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Environmental justice is a term that originated in the USA with the formation of grassroots networks of activists in working-class communities (Szasz 1994; Bell 2004: ch. 1; Visgilio and Whitelaw 2003). Many of these were African-American neighbourhoods, and the selection of these areas for dumping hazardous waste and siting incinerators was seen by activists as a type of ‘environmental racism’ (Bullard 1993). Environmental justice campaigns can be seen as an extension of civil rights discourse into the arena of environmental issues, focusing on the way that many environmental problems ‘bear down disproportionately on the poor’ (Agyeman et al. 2003: 1).

An important foundational campaign was that of Lois Gibbs in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1978, who sought to relocate the Love Canal community, which she discovered had been built on a 20,000-ton toxic chemical dump. The community campaign was ultimately successful when 900 working-class families were relocated away from the leaking dump in 1980 (Gibbs 2002). Linking environmental quality to social class inequalities shows that environmentalism is not just a middle-class concern but can be related to working-class interests and takes account of social inequalities and real-world ‘risk positions’. In the USA, toxic waste sites have tended to be situated in black and Hispanic communities, where citizens’ action groups are relatively less powerful, but Gibbs’s working-class campaign showed that they are not powerless.

Environmental justice groups can be very significant. Their emergence has the potential to broaden the support base of environmental politics to currently under-represented groups within the wider environmental movement. For instance, Friends of the Earth International (among others), recognizing the need to tackle social problems if pressures on the natural environment are to be relieved (Rootes 2005), has expanded its agenda. Environmental justice takes us into the urban and inner-city areas, where most of the waste products of modern life wind up, and this opens environmental politics to people who may not have thought about their problems as being at all ‘environmental’.

Perhaps the most significant consequence of environmental justice groups is that they offer the possibility of linking environmental politics across the developed and developing societies. An important example was the protest against the impact of the multinational oil company Shell on the environment of the indigenous Ogoni people in Nigeria. The campaign of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (formed in 1990) and the international support it garnered is just one example of the potentially unifying concept of environmental justice. Attempts by the Nigerian government to put down the resistance movement involved torture, ransacking of villages and, in 1995, the execution of nine members of the movement’s leadership, including the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, in the face of international protest (Watts 1997).

Such events reinforce the argument that the relatively powerless bear the brunt of environmental pollution. Environmental justice campaigns demonstrate the potential to link social inequalities and poverty to environmental issues, promising to make environmentalism more than just a nature-defence movement. Recently the concept of a ‘social licence’ has been used to describe the dynamic relations between companies and communities (Soyka 2012: ch. 4). For instance, communities and citizens’ groups may informally ‘grant’ an ongoing social licence to a company seeking to begin mining operations, promising new jobs and economic development. But that approval or ‘licence’ may be withdrawn if unnecessary environmental damage is caused, perceptions change and business operations are deemed illegitimate. Awareness of the need for a social licence to operate can empower local communities, as it has to be earned and sustained by companies if they are to benefit from citizens’ approval (Syn 2014).

One final development worthy of note is the emergence of a proposed form of citizenship linked to the defence of the natural environment. Some sociologists and political scientists have argued that a new form of citizenship is emerging, which M. J. Smith (1998) has called ecological citizenship and Dobson and Bell (2006) refer to as environmental citizenship.

See chapter 11, ‘Poverty, Social Exclusion and Welfare’, for more on citizenship.

Ecological citizenship is a fourth stage of citizenship beyond the existing civil, political and social types, involving new obligations: to non-human animals, to future generations of human beings, and to maintaining the integrity of the natural environment (Sandilands 1999). Obligations to animals means reconsidering human uses of animals that infringe their right to lead a natural life and express their natures. Hence, vivisection, hunting, farming methods, breeding and even pet-keeping would all need to be reassessed. Ecological citizenship’s obligation to future generations of people means working towards sustainability over a long time period. If economic development plans threaten the ability of future generations to provide for their own needs, then other forms will need to be designed and planned. Political and economic planning must become future-oriented and take a long-term view rather than adopting a short-term, free-market or laissez-faire approach. Finally, all human activity should be considered with reference to its effects on the natural environment, and a precautionary principle should be adopted that puts the onus on developers to justify their actions in ecological terms.

In essence, ecological citizenship introduces a new demand for people to take account of their ‘ecological footprint’ – the impact of human activity on the natural environment. Clearly, ecological citizenship demands some fundamental changes to modern societies. Perhaps the most radical change would be to people themselves, as ecological citizenship requires a transformed human experience of nature and the self as tightly bound together. In the same way that people had to start to perceive themselves as citizens with rights in order for political citizenship to take hold, so ecological citizenship is unlikely to develop fully unless people’s identities also include the experience of having an ‘ecological self’.