Environmental Justice Is Simply a Matter of Fair Distribution

If you need a definition of environmental justice, it's easier to describe environmental injustice. That's the concentration of undesirable environmental hazards in a small area, with the usual connotation that undesirable land uses situate in poor communities. There are demonsrated racial disparities in locations of landfills, polluting industrial plants, or large publicly owned eyesores or near-nuisances of some type.

Sometimes the term is used in a more theoretical way, where crime, drug dealing, or poverty are considered the environment.

Environmental justice is a little abstract for me. No one drives into a neighborhood and says, "Oh, look how much environmental justice they have here. Isn't this handsome?"

Poor communities are usually the communities of choice when something not so desirable is located. Lack of political power in general and knowledge of environmental issues in particular allows this despicable situation to continue.

The unfair distribution of undesirable environmental features begs the question of why society allows these hazards to exist anywhere near human activity in the first place. But since that's a broader discussion, we'll just concentrate on a few ideas about how to address the existing situation, providing there are no systemic changes in how environmental pollution is regarded.

Mostly we think environmental injustices result from unconscious racism and classism, plus fear of the reaction of more educated and powerful neighborhoods. It's a bit of a vicious cycle, with minority groups tending to have lower incomes and therefore only being able to afford neighborhoods that have some marks in the minus column.

But the point is to make the siting of new facilities equitable, and to raise the profile of existing environmental nuisances and hazards so that the racial disparities in exposure to environmental pollution become apparent.

Finding Out About Environmental Justice in Your Community

Most of us are pretty fuzzy about whether our metropolitan area or community has an environmental justice problem. The classic example is to think about where is the landfill, still called the dump in many circles. Chances are pretty good that it's close to a minority population center rather than the center of affluence in your community.

But many pollutants aren't so visible. One place to begin is at the Scorecard website, where data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are digested into a searchable format. You can find the largest individual polluters, most polluted communities, and so forth on this site.

Making an inventory of the environmental justice picture in your community would be a useful group project, or class project for that matter. Collect and map the information available on power generation sites, incinerators, known polluters, common eyesores such as unsophisticated auto salvage businesses, landfills, plants where dubious health effects already have been reported or suspected, places where firefighters and police practice shooting or fire abatement, and especially noisy places such as racetracks near residential areas.

You may even want to include major highways and airports, which points out that land uses and community facilities that are viewed as assets in other contexts may be liabilities from an environmental perspective.

If you can find some organization with a GIS (geographic information system) computerized mapping setup, you can overlay information about the location of minority populations very easily. Usually that's a local utility, government, or business built on delivery. If not, a tracing paper overlay still works.

How to Further Environmental Justice

The Natural Resources Defense Council has produced a useful guide to fighting for environmental justice. The techniques are similar to any other action your neighborhood must take to preserve or enhance your quality of life. However, the difference in the case of environmental justice may be in the amount of technical information that you need to understand to argue intelligently for your position.

In large cities, often you will find an environmental law center of some type to help you. A local university will have experts who may be able to provide some information for you. Begin with a medical school or chemistry department. In some cases if you find out what pollutants a proposed new use would produce, your own physician can give you some perspective on the health effects. You need not show detailed knowledge of the subject, because your elected representatives probably won't understand much more of the science than you do. However, your effort to understand a one-sentence summary of the health or psychological effects of an environmental injustice will be very useful to you.

Finally, use whatever techniques have worked for your community in the past in fighting for civil rights and equitable treatment in other respects. You deserve a clean environment as much as the next person.

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