Each Wednesday you will turn in a reflection memo, with your personal reactions to the course material. You should use this exercise as an opportu

O N E

A History of the

Environmental Justice

Movement

The determination and persistence of residents in communities like Ket- tleman City is firmly rooted in past social justice movements in the United States. Many of the techniques employed by groups like El Pueblo in Kettleman City did not, of course, originate in those struggles. Coalition building, mastery of technical language, development of tech- nical expertise, direct action, litigation, and direct participatory democ- racy have all been used in various social reform movements for decades. Nevertheless, as applied to environmental struggles in poor communities and communities of color, these techniques are helping to redefine both ecological awareness and the meaning of the “environment” itself.

Pointing to a particular date or event that launched the Environmen- tal Justice Movement is impossible, as the movement grew organically out of dozens, even hundreds, of local struggles and events and out of a variety of other social movements. Nevertheless, certain incidents loom large in the history of the movement as galvanizing events.

Many observers point to protests by African Americans against a toxic dump in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982 as the beginning of the movement. The sociologist Robert Bullard points to African Ameri- can student protests over the drowning death of an eight-year-old girl in a garbage dump in a residential area of Houston in 1967.1 Others note that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was traveling to Memphis to support striking garbage workers in what is now considered an environ- mental justice struggle when he was assassinated in 1968.2 The United

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Farm Workers’ struggle against pesticide poisoning in the workplace, be- ginning in the 1960s (and continuing to this day), is the starting point for some. Some Native American activists and others consider the first environmental justice struggles on the North American continent to have taken place 500 years ago with the initial invasion by Europeans.

Rather than an incident-focused history of the movement, however, we think it more useful to think metaphorically of the movement as a river, fed over time by many tributaries.3 No one tributary made the river the force that it is today; indeed, it is difficult to point to the headwaters, since so many tributaries have nourished the movement. Particular events can be seen as high-water marks (or perhaps, to push the metaphor, exciting rapids) in each stream, or the main river. With this idea in mind, we discuss here some of the most important tributaries of the river of the Environmental Justice Movement.

Foundations of the Environmental Justice Movement

The Civil Rights Movement

Perhaps the most significant source feeding into today’s Environmental Justice Movement is the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Through that movement, hundreds of thousands of African Americans and their allies, primarily but not solely in the southern United States, pressed for social change and experienced empowerment through grassroots activism.4

The spirit and experience of resistance through the Civil Rights Move- ment was widespread in the southern United States and in many north- ern urban areas. The movement was strongly church-based; many of its leaders, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, were ministers. When the Environmental Justice Movement began building momentum in the early 1980s, it was church-based civil rights leaders, seasoned in the Civil Rights Movement, who were at its fore. The 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina, against a PCB dump were led by local church officials and by the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, a longtime civil rights activist and at that time the head of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice.5 The Envi- ronmental Justice Movement’s roots in civil rights and church-based ad-

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vocacy is evidenced in the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice’s landmark 1987 study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. Perhaps the single best-known work documenting the dis- proportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color, Toxic Wastes and Race galvanized the movement. (Its author, Charles Lee, while working for a church-based civil rights group, also helped organize early meetings of academics to talk about environmental justice issues.)

Environmental Justice Movement leaders coming out of civil rights organizing include not only those who advocated for the rights of African Americans but also Latino activists. Movement leaders like Jean Gauna and Richard Moore of Albuquerque came out of Chicano politi- cal organizing in the Southwest, which involved mass protests against the Vietnam War, police brutality, and racism in housing and education.6

Civil rights activists brought three things to the Environmental Jus- tice Movement: a history of, and experience with, direct action, which led to similar exercises of grassroots power by the Environmental Justice Movement; a perspective that recognized that the disproportionate im- pact of environmental hazards was not random or the result of “neutral” decisions but a product of the same social and economic structure which had produced de jure and de facto segregation and other racial oppres- sion; and the experience of empowerment through political action. The seasoned civil rights leaders recognized environmental racism and set about using the tools and techniques they knew in their effort to com- bat it. The Warren County protests, for example, in which more than 500 people were arrested in acts of civil disobedience,7 directly echoed the sit-ins and civil disobedience of the 1960s. Similarly, marches, a sig- nature of the Civil Rights Movement, have become a fixture in local en- vironmental justice struggles.

Civil Rights Movement leaders now in positions of power have also lent assistance to the Environmental Justice Movement. For instance, in 1992, Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a prominent participant in the protests of the 1960s, introduced the Environmental Justice Act.8

Though the Act did not pass Congress, it raised environmental justice is- sues to a new stature in Washington. Lewis, in speaking about the bill, recognized that “the quest for environmental justice has helped to renew the civil rights movement” through its call for environmental protection as a “right of all, not a privilege for a few.”9

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The Anti-Toxics Movement

The second major tributary to the river is the grassroots anti-toxics movement. Communities have long resisted and organized against haz- ardous waste facilities, landfills, and incinerators.10 The grassroots anti- toxics movement burst into national prominence in the late 1970s, when President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal, New York, a disaster area and evacuated residents of a housing development built on a former toxic waste dump.11 While Love Canal and the subsequent evacuation and relocation of another contaminated community at Times Beach, Missouri, are perhaps the best-known early examples of “grassroots en- vironmentalism,” similar stories have taken place across the United States. The proliferation of local actions marked an important shift in en- vironmental activism when it began in the late 1970s: as Andrew Szasz notes, these local environmental conflicts “tended not to be about na- ture, per se, but about land use, social impact, [and] human health.”12

These local actions and activists also transformed toxic waste from a “nonentity to a full-fledged issue.”13

The grassroots anti-toxics movement grew to prominence after the Civil Rights Movement; in contrast to that movement, its leadership is generally characterized by a lack of political organizing experience before a particular toxic struggle. “I have never been an activist before this fight” is a common story in the anti-toxics movement, in which resi- dents, primarily women, are galvanized to action by threats to their health, their families, and their communities. As these grassroots leaders heard about other, similar anti-toxics fights in nearby communities, they slowly linked their local struggles together into a larger “movement.”14

The anti-toxics movement became loosely organized under several national umbrella organizations in the 1980s, which helped make its actions more technically sophisticated and strategically coherent. For example, Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes (CCHW), an organization founded by former residents of Love Canal, has assisted grassroots activists nationwide for the past fifteen years, working with more than 7,000 local groups.15 Thousands of these groups used (and continue to use) direct action protests to effectuate their demands. National groups like CCHW and regional groups that sprang up, such

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as the Environmental Health Coalition in San Diego, California, also used science and technical information, placing a high premium on de- mystifying arcane documents such as environmental impact statements and processes such as risk assessment. The anti-toxics movement sought to understand, and then restructure, the system of toxic waste production in the United States. Growing out of their concrete experi- ences in their own communities, anti-toxics activists came up with the idea of “pollution prevention”—that is, eliminating the use of toxic chemicals in industrial practices so that the production of toxic waste is stopped as well. Under the force of years of organizing, pollution prevention has moved from being a movement demand to being na- tional policy.16

Like the Civil Rights Movement, the grassroots anti-toxics movement also brought the experiential base of direct action into the Environmen- tal Justice Movement. It further contributed both the experience of using (and, when need be, discrediting) scientific and technical informa- tion and the conceptual framework that pushed pollution prevention and toxics use reduction as policy goals. Anti-toxics groups also had built na- tional networks by linking local activists, an experience that they brought to the movement.

The grassroots anti-toxics movement also contributed a structural un- derstanding of power, albeit different from civil rights leaders’. Civil rights advocates came, through the process of the civil rights struggles, to understand discrete racial assaults (from epithets to lynchings to seg- regation laws) as part of a social structure of racial oppression that ulti- mately had to be dismantled if racial justice was to be achieved. Anti-tox- ics activists, through the process of local fights against polluting facilities, came to understand discrete toxic assaults as part of an economic struc- ture in which, as part of the “natural” functioning of the economy, cer- tain communities would be polluted. Anti-toxics leaders thus focused on corporate power and the structure of the U.S. and the global economies and on strategies for changing that structure. It was when, in the 1980s, civil rights leaders began to embrace the anti-toxics movement’s eco- nomic analysis and the anti-toxics leaders embraced the civil rights ac- tivists’ racial critique that the conceptual fusion took place that helped create the Environmental Justice Movement.17

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Academics

A third important contributory stream to the Environmental Justice Movement comes from a seemingly unlikely spot: academia. Academics, however, have played a crucial role in both sparking and shaping the En- vironmental Justice Movement, perhaps a larger one than they have played in any other broad-based social movement in the United States. Beginning in the 1960s, isolated researchers discovered that environ- mental hazards had a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income people.18 Dr. Robert Bullard, studying Houston land use patterns, found in the late 1970s that garbage dumps had a dispropor- tionate impact on African Americans; this research led to Bullard’s pio- neering work in the field. In the late 1980s, Bullard did a literature search using the terms “minority” and “environment” and found twelve articles—six of which he had written. At that time, several academics, led by Bunyan Bryant at the University of Michigan, Bullard (then at the University of California-Riverside), and Charles Lee of the United Church of Christ, began to discuss the findings of disparate impact among themselves and held conferences on the subject.

In 1990, a group of academics convened at the University of Michi- gan to discuss their most recent findings. At that meeting, they de- cided that the energy and the momentum generated in their weekend together were too exciting to let dissipate in the usual academic pa- pers. Instead, the group wrote letters to Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and to William Reilly, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the letters, the professors, who came to be known as the Michigan Group, set out some of their findings of disproportionate impact and asked for a meeting with the officials to discuss a government re- sponse. As Bullard reports, the group never heard from Secretary Sul- livan. William Reilly, however, agreed to meet with the Michigan Group, and, later in 1990, seven professors met with Reilly and EPA staffers in Washington, D.C.19 The result of the Michigan Group’s ad- vocacy with Administrator Reilly was EPA’s creation of a Work Group on Environmental Equity.20 Reilly later created an Office of Environ- mental Equity, which newly appointed EPA Administrator Carol Browner renamed the Office of Environmental Justice in 1993.

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Beyond lobbying the federal government, the academics researched and wrote (and continue to produce) studies that demonstrate the dis- proportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color and on low-income people. These studies, dialectically fueled by and fueling the movement, played a series of roles. For one, the studies sparked and moved forward local struggles. In Los Angeles, for example, a commu- nity struggle led by Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles against a giant garbage incinerator received what its leaders call crucial support when, before a key vote of the City Council, the UCLA School of Urban Planning released a 700-page critique of the incinerator pro- ject and its disproportionate impact on people of color in Los Angeles.

The academics’ work also shaped or reaffirmed movement leaders’ consciousness about the structural or systemic nature of environmental oppression. “I thought it was just us until I began to hear about the United Church of Christ study and the other studies,” says Mary Lou Mares, an activist who has fought for more than ten years against Chem- ical Waste Management’s toxic dump near her Latino community of Ket- tleman City. “Then I realized we were part of a national pattern.”21

At other times, the academics have provided expertise to community groups during litigation or administrative advocacy in a local environ- mental justice struggle. In fact, the career of the most prolific and influ- ential academic, Dr. Robert Bullard, was launched by a court case in Houston in the late 1970s in which his wife needed an expert witness.22

Bullard and others have since prepared studies and testified for dozens of community groups nationwide. In perhaps the best known example, Professor Bullard’s documentation of racially biased decision-making cri- teria in the siting of a nuclear waste processing facility in rural Louisiana was directly responsible for the federal government’s decision to deny a permit to the facility.23

The concrete victories achieved in Los Angeles, Louisiana, and else- where were marked by the synergy between community activism and the academic support that played a critical role in each fight. On a local level, the education went both ways: the academics learned from community residents the situation on the ground, while local residents came to un- derstand their community’s struggle in the context of a larger regional or national pattern and movement.

Finally, the academics’ work provides a basis for policy changes at the

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local, state, and national levels. In signing the Executive Order on Envi- ronmental Justice, for example, President Clinton acknowledged the need to “focus Federal attention on the environmental and human health conditions in minority communities and low-income communi- ties with the goal of achieving environmental justice.”24 Without the pre- vious decade of studies that had established the scope of the environ- mental injustice in these communities, the problem never would have reached the attention of the White House.

Today, academics continue to play a crucial supporting role through such institutions as the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark- Atlanta University, founded and run by Robert Bullard, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Xavier University in New Or- leans, run by Beverly Hendrix Wright. These centers, and others like them, provide crucial research that aids local struggles, as well as train a new generation of professionals of color.

Native American Struggles

A fourth significant stream feeding the Environmental Justice Move- ment has been organizing by Native Americans. Native Americans have struggled for self-determination in land use decisions since their first en- counters with Europeans more than 500 years ago.25 Activism by Native Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the precursor to today’s organizing around environmental issues by Indians on and off the reser- vations, organizing that contributes one of the most vibrant and ever ex- panding tributaries to the movement. The struggles that led to the cre- ation of the American Indian Movement were often focused around land and environmental exploitation, including such well-known and iconic incidents of Indian resistance as the shootout at Pine Ridge in 1975, which took place on the very day that the corrupt Pine Ridge Tribal Chair Dickie Wilson was in Washington, D.C., signing away rights to mineral exploration in the sacred Black Hills to major oil companies.26

Native American activists brought to the Environmental Justice Movement the experiences of centuries of struggle for self-determina- tion and resistance to resource-extractive land use. The struggles of the 1870s to protect tribal land honed skills that would be useful later. As the

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first victims of environmental racism, Native Americans brought a deep understanding of the concept to the Environmental Justice Movement.

The Native American tributary to the movement also helped define one of its central philosophies, the concept of self-determination. The centuries-old Native American idea of sovereignty echoed with, and helped create, the Environmental Justice Movement’s credo, “We speak for ourselves.” While for some other communities the slogan was an at- tempt to take back environmental policy decisions from traditional envi- ronmental groups, for Native Americans the slogan defined their rela- tionship to state and federal governments.

The significant contributions of Native Americans to the Environ- mental Justice Movement were institutionalized in the formation of the Indigenous Environmental Network in 1990, the history and function of which is the subject of chapter 6.

The Labor Movement

Various strands of the labor movement have also contributed to the Environmental Justice Movement. The largest labor tributary has been the historical struggle of farm-workers to gain control over their working conditions. The farm-worker movement of the 1960s, led by Cesar Chavez, was perhaps the first nationally known effort by people of color to address an environmental issue. Much of the activity took the form of union organizing drives. For instance, the United Farm Workers (UFW) included in its initial organizing and contractual de- mands the ban of certain dangerous pesticides, including DDT. Union contracts in the late 1960s prohibited the use of such pesticides, and the lawsuits that ultimately led the U.S. government to ban the chem- ical outright were brought by migrant farm-workers.27 Farm-workers’ struggle for self-determination in the workplace—for the power to control decisions that affected their lives, such as the use of pesti- cides—mirrored the struggles by Native Americans and African Amer- icans for political self-determination and by the grassroots anti-toxics movement for a role in local decisions. Unionization and protection of farm-workers’ health and safety were integrally linked from the earliest days of the farm-worker organizing drives, and they continue to be

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linked today; it was thus natural for farm-workers to become active participants in the movement for environmental justice.

A second, and much less significant, labor tributary, one fed by the public health activism of the 1970s, is the occupational safety and health movement. The rise of Committees on Occupational Safety and Health (COSHs) across the country in the 1970s and 1980s brought increased attention to the environmental hazards faced by workers in the work- place. The COSHs were active in regions of the country—the South, for example—and in industry sectors—such as textiles and high-technol- ogy—that traditionally had little or no union representation. COSH ac- tivists, such as Mandy Hawes in San Jose, California, became early orga- nizers of and advocates in the Environmental Justice Movement.

A third labor tributary is the increased attention paid to occupational safety and health by industrial unions. Led by sometimes renegade union activists such as Tony Mazzochi, unions such as the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union have paid increased attention to environmental justice issues. While industrial unions have often believed that their in- terests lay with further development or expansion of industrial plants, some visionary union leaders have understood that the push for safer jobs and a cleaner workplace can help build political support for labor from fence line communities and environmentalists. This awareness has led to an important collaboration between the Environmental Justice Move- ment and organized labor in the Campaign for a Just Transition; through this campaign, movement and union leaders have been exploring com- mon ground in phasing out the use of dangerous chemicals. This tribu- tary is still a trickle, but it is an exciting addition to the movement.

Traditional Environmentalists

A very small, and late, tributary to the Environmental Justice Movement is the traditional environmental movement. Perhaps it is the history of the traditional environmental movement that has made it such a small contributor to the Environmental Justice Movement.

Two major waves of traditional environmentalism have swept the United States. The first wave began around the turn of the century, when John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and other lovers of wilderness advo- cated the preservation of natural spaces in the United States. Like the

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second wave, the first wave encompassed two divergent views that even today remain in tension: the preservationists, who advocate preserving wilderness from humans, and the conservationists, who want to preserve nature for human use through wise stewardship.28

Modern environmentalism, or the second wave, began after World War II with the rapid expansion in the use of petrochemical products. When the consequences of the shift to petrochemical production began to be felt, a new wave of activism sprang up, fueled by searing critiques of industrial practices such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. This wave of environmentalism coalesced around Earth Day in 1970 and was institu- tionalized in the proliferation of legal-scientific groups such as the Nat- ural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (SCLDF), and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), organi- zations that currently dominate the national scene.29 The second wave— what we call the traditional environmental movement30—and the body of statutes and case law known today as environmental law grew out of the social ferment of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement and the anti–Vietnam War movement, the two movements in which the second wave has its roots, were explicitly oriented toward social justice.

The second-wave environmentalists have moved away from this social justice orientation, however. In particular, they have moved from a par- ticipatory strategy based on broad mobilization of the interested public, such as that used in the civil rights and the anti-war movements, to an in- sider strategy based on litigation, lobbying, and technical evaluation.31

The movement away from a participatory strategy paralleled the move- ment away from the social justice issues that dominated the speeches given on Earth Day in 1970.32 It also coincided with the traditional groups’ desire to control the environmental establishment or at least to have power within it; as one commentator observes, “Shedding the rad- ical skin of their amateur past seemed necessary to achieve that goal.”33

The second wave, made up overwhelmingly of lawyers, focused pri- marily on legal and scientific approaches to environmental problems.34

Second-wave lawyers helped write most of the environmental legislation on the books today, from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), to the Clean Air Act (CAA), the Clean Water Act (CWA), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA),

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the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), and the Superfund Amendment and Reauthorization Act (SARA). These laws created complex administrative processes that exclude most people who do not have training in the field and necessitate specific technical expertise. The laws, while in some cases successful in cleaning up the environment, have also had an unintended consequence—the exclusion of those without expertise from much of environmental decision making.

Having designed and helped implement most of the nation’s envi- ronmental laws, the second wave has spent the past twenty-five years in court litigating. Lawsuits are now the primary, and sometimes the only, strategy employed by traditional groups.35 As the executive director of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund stated in 1988, “Litigation is the most important thing the environmental movement has done over the past fifteen years.”36

Until relatively recently, the traditional environmental law community has largely ignored environmental justice issues.37 In some cases, the lack of attention has been intentional: in a 1971 national membership survey, the Sierra Club asked its members, “Should the Club concern itself with the conservation problems of such special groups as the urban poor and ethnic minorities?” According to the Club’s Bulletin, “[t]he balance of sentiment was against the Club so involving itself,” with “58 percent of all members either strongly or somewhat opposed” to the idea.38

Racism and other prejudices have historically excluded activists of color and grassroots activists from the traditional environmental move- ment.39 In fact, some of these activists regard the traditional environ- mental groups as obstacles to progress, if not outright enemies.40 Some in traditional environmental groups have pushed for a greater focus on environmental justice—one hired an environmental justice coordinator, another hired several environmental justice fellows and announced a new focus on such cases—but, for the most part, the Environmental Justice Movement has operated without the input or assistance of the traditional environmental groups, perhaps to its benefit.41 Given the second wave of environmental activism’s roots in the grassroots activism of the 1960s, this disconnect is ironic, and poignant.

Some have described the grassroots movement for environmental jus- tice as the third wave of environmental activism,42 but we see the Envi-

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ronmental Justice Movement as separate from and as transcending the environmental movement—as a movement based on environmental is- sues but situated within the history of movements for social justice.

The Summit

The disparate strands of the Environmental Justice Movement—civil rights, grassroots anti-toxics, academic, labor, indigenous—were con- sciously brought together for the first time in 1991 at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The Summit served notice that the Environmental Justice Movement had arrived as a force to be reckoned with on the national level. It was also, in some ways, a de- claration of independence from the traditional environmental move- ment; a telling statement from attendees was, “I don’t care to join the environmental movement, I belong to a movement already.”

Ironically, the Summit grew out of the Environmental Justice Move- ment’s challenge to traditional environmental groups. In early 1990, Richard Moore, of the SouthWest Organizing Project, and Pat Bryant, of the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization, drafted a letter, ultimately signed by more than 100 community leaders, to the ten largest tradi- tional environmental groups in which they accused the groups of racism in their hiring and policy development processes.43 An article in the New York Times on the letter 44 initiated a media firestorm around the issue, and in an interview on CNN, the Rev. Ben Chavis, one of the signatories of the letter and at the time the head of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, called for an emergency summit of envi- ronmental, civil rights, and community groups. “In his mind, he was thinking about a small group of people getting together to negotiate it out,” says Charles Lee, who directed the environmental justice program at the Commission for Racial Justice. Lee had other ideas, however, and, as he put together a planning committee, the summit quickly evolved from a small negotiating session into an event at which people of color could actively put forward their own environmental agenda.

The Summit was the product of eighteen months of intensive orga- nizing by movement leaders, including Lee, Bryant, Moore, Dana Al

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