environmental justice addresses the logistic distribution of benefits and burdens in modern industrial society. Throughout the history of the United States, there has existed an “inextricable link between exploitation of the land and the exploitation of people.” Numerous communities scattered across the nation are suffering from the negative consequences of industrial production and modern society. Indeed, some communities are more equal than others. But where racial discrimination exists in education, employment, housing, health care delivery, and voting rights, it should be no surprise that it affects environmental issues as well. Over the past decade, the environmental justice movement has redefined the environment as “the place where we live, where we work, and where we play.” Further, the environmental justice movement has contributed to an understanding of the profound value of public participation and accountability in formulating public policy and environmental decision making. The environmental justice concept has reshaped discourse about public health and environmental risks to include path-breaking issues of multiple, cumulative, and synergistic risk. Finally, environmental justice presses for community-level analysis of environmental protection.
Environmental justice is predicated upon a wide-ranging critique of the current environmental protection paradigm. Environmental sociologist Robert Bullard notes:
[T]he current environmental protection paradigm has institutionalized unequal protection; traded human health for profit; placed the burden of proof on the “victims” rather than on the polluting industry; legitimated human exposure to harmful substances; promoted “risky” technologies such as incineration; exploited the vulnerability of economically and politically disenfranchised communities; subsidized ecological destruction; created an industry around risk assessment; delayed cleanup actions; and failed to develop pollution prevention as the overarching and dominant strategy.
Environmental justice developed nationally in three major phases. Analysis of these areas reveals the origins of the environmental justice movement and explains the future agenda of the movement.
The first phase covered events originating in Warren County, North Carolina, which culminated in the 1987 release of the landmark United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The report was the first national study on the demographic patterns associated with hazardous waste site location. This phase changed the debate about the connection between race and the environment.
The second phase covered events rooted in communities of color. These events culminated in the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. This phase changed the debate about what constitutes the environmental movement itself.
Currently, we are in a third phase characterized by a multiplicity of emphases and tasks consonant with a movement that is blossoming on many different levels. This phase is changing the debate about what constitutes healthy and sustainable communities.