Last month, President Biden signed legislation passed by a vast majority of lawmakers in both the House and Senate that made Juneteenth a national holiday in remembrance of the emancipation of slaves on June 19, 1865. There is a large consensus that this is a particularly important holiday to celebrate, especially as race increasingly becomes a topic of discussion in today’s day and age. We thought that to commemorate this holiday, we should add a unique spin and talk about the overlap between social justice and climate change: environmental justice.
In this post, we’ll give you a brief introduction to environmental justice and its significance in the road ahead.
What Is Environmental Justice?
At its core, environmental justice is the field of ensuring that the environment affects different populations (races, religions, ethnicities, etc.) as fairly as possible. This means making sure that one group of people is not unfairly targeted (can be unintentional) by harmful environmental practices.
While such practices have been around for centuries, the environmental justice movement in the United States traces back to the late 1960s when African-Americans assembled in what was known as the Memphis Sanitation Strike. Since then, a lot of progress has been made in this space, but the issue still remains. In fact, environmental justice has become especially prominent in the last year with increasing racial tensions and a larger discussion about the treatment of minorities.
Who Created Environmental Justice?
Dr. Robert Bullard is considered “the father of environmental justice” for his decades of work in this field. Bullard is a former member of the Marine Corps and currently a Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. He first arrived at the main stage when publishing one of the first books ever written on environmental justice, “Dumping In Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality.” Through this work and numerous subsequent ones, Bullard found that there is a direct correlation between income-level/race/class and relationship with the environment. Communities on the less privileged side of the spectrum are subject to much more difficulty with the environment (pollution, landfills, etc.) than communities who are “better off.”
Why Is Environmental Justice Necessary?
The Declaration of Independence was signed and adopted in 1776 as a formal split from Britain. Thomas Jefferson was the main author of the pivotal document which laid the foundation for the birth of a new form of government. In the Declaration, a bold promise is made, stating that all Americans “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Let me repeat that. Unalienable Rights. Life. Liberty. Pursuit of Happiness. This is a major claim, but one that must be lived up to.
But when you think back, is everybody in the United States guaranteed equal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? Now, I’m not asking whether everybody has equal QUALITIES of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Instead, I’m asking whether the ACCESS is equal, meaning the availability of each of these three desires at birth. In my opinion, no. Certain unbreakable barriers box specific populations and force them to remain virtually stuck in their circumstances without the ability to break free, and one of these barriers is environmental injustice.
Here are a few statistics that shine a lot on the need for environmental justice:
- Nonwhites are faced with 38% higher concentrations of NO2, a harmful gas linked to asthma and heart disease (source).
- “People of color make up nearly half the population in fenceline zones (11.4 million), and they are almost twice as likely as whites to live near dangerous chemical facilities” (source).
- Exposure to particulate matter makes black people three times more likely to die than the overall population (source).
These disparities are not the result of coincidence. Instead, they are the result of centuries of biases against minorities, whether conscious or unconscious, that have put their lives at greater risk.
How Can You Help Environmental Justice?
As you can see, environmental injustice is a big-time problem and it’s not something that will just go away in an instant. It has to be addressed strategically and tenaciously across several years for significant progress to be made. Though this issue spans so wide and affects so many people, there is still a role you can play in solving it.
1. Learn
Making sure that you keep yourself educated about environmental justice is one of the best things you can do. Plus, by reading this article, you’ve already gotten a head start. Continue to watch videos, read, and just stay updated on this issue. Here are a few places to get started:
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) website
- Dr. Robert Bullard’s (“Father of Environmental Justice”) official website
- “Environmental justice, explained” video by Grist
- “A Brief History of Environmental Justice” video by ProPublica
2. Speak Up
Once you feel like you have a solid foundation in your understanding of environmental justice, it’s time for you to make your voice heard. One way to do this is through political engagement, whether that means speaking with your representatives (local and federal), voting for the right candidates, or even running for office yourself. You can also take other initiatives such as starting an organization that helps those affected by environmental injustice, running a social media account to raise awareness, or even writing a blog like us 😉
3. Stay Active
This step will likely be the hardest of them all, mainly because making real change is HARD. It will take time to get the ball moving early on, there will be people trying to tell you to stop fighting for justice, and you will feel like your efforts are worthless, but pushing past all of this resistance will be the most rewarding part of it all. Nothing worth fighting for comes easy, so all of the hardships should be anticipated. Just remember that you shouldn’t settle until you get nothing less than what you ask for (yes, I know that was a double negative).
Conclusion
Environmental justice should be something that we all strive toward. It’s something that you may see every day without even noticing, but it is something that needs to be achieved. Like any other issue, it is not an easy goal to reach nor is it always evident to the naked eye, but there is a role we all have to play in fighting for it. Make sure that you follow the 3 steps mentioned above to help environmental justice and play a part in your community because if we work together, we will attain something greater than ourselves.