Environmental Justice

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE. The environmental movement is generally defined by its commitment to safeguarding natural wilderness from despoliation and defending imperiled species from extinction. Yet there have been numerous instances over the last century of arguments especially on the left to classify industrial workplaces and the urban landscape, not to mention the human beings who work and live in or near these locales, as very much in need of environmental protection. A movement for environmental justice has sought historically to hold wealthy and powerful industries accountable – and liable – for toxic substances they release, emit, or dump into the water, air, and soil, as well as for the numberless injuries, diseases, and deaths that result from these exploitative and unsafe activities. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, and far from incidentally, the demographic most vulnerable to toxic exposure and to the dangers associated with earning a living wage have been the foreign-born, the nonwhite, and the poor. Activists and organizers on the American left have long been at the forefront in the battle to achieve environmental equity.

What we have come to call environmental justice has its roots in the history of the American left dating back at least to the early twentieth century. At that time, muckraking journalists made it their assignment to document abuses experienced by working Americans while corporate interests amassed fortunes. Most famously, Upton Sinclair witnessed at firsthand the appalling workplace experiences of Lithuanian immigrants in a Chicago meatpacking factory and then dramatized these conditions in The Jungle (1906), a novel Sinclair first serialized in the socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason.

There were lesser known muckraking accounts that reported on how industries hoarded wealth and discounted (in more than one meaning of the word) the lives of laborers. Already in 1904, the International Socialist Review published a series by journalist and Socialist Party member Mary Marcy on the coldblooded strategies of a Chicago pork factory. Marcy wrote that the factory’s “accident department” required workers to sign affidavits whenever they were injured on the job, affidavits that amounted to economic blackmail. “They all swear in order to hold their jobs, to whatever is requested of them,” Marcy wrote, “that the machinery was in perfect repair, whether it was or not, and that the accident was due to the man’s own personal carelessness.”

A demand that workers and their families receive funds to support themselves when they were injured on the job had its most prominent advocate in leftist labor lawyer Crystal Eastman. Eastman’s bestselling Work-Accidents and the Law (1910) drew on an extensive social scientific study that had been conducted in Pittsburgh and that highlighted the perils of industrialization for an immigrant and unskilled workforce. Eastman’s book debunked the pernicious (if prevalent) lie that laborers injured on railways or in steel mills and coal mines had demonstrated a reckless disregard for their own safety. It was, Eastman countered, “the speed and pressure of work” that caused most industrial accidents, adding that these accidents were often preventable with the simplest of safety measures (like the installation of handrails). She also proposed that states pass a law that would offer financial compensation for occupation-related injuries. A peace activist and later a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Eastman watched politicians evince little political appetite for her proposal. Then in 1911 a disastrous fire at a sweatshop in Greenwich Village killed nearly 150 women, most of whom were young and foreign-born. Victims’ families received a mere pittance in exchange for their losses. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire shocked the nation and resulted in the passage in several states of the first workers’ compensation laws – laws based on Eastman’s draft proposal.

A quarter-century later, an impulse for environmental justice reached the halls of the United States Congress thanks to the heroic efforts of Vito Marcantonio, a socialist representative from East Harlem, New York. Marcantonio had been a supporter of Progressive Party candidate Robert La Follette in the 1920s. He later joined the American Labor Party and led early efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation. In keeping with his leftist and anti-racist convictions, Marcantonio in 1936 demanded a hearing into an environmental catastrophe at a tunnel construction site near Gauley Bridge, West Virginia.

The sordid story Marcantonio sought to investigate had begun in 1930 when a subsidiary of Union Carbide hired close to 3,000 unskilled laborers, the majority of whom were African American. The company steadily adjusted workers’ salaries downward as the Great Depression deepened. It turned a blind eye to the carbon monoxide that filled the tunnels, as well as to the dust in the tunnels that contractors knew contained high levels of crystalline silica. The company never provided tunnel laborers with masks. It never sought to improve ventilation in the tunnel. It never bothered to improve its workplace policies when tunnel laborers began to sicken and die. Even after hundreds died, neither their families nor the surviving workers were informed that silica dust when inhaled caused permanent scarring of the lungs (a condition known as silicosis). The majority of the dead and diseased were black. There were no lawsuits against the company, and no workers or their families were compensated. Despite Marcantonio’s efforts to get these corporate crimes addressed, it would be another thirty-five years before any legislative remedies would be taken to address the scourge of occupational silicosis.

Individuals across the United States committed themselves to environmental justice long before anyone called it by that name. Dr. Alice Hamilton was a pioneer in occupational toxicology as well as a lifelong women’s rights and peace activist. When Hamilton started her career into the workplace hazards posed by chemicals and industrial metals, she quickly ran into the many ways white racist assumptions devalued nonwhite lives. In her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943), Hamilton recounted how astonished she had been when she heard from a druggist near a lead smelting factory in Colorado that no workers at the factory suffered from industrial poisoning. When Hamilton challenged the druggist, he corrected himself. Of course men had been poisoned, the druggist said, but these men were not white. By way of apology for the misunderstanding, the druggist added: “I thought you meant white men.”

In the industrial boom of the postwar years, a prevailing perspective was that when filth poured from industrial zones this signaled economic strength. That a strong economy was being built on the pain and suffering of the disenfranchised was not ignored; on the contrary, it was celebrated. For instance, Alabama governor (and arch-segregationist) George Wallace announced during a visit to a stinking paper mill in a Black Belt town not far from Montgomery: “Yeah, that’s the smell of prosperity. She does smell sweet, don’t it?” And when chemical companies from Texas and Louisiana to Kentucky and New York buried or released untold tons of toxic waste into landfills or lakes, no one saw fit to see a problem with this activity; on occasions when local residents expressed their dismay with the stench and dead fish, they were told everything was fine and no genuine harm had been done.

The publication in 1962 of marine biologist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was a watershed moment in environmental history. Yet it additionally represented a landmark in the history of environmental justice. Carson defended as fundamental the right to safety and health of Mexican farmworkers; she condemned the pesticide industry for exposing migrant workers to DDT and other pesticides she pointedly labeled “elixirs of death.” The pesticide industry responded by orchestrating a hundred thousand dollar campaign both to discredit Silent Spring and to smear Carson as likely a lesbian or a Communist, or both.

No less a milestone in the history of environmental justice was the establishment in 1962 of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA). Founded by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta, the NFWA, which later merged with Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) to form the United Farm Workers (UFW), took on California’s agribusiness in the fight to earn a just wage and to end pesticide poisoning. When Huerta testified before Congress in 1969, she not only spoke to the environmental health emergency caused by chemical spraying while agricultural workers picked grapes, she demanded that all workers be issued protective equipment so that they might do their labor without fear of illness and injury. The UFW soon joined with progressive environmental groups (e.g. the Environmental Defense Fund, Friends of the Earth) to demand that DDT be banned – which it would be in 1970 by the newly-established Environmental Protection Agency.

The 1960s witnessed a struggle for environmental justice on several fronts. The anti-Vietnam war movement played an essential, if often unacknowledged, role in this struggle. Scientists on the left drew a direct line between their antiwar politics and what they identified as the catastrophic ecological impact of US military policies on the Vietnamese people. In the mid-1960s, American scientists denounced as biochemical warfare a defoliation program being conducted under the euphemistic name Operation Ranch Hand. Begun in 1961-1962, Operation Ranch Hand was a brainchild of the Department of Defense; it involved the spraying of toxic herbicides (e.g. 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, a chemical ingredient of Agent Orange) on Vietnamese forests. Officially considered a counterinsurgency operation, Ranch Hand’s stated goal was to prevent North Vietnamese guerillas from camouflaging themselves in wooded areas. However, scientists angrily argued that the operation had a far more sinister objective: the destruction of millions of acres of crops. The operation was using “starvation as a weapon,” Harvard public health expert Jean Mayer wrote in 1967. Botanist Arthur Galston called the operation “ecocide.” Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich – never one to pull his rhetorical punches – said the defoliation campaign was not unlike the Nazi genocide of European Jewry since both were crimes against humanity. It would be the efforts of plant physiologist Arthur Westing, who traveled twice to Vietnam to document the deforestation caused by Operation Ranch Hand (as well as the effects of incessant bombing on the country’s ecosystem) that finally in 1972 convinced Ellsworth Bunker, US Ambassador to Vietnam, to press successfully for an end to the military operation.

A major figure in the postwar history of environmental justice was biologist Barry Commoner. Commoner’s career as an environmentalist began when he formed the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) in 1958 to publicize the dangers that aboveground nuclear weapons testing posed to the general public. To bring attention to their cause, CNI concocted an ingenuous plan. On an understanding that St. Louis lay directly in the path of winds from nuclear test sites in the southwest, CNI calculated that Missouri cattle were grazing in contaminated pastures and that in turn Strontium-90 was finding its way into local dairy products. On the assumption that children drank milk, CNI concluded that Strontium-90 from nuclear fallout would end up in the calcium of children’s teeth. The group asked local parents to mail their children’s baby teeth to them – and thus received tens of thousands of baby teeth to test for radioactivity. (CNI continued to receive thousands more baby teeth for many years to come.) The CNI survey determined that the teeth of children born before most aboveground nuclear testing had begun contained far less Strontium-90 than did the baby teeth of children born in the early 1960s. This data helped successfully to mobilize public sentiments in support of a nuclear test ban treaty. The United States and the Soviet Union ratified this treaty in 1963.

Virginia Warner Brodine, a good friend of Commoner’s, played a crucial role in the Committee for Nuclear Information’s political evolution. Brodine had been a columnist for the Marxist Daily People’s World in Los Angeles before she moved to St. Louis (after her musician husband had been blacklisted in Hollywood). There Brodine took a position first with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) before she helped co-found CNI with Commoner, editing the committee’s bulletin, Nuclear Information, renamed Scientist and Citizen in 1964 (after CNI had been renamed CEI – the Committee for Environmental Information), and finally Environment in 1968. Under Brodine’s guidance, Environment often profiled environmental justice concerns like ecocide in Vietnam and the disproportionate health impact of air pollution on nonwhite and poor communities in urban centers. In 1972, and with an introduction by Commoner, Brodine published Air Pollution, an early attempt to raise public awareness about rising planetary temperatures – in her words, the critical question of how much “waste heat we can dissipate into the atmosphere without producing major effects on the global climate.”

Barry Commoner’s own leftist sympathies increasingly defined his environmentalist agenda. Commoner expressed deep skepticism that free market capitalism could ever effectively protect Americans from further environmental deterioration. He spoke often of a “hidden price” to “our system of productivity,” noting in 1970, or long before this view assumed the status of commonsense on the American left, that capitalism was “designed in such a way as to rely for its economic success on the evasion of its true costs in environmental destruction.” Commoner took every opportunity to deliver a message directly to industrial workers that environmentalism mattered dearly to their future and the future of their families; he spoke just as eloquently to persuade those in the professional and more conventionally liberal (and often white) environmentalist groups that working-class and minority support for environmentalism was vital to the movement’s success. Commoner also addressed the discriminatory impact of environmental toxins, arguing that a “functional link” existed between “racism, poverty, and powerlessness, and the chemical industry’s assault on the environment.”

By the end of the 1960s, public health advocates affiliated with the New Left had identified an environmental justice impulse as integral to their activism. In 1967, the Health Policy Advisory Center (Health/PAC) formed under the leadership of Robb Burlage, a co-founder of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) who had helped to draft the Port Huron Statement. Health/PAC’s initial project was an investigation of inequities in the New York City public health system, but its mission quickly expanded. Health/PAC censured the US military’s decision to bomb North Vietnamese medical facilities. It demanded that politicians and health officials devote far more resources toward preventing an epidemic of lead poisoning among New York’s poorest children of color. It detailed the plague of occupational accidents and respiratory diseases in the agricultural, coal, textile, and asbestos industries. In 1970, Health/PAC issued The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics, a book written by staff members Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich. It stated that “we have seen ourselves as serving the larger movement for radical social change in America, by making health a ‘case study’ in the need for democratic restructuring of American institutions.” Health/PAC’s activism represents a crucial precursor to the ongoing demand on the social democratic left that comprehensive universal single-payer healthcare be considered a human right.

Lost to history are the names of many who perished in the fight for environmental justice. We do, however, remember Karen Silkwood as the first whistleblower from the nuclear energy industry. Silkwood was a technician at the Kerr-McGee plutonium factory near Cimarron, Oklahoma. A member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW), Silkwood died under suspicious circumstances in 1974 as she drove to meet a New York Times reporter with a folder of evidence on Kerr-McGee’s failures to protect employees from deadly exposure to contaminants. (The folder was never found.) Kerr-McGee permanently shut the Cimarron plant the next year. Silkwood’s efforts were memorialized in a 1982 film (starring Meryl Streep).

Founded in 1974, the Women of All Red Nations (WARN), under the collective leadership of Lorelei DeCora Means (Lakota), Madonna Thunder Hawk (Lakota), Phyllis Young (Lakota), and Janet McCloud (Tulalip), made its own critical contributions to environmental justice. WARN conducted a study into an environmental crisis on the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation in South Dakota, finding a correlation between uranium mining in the area and an unusually high rate of miscarriages among Native women. The Black Hills Alliance (BHA), established in the late 1970s, continued WARN’s initiatives, arguing that the poisoning of Indian land constituted a form of genocide because it relegated indigenous people to a “National Sacrifice Area.” BHA succeeded in blocking all uranium mining on Lakota land. Lifelong environmental justice activist Winona LaDuke (Ojibwe) was an early member of BHA; in 1996 and 2000, LaDuke ran as the Green Party nominee for vice president (with presidential candidate Ralph Nader). In more recent years LaDuke and WARN co-founder Madonna Thunder Hawk have been leading opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The Appalachian environmental justice movement has its own long history. One important milestone in this history occurred in 1978 when Appalachian activist and writer Helen Matthews Lewis, with assistance from the Highlander Research and Education Center, established the Kingsport Study Group. Lewis’ group accused the Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee, of poisoning its workers and the townspeople. Lewis bluntly stated that the chemical company bore responsibility not only for neurological diseases among their workers, but also for a rash of physical and intellectual disabilities among Kingsport children. The chemical company responded by red-baiting Lewis and her group, and by threatening workers’ jobs. Lewis’ efforts in Kingsport may have had limited immediate impact, but it did contribute to the establishment at Highlander of the Southern Appalachian Leadership Training Program (SALT). SALT became invaluable for organizers as a place to learn the skills to build grassroots groups around environmental and occupational health needs in their communities. By the early 1980s, dozens of citizens’ groups in the region had formed to challenge absentee corporate interests eager to reap profits from the mountains’ resources while remaining brazenly unconcerned that their greed all too often devastated the land and the people who lived on it.

Environmental justice attracted national attention due to protests by the Love Canal Homeowners Association (LCHA). LCHA was a white and working-class neighborhood group in a community near Niagara Falls, New York; it had formed in 1978 after residents were told that a playground adjacent to their children’s elementary school sat atop more than twenty thousand tons of chemical waste buried there in the late 1940s and early 1950s by the Hooker Chemical Company – later a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum. In 1980, Lois Marie Gibbs, a local housewife turned antitoxics activist, compelled the federal government to place Love Canal under a state of emergency. Gibbs successfully petitioned the US Congress to pass the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), or Superfund Act. In 1981 Gibbs renamed LCHA the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW), and then again renamed it the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ). Gibb’s CHEJ continues to lend organizational support to hundreds of communities across the United States devastated by contaminants and, more recently, industrial fracking.

In 1982, the residents of Afton, North Carolina, organized Warren County Citizens Concerned (WCCC) to prevent the dumping of tons of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in a local disposal landfill. That PCBs – a chemical compound commonly used in a host of products like coolants, fluorescent lights, and lubricants – were so toxic that their commercial manufacturing had ended in 1977 and that Warren County was one of the poorest and blackest counties in the state were facts scarcely lost on the people of Afton. WCCC activists argued it could not have been random that EPA director Anne Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) selected vulnerable Warren County as the site for a PCBs-infected landfill. For a full six weeks, members of WCCC lay down in the road to block the trucks hauling the chemical waste; police arrested them by the hundreds. It was the first time in American history that individuals were imprisoned for opposing a toxic waste site. In 2012, the state of North Carolina unveiled a historical marker that honored the Warren County protests for having “sparked [an] environmental justice movement in the U.S.”

It remains apocryphal that the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis actually cried out, “This is environmental racism!” while he was being arrested for his participation in the Warren County protests. However, Chavis not only did coin the phrase, he documented its reality. In 1987 Chavis, with environmental activist Charles Lee, and under the auspices of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. What the UCC report found was that no variable determined where a hazardous waste landfill was sited more than the blackness of the people who lived nearby. A follow-up study in the mid-1990s found communities of color to be nearly fifty percent more likely than white communities to live close to a toxic waste facility.

Petrochemical companies did not necessarily hesitate to bury or dump their toxins in white and working-class communities like Love Canal, New York, Acton, Massachusetts, and Times Beach, Missouri. However, when industries deposited their chemical waste close to poor communities of color, these decisions often stood in the long shadow of racial oppression in the United States. An egregious example is a stretch of 85 miles between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, an area where cotton and sugarcane plantations had once relied on slave labor and an area that remained largely African American into the postwar era. This stretch of land became a favorite for petroleum companies to build their refineries – refineries that maintained strictly segregated hiring practices as long as it was legal for them to do so. These refineries have produced one of the nation’s most polluted industrial zones in the country. Today the region is still called Cancer Alley due to the astronomical rates of disease and death, particularly among African Americans.

Environmental racism had long been hidden in plain sight, argued sociologist Robert D. Bullard, who founded the Environmental Justice Resource Center at the historically-black Clark Atlanta University. White and middle-class communities exerted political clout, making certain that toxic landfills were always put elsewhere. But since these landfills had to be put somewhere, this meant politically marginalized persons of color were far more likely to see toxins disposed in their neighborhoods. The progress of environmentalism had meant progress for a few at the expense of many. It was, Bullard wrote, the racial logic of an environmental movement that had too often neglected to acknowledge that race mattered in its analyses of ecological damage. Bullard observed, with his frequent collaborator Beverly D. Wright, founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, that when mainstream environmentalism spawned a “not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) phenomenon,” it additionally produced a “place-in-blacks’-backyard (PIBBY) principle.”

In 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington DC. In 1992, the EPA established an Environmental Equity Working Group (later renamed the Office of Environmental Justice) to “review the evidence that racial minority and low-income communities bear a disproportionate risk burden.” In 1994, the Clinton administration ordered that any decision about the location of hazardous waste sites address the potential impact on nonwhite communities. Steps to correct the environmental injustices of history began to be made.

Yet environmental racism continued to fester. In 2014, the impoverished and principally black residents of Flint, Michigan, were informed that levels of lead in their water supply were dramatically too toxic for human consumption. In 2020, in a heartbreaking continuity from Upton Sinclair’s time to our own, Latinx workers in the meatpacking and food processing industries, among other services considered essential, were hit especially hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, a Green New Deal for the United States remained unrealized. And climate change was already creating environmental refugees from their own sacrifice zones due to rising sea levels or drought or any number of extreme weather events. Climate migration can be expected to intensify in the decades to come.

In the twenty-first century, environmental justice is a global movement. It continues to advocate on behalf of (and alongside) those most vulnerable frontline populations often least equipped and empowered to advocate for themselves. Innumerable challenges lie ahead for a movement increasingly led by a new generation of activists (e.g. the Sunrise Movement, Climate Justice Alliance) that has taken up the cause as if its very existence depends on it.

Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Gottlieb, Robert. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993.

Hofrichter, Richard, ed. Toxic Struggles: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Justice. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993.

Karmel, Jonathan D. Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017.