Welcome

Welcome to the Pacific West Community Forestry Center (PWCFC) website on rural environmental justice. This site features a variety of information, resources, links, and networking tools. It is our hope that community organizers and community members, employees and leaders of non-profit organizations, and independent or university researchers will all find something of interest here. The site is still under construction, and we welcome your suggestions! On this page, you can:

• trace the steps of the modern environmental justice movement
• find definitions of "environmental justice" and other terms
• determine whether researchers might be of use to your organizational or community mission, and how to structure relationships with them that leave community members in the driver's seat
• read about successful examples of rural environmental justice work with the Pacific West Community Forestry Center (PWCFC)
• read about current laws on environmental justice
• learn which groups are seen as part of the environmental justice movement, and which are seen as allies
• connect to hundreds of other web sites for grassroots environmental justice groups, advocacy groups, funding organizations, and other community legal, environmental, and organizing resources
• learn about the latest terms connected with environmental justice and how you might apply them to your funding requests
• learn about the precautions to take when forming alliances with environmental, non-grassroots, or research organizations
• learn about connections between issues faced in rural and urban areas of the Pacific Northwest
• receive encouragement in your work and connect to others facing similar struggles

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What is Environmental Justice (EJ)?

Definitions

The environmental justice (EJ) movement and the environmental movement are distinct, yet overlapping struggles. The modern EJ movement has its roots in the intersection of the Civil Rights movement and the environmental movement. While Civil Rights activists were struggling for basic human rights, environmentalists were working to preserve wilderness areas and conserve forests. These two movements did not begin to meet in the mainstream until the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Carson redefined environment to include industrial farmlands, urban and suburban areas. She cited the dangers of chemicals used to kill agricultural pests, fungal predators, and competitive weeds—showing readers how these compounds poison entire systems as they work their way through the food chain. While Carson noted the vulnerability of humans in this chain of catastrophe, she did not make the explicit link to the increased vulnerability of low-income or minority populations, who are often targeted by chemical companies as powerless, forced to live and work in polluted environments, or have certain practices—such as subsistence fishing in polluted streams—that increase their vulnerability to environmental hazards. The increasing importance of the environmental justice movement called environmentalists to redefine the term "environment." No longer could the environment be a place preserved separate from human habitation. The new definition of environment had more in common with that of conservationists, such as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, although many conservationists were unwilling to recognize the vital importance of people of color in the conservation movement. An environmental justice definition for the environment is broadened to the "place where we live, work, learn and play" (in Turner and Wu 2002). This encompasses urban and rural environments, labor and conservation issues, human beings and animals, and attests to the place of humans within an ecosystem. Inherent in the definition is a commitment to achieving sustainability so that all creatures—human, plant, animal, and bacterial—can survive and live healthy lives. Contemporary definitions of environmental justice include:

• Senate Bill 115: "the fair treatment of people of all races, cultures, and incomes with respect to the development, adoption, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws and policies."
• Environmental Protection Agency: "the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Fair treatment means that no group of people, including a racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic group, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies (http://www.epa.gov).
• Environmental Justice Principles, adopted at First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, 1991: (Environmental Justice includes) protection from contaminants, the right to a clean environment, the right to participate in decision making, and a commitment to consume less resources. See http://www.toxicspot.com/env_justice/env_principles.html.

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"Environmental Justice" in Practice

Here are just three examples of the many lenses activists and scholars use to conceptualize environmental justice issues:

• Public health: Environmental injustices that result in community-wide health problems, such as the lack of clean water for farmworkers, or the presence of contaminants in the soils of rural areas from past mining activities, are key public health issues. Interventions will be technical, relying on risk assessment, treatment, and prevention, as well as social, involving community organizing and information dissemination. Other EJ public health issues include social behavior and social pathologies related to environmental degradation. Greenberg & Schneider (1994) describe the high rates of violence in areas of urban New Jersey where there are high concentrations of Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) and Temporarily Obsolete Abandoned Derelict Sites (TOADS) (in Turner and Wu 2002). Similarly, centuries of destruction and alienation of the resources belonging to indigenous people have left Native communities with high rates of health problems and environmental contamination.
• Civil Rights, race or racism: Environmental injustices associated with race involve two main categories of assumptions:
  1. People of color negatively affect or disregard their environments. They are not environmentalists.
  2. People of color, by virtue of their ethnicity, as well as their economic, and social status, are powerless to fight a negative situation. Therefore, companies can knowingly discriminate in the placement of polluting facilities, posing a greater risk to populations of color.
  These lead to the exclusion of minority populations from environmental decision-making, and, often, the imposition of environmental burdens through pollution, health hazards, and lack of information. Interventions include community organizing, popular education, and network building for systemic change. Challenges include linking multiethnic groups, convincing groups of their entitlement and legitimate right to participate in the process to positively affect the lives of their communities, and making significant policy changes that improve the health and opportunities of all diverse groups effected.
• Sovereignty: According to Zoltan Grossman, "...the most workable date for the founding of the (North American) Native environmental justice movement is 1492" (in Turner and Wu 2002). Environmental justice cannot be achieved without addressing past wrongs and nullified property rights. The taking of lands and resources, and the attempted cultural genocide that Native people have faced since the onset of colonization continues today in many forms. These include public lands policies that don't include Native communities (recognized or unrecognized), hydroelectric re-licensing without examining the history of land ownership (within the framework of international treaty rights, if a treaty has not been made, the indigenous inhabitants still own the land), the siting of toxic chemicals on Native lands, exclusion from environmental decision making, and the barring of traditional activities on lands now recognized as public (national forests, parks, and monuments). Native environmental justice activists work on re-gaining access to their lands, educating allies, protecting existing Native lands and cultures, maintaining and improving their government-to-government relationship, and gaining a say in environmental matters in their homelands. This lens overlaps with that of Civil Rights, race, or racism, but is distinct in its emphasis on retaining sovereignty.

All three lenses described above are used in defining and addressing environmental injustices. In 1991, the first national People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington, D.C. and participants released a list of Environmental Justice Principles, available at http://www.toxicspot.com/env_justice/env_principles.html. The principles attest to the right of all people to a safe and healthy environment, address the issue of environmental burdens on minority and low-income populations, and cite the unique concerns of Native sovereignty within the larger environmental justice struggle.

Environmental Racism

Environmental racism is one aspect of the broader environmental justice movement. Under the rubric of environmental racism, disproportionate impacts are related primarily to race. Discrimination may be either intentional and specific, or institutional and structural. Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr. of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) defined environmental racism as the former: "racial discrimination in environmental policy-making and enforcement of regulations and laws; the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic-waste facilities; the official sanctioning of the presence of life-threatening poisons and pollutants in communities of color; and the history of excluding people of color from leadership in the environmental movement" (Griffey 2002).

Often beyond intentional targeting of communities of color is institutionalized racism, in which people of color continue to be marginalized because of the after-effects of oppressive policies (such as Jim Crow laws or the isolation of Native Americans to resource-poor reservations). Such factors repeatedly strand current generations of people of color in situations or areas where they cannot avoid environmental harms. One example is the lower cost of housing around chemical facilities. A low-cost housing project was built in one of these areas in Rodeo, California, and is inhabited primarily by people of color, who because of the after-affects of structural marginalization and intentional discrimination, are disproportionately represented in the low-income population living in the cheapest of subsidized housing.

Race in the Environmental Justice Movement

Looking at the history between race and the contemporary environmental movement, many environmental justice scholars site the importance of the 1982 resistance by the multi-racial, multi-class residents of Warren County, North Carolina to a proposed poly-chlorinated biphenyl (PCB) dump in their county. The community called upon Civil Rights leaders in their struggle, forever "racializing" environmentalism (United Church of Christ 1987). Authors also list a host of other events linking race and environmentalism, including garbage workers' strikes in Memphis in 1968 and 1978/9 (Bullard and Johnson 2000) and unionization in the early 1900s (Taylor 1997).

Environmental Justice scholar Laura Pulido analyzes the emphasis on race within the contemporary environmental justice movement in her article "Development of the 'People of Color' Identity in the Environmental Justice Movement of the Southwestern United States" (Socialist Review 1996). She argues that creating a strong movement calls activists to isolate one element of their identity, such as race, gender, class, or occupation, to mobilize around. However, isolating race (or class, or gender, etc.) does not have to be permanent, but activists can use a people of color identity in larger national or regional struggles, and return to a single ethnic identity for local organizing (Pulido 1996:146). Race has become particularly unifying for the environmental justice movement because it reacts to the political trend of de-emphasizing race while race remains an important societal factor, identifies a clear common experience, allows for the situationality described above, lets communities challenge environmental groups, agencies, and polluters simultaneously, and eliminates the shortcomings of a class-based identity. The Southwest is an ideal place in which to form a "people of color" identity because of the long history of multiculturalism and shared experiences of racism. However, organizing around race has multiple challenges, including:

• Overcoming historic antagonistic relationships between different racial minority groups.
• Giving credence to different experiences of racism, different forms of organizing, and different issues among minority groups.
• Breaking out of the oppressor framework that defines who is a person of color and who is not.
• Forging beneficial relationships with strong allies that may be white.

Race has become a defining factor in determining who is an environmental justice group, and who can become a member of an environmental justice network. According to organizer Jose Bravo in an interview with Voces Unidas, the newsletter of the Southwest Organizing Project (SWOP), "When we say environmental justice organizations we mean grassroots, people of color-led organizations. People working on environmental justice are people who actually live with this problem day in and day out, 24 hours a day, that brings a different perspective to the table than those whose environmental concern is from 9 to 5 and have multimillion dollar budgets." Similarly, membership policy for the Northeast Environmental Justice Network includes stipulations that the group must have majority people of color leadership and membership, and be sited in a low-income community or a community of color.

There is tangible animosity between many environmental justice organizations and mainstream environmental groups. Mainstream environmentalists have all too often neglected the concerns of minority and low-income communities by forwarding a definition of the environment as one far from communities of color. Tensions surfaced with a 1990 letter to the Big 10 environmental organizations, Sierra Club, Natural Resource Defense Council, and others, from environmental justice leaders. At the second national environmental leadership summit, environmental organizations were taken to task for their actions since the letter. Several have taken steps to improve, including the Sierra Club, which has established environmental justice offices, but, like the governmental agencies, they are slow to show communities of color that they are truly committed to environmental justice concerns.

More than Equal Protection Under the Law

While laws may appear to serve all populations equally, existing conditions, specific practices, and a history of oppression can combine to make their impacts very different for different populations. According to John Powell, Executive Director of the Institute on Race & Poverty in Minneapolis, discrimination is subtler today than in the pre-Civil Rights era, but "laws and policies are anything but neutral in effect, even though they are racially neutral on their face" (8/2002:4). Resolving environmental injustices goes beyond ensuring equal protection under the law to inserting provisions for communities that may already be impacted, or stand to face greater consequences from the environmental burden.

In order to address some of these concerns, and to disseminate information to communities and groups on potentially useful laws and statutes, the Environmental Law Institute has released a useful handbook entitled "A Citizen's Guide to Using Federal Environmental Laws to Secure Environmental Justice." The text informs communities of a host of environmental laws administered by federal (particularly the Environmental Protection Agency), and state agencies that can be used to achieve mitigations or policy changes. The focus is on how to understand and combine statutes to address complex and cumulative environmental justice issues. The book acknowledges the problematic nature of the presence of multiple polluting facilities, of particularly sensitive populations such as children and the elderly, and of populations that depend on local natural resources that may be contaminated.

In their extensive bibliography of current Environmental Justice literature (2002) University of California Berkeley graduate students Robin Turner and Diana Wu analyze the different approaches to achieving justice within a framework of distributional justice, procedural justice, and entitlements. The distinctions are as follows:

• Distributional justice refers to the equal distribution of impacts and benefits among populations. However, providing each community with the same level of pollution denies inherent differences in lifestyle, consumption, and susceptibility.
• Procedural justice refers to the opportunity for fair and complete participation in all levels of decision making and planning. While the opportunity may be available for public participation, interventions including translation and training may be necessary to ensure the active participation of marginalized groups.
• Entitlements are stated universal rights to a clean and healthy environment, and/or to the resources necessary for health and well-being.

Achieving environmental justice through existing laws and regulations can be viewed through different lenses of how best to achieve justice. Correcting environmental injustices will require fair procedures, fair distribution, and an inclusive list of entitlements for communities. The precautionary principle, advanced by groups like Physicians for Social Responsibility, requires the analysis of potential risks before citing a facility or making an environmental decision. As such, the precautionary principle is a necessary element of achieving environmental justice.

Rural Environmental Justice

Environmental justice is often framed as an urban issue. Power plants or other polluting facilities are sited in predominately minority and low-income city neighborhoods having already dangerous concentrations of air, water and/or land pollution. Other injustices include a decline of investment in the inner city, and planning and zoning laws that reduce opportunities and quality of life for low income people and people of color. These are the subtle forms of discrimination mentioned by John Powell of the Institute for Race and Poverty.

The term "urban" itself is often used as a code for "black," "minority," and/or "poor." The term "rural" varies in its meaning depending on where it is used. In the South, rural could refer to poor, minority farmers. In other parts of the country, it is often pictured as Caucasian farms and ranches. Elsewhere, it conjures imagery of production—timber, mining, and hydropower. It is important to be aware of these stereotypes, as they often underlie uses of the terms "rural" and "urban." In addition, as uses of land, economy, and lifestyle have changed, U.S. Census definitions have also changed. Whereas rural once meant solely farming, forestry, fishing, mining and other natural resource related occupations, it now often means low-density residential or light industrial use.

Rural environmental justice issues are often overlooked because people are dispersed, silenced by lack of numbers, constitute historically marginalized communities, or travel from place to place for work. Rural populations at risk are minority as well as Caucasian, and they face increased environmental impacts because of where and how they live, employment, and their lack of information on environmental laws and organizations that could assist them. Environmental justice issues in rural areas are varied, serious, overlooked, and are inextricably linked—by natural resources, context, and history—to urban environmental justice concerns.

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