What Is Environmental Justice?

By: Camryn Fujita

Protestors Marching in the 2019 San Francisco Youth Climate Strike.
Source: Marti Johnson, Wikimedia Commons

Today’s movement to mitigate the effects of climate change and preserve natural spaces against the advance of urban sprawl highlights the intersectional nature of the environmental challenges we face. Pollution, deforestation, and a lack of green spaces in neighborhoods does not happen in a vacuum. Around the world, the effects of climate change have a disproportionately devastating effect on the global south and low income, communities of color. In reality, the countries and people who bear the brunt of the negative effects of climate change are usually those who are not contributing to the majority of humanity’s carbon footprint.
 
Issues surrounding environmental justice are not limited to developing nations, they are also relevant within the wealthiest country on Earth. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, environmental justice is the “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. . . no group of people should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, governmental and commercial operations or policies.” Environmental justice, then, is essentially the intersection between environmentalism and social justice. 
 
Awareness for environmental justice first began as a result of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. As a result, Native American, African American, Latino, and Pacific Islander groups have long championed the call for environmental justice.  People felt empowered to complain about and expose the public health consequences of living in neglected neighborhoods. The movement became unified in the 1980s with the highly publicized protest against Warren County’s plan to build a hazardous waste landfill in the rural, predominantly African American community of Afton in North Carolina. The county wanted to designate a landfill for 50,000 tons of PCB-contaminated soil that was removed from the sites of illegal dumping along highways. In 1982, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the Federal EPA and the State of North Carolina and staged a massive sit-in protest, in which hundreds of citizens and even some community leaders were arrested. In the end, they lost the fight against the State. Even though it was unsuccessful, this struggle is largely regarded, as the impetus for the national movement for environmental justice.
 
The Afton protests sparked proper research into the environmental disparities in America. Representative Walter Fauntroy of the District of Columbia launched an investigation into the relationship between race and hazardous waste landfills in the South where there were high populations of people of color. The report done by the General Accounting Office found that of the four hazardous waste landfills in the region of study, Black people made up the majority of the population living near three of the landfill sites. In all four communities, 26% of the population were living in poverty and Black people represented 84% or more of those below the poverty level. 
 
In 1987, the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, a national report on the racial and socio-economic characteristics of communities that host hazardous waste sites. The report found indisputable patterns that communities with greater minority percentages of the population are more likely to be sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities. They concluded that “the possibility that these patterns resulted by chance is virtually impossible, strongly suggesting that some underlying factor or factors, which are related to race, played a role.”
 
The push for environmental justice in America has also encompassed the right for all people regardless of class and race, to have equal access to natural spaces such as trees, gardens, and recreational parks in their neighborhoods. City governments learned that the presence of urban trees and parks were consequential in improving public health by reducing air pollution, encouraging more exercise and outdoor activity, and mitigating the summer heat. In 1990, the Farm Bill created the National Urban and Community Forestry Advisory Council (NUCFAC), to advise the Secretary of Agriculture on urban forestry and to provide a platform for the discussion about the health and preservation of America's urban forests. Currently, about 84% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas. Experts predict that 89% of the U.S. population will live in urban areas by 2050. Therefore efforts to improve and preserve the urban tree canopy will only become more important into the future. 
 
How does the concept of environmental justice apply to Hawaiʻi? As an island state, we face an interesting and unique set of challenges. We are defined geographically and environmentally by a fragile, endemic ecosystem, limited space, and isolation. Therefore, the environment and how it affects people is an important political issue that cannot be avoided. The Senate Concurrent Resolution (SCR) 140 HD 1 was the first legal recognition in Hawaiʻi that there needed to be a study on the effects of the environment on vulnerable populations. The resolution requested that the state Environmental Council, the Office of Environmental Quality Control (OEQC) and the University of Hawaiʻi Environmental Center (UHEC) provide a report which would be used as guidance on including principles of environmental justice in all phases of environmental review. 
 
The report, published in 2008, is important because it outlines the target population for environmental justice efforts as “minority and low-income populations, with a special emphasis on the Native Hawaiian population.” It also establishes a definition for environmental justice in Hawaiʻi: “Environmental justice is the right of every person in Hawaiʻi to live in a clean and healthy environment, to be treated fairly, and to have meaningful involvement in decisions that affect their environment and health; with an emphasis on the responsibility of every person in Hawaiʻi to uphold traditional and customary Native Hawaiian practices that preserve, protect, and restore the ʻaina for present and future generations. Environmental justice in Hawaiʻi recognizes that no one segment of the population or geographic area should be disproportionately burdened with environmental and/or health impacts resulting from development, construction, operations and/or use of natural resources.” 
 
The conversation around environmental justice in Hawaiʻi is likely to become more and more common as the population grows over the next three decades. Census data from 2010 reveals that 91.9% of the state’s population reside in “densely developed residential, commercial, and other non‐residential areas,” figures much higher than the national average due to limited land space. Therefore it is imperative that Hawaiʻi’s leaders are aware of the historical problems associated with the distribution of negative environmental consequences as they manage future urban growth. Furthermore, educating Hawaiʻi’s people on issues relating to environmental justice will empower communities, hold representatives accountable, and help Hawaiʻi to be a more equitable and just place for all.