The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

Environmental groups

6.4 The environmental justice movement

Environmental justice is broader than just

preserving the environment. When we fight for

environmental justice we fight for our homes and

families and struggle to end economic, social

and political domination by the strong and the

greedy.

(Lois Gibbs, quoted in Schlosberg

1999b: 127)

The institutionalisation of the environmental movement

in the USA during the 1980s with the

mushrooming of networks of grassroots

groups, such as the Clearing House for

Hazardous Waste (renamed, symbolically, in

1997 as the Centre for Health, Environment and

Justice). It is a bottom-up movement that is

rooted in the struggles of local communities

against environmental hazards: people get

involved through personal experience and local

networks, not because they happen to be on a

mailing list.

The key idea underpinning the environmental

justice movement is the recognition that

environmental hazards are closely linked to

race and poverty. It is poor people who live in

the worst environments, and in the USA the

poorest people tend to be non-whites.

Disproportionately large numbers of

African-Americans and Hispanics live close to

hazardous and toxic waste sites (Bullard 2000 ).

In short, ecosystem destruction is often

connected to racism. Hence the second

The impact of the environmental movement

movement states that: ‘Environmental justice

demands that public policy be based on mutual

respect and justice for all peoples, free from

any form of discrimination or bias’

(Environmental Justice Resource Center

2006 ).

For an analysis of the environmental justice

movement, see Szasz ( 1994 ), Pulido ( 1996 ),

Schlosberg (1999b), Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss

(2001) and Visiglio and Whitelaw ( 2003 ).

notable feature of US grassroots groups is the prevalence of anti-toxic waste
and environmental justice groups in many poor urban and rural communi-
ties, with a sharply different membership profile from the predominantly
middle-class mainstream environmental movement. In particular, women
of all classes are well represented in the anti-toxics movement (Gottlieb
1993 )and they contain a much larger proportion of African-Americans and
Latinos (Pulido 1996 ;Schlosberg1999a;Visiglio and Whitelaw 2003 ). (See
Box6.4.)
NIMBY groups exist everywhere and employ a wide range of strategies.
Some areparticipatory pressuregroups employing conventional tactics, includ-
ing lobbying, organising petitions, filing lawsuits or running candidates in
local elections to publicise their case. Conventional methods often prove
fruitless, prompting frustrated and increasingly politicised activists to adopt
more confrontational, unconventional tactics, such as demonstrations, sit-
ins and blockades. A famous 1978 incident involved the residents of Love
Canal in New York holding two officials of the Environmental Protection
Agency ‘hostage’ for several hours in order to publicise the danger of local
toxic chemical pollution. Two days later, President Carter declared the area
adisaster zone, which made the residents eligible for relocation assistance
(Gibbs 1982 ). Although grassroots campaigns have achieved many individual