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Robert D. Bullard

Photo 1.1: Houston protests against the Whispering Pines Sanitary Landfill that was the subject of the Bean et al. v Southwestern Waste Management Corps. lawsuit—the nation’s first lawsuit to challenge environmental racism using civil rights laws.

Photo by Robert D. Bullard, 1978.

This introductory chapter lays the foundation for understanding environmental justice from its early roots in the modern civil rights movement to the current-day Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. It also explores how the environmental justice framework redefined environmentalism and challenged institutional racism and the dominant environmental protection paradigm. The chapter uses an environmental justice framework to examine the location of polluting facilities; government response to natural and human-made disasters; and the application and enforcement of laws, policies, and regulations governing equal protection and civil rights. The environmental justice framework rests on developing tools and strategies to eliminate unfair, unjust, and inequitable conditions and decisions. It also attempts to uncover the underlying assumptions that contribute to and produce inequality, including differential exposure, unfair treatment, and unequal protection. The framework brings to the surface the ethical, moral, and political questions of “who gets what, when, why, and how much?”

Various movements over the decades have challenged structural racism that devalued blacks and other people of color and their communities. These movements challenged the underlying assumptions that contribute to and reproduce inequality. The modern civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was largely an anti-racism and anti–white supremacy movement. The 1970s and 1980s ushered in a more focused era of targeting unequal and unfair pollution burdens borne by poor people, people of color, and other vulnerable populations—including children. The 1990s and 2000s expanded the equity and justice lens to include issues ranging from health equity, parks and green space, food security and healthy food access, sustainability, climate change, community resilience, racial profiling, policing, and criminal justice.