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In the 1980s and 1990s, different narrative strands were coming together around the concept of environmental justice, including one focused on environmental racism. At that time, environmental racism most often referred to the disproportionate targeting of minority communities for toxic burdens (like the siting of landfills, incinerators, or toxic industries). Warren County, North Carolina, became an iconic place symbolizing the coming together of the civil rights movement and the EJ movement when in 1982 African American residents engaged in direct action protests against the EPA-approved placing of a landfill with contaminated waste in their area despite the potential health hazards (see Chapter 1 in this volume).

In his 1990 book Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, Robert Bullard not only researched the pattern of disproportionate impact on minority communities but also engaged in active outreach to affected communities (including Carver Terrace) to make the research usable in a fight against environmental racism. As Dorceta Taylor (2000) and others have pointed out, mainstream organizations focused on reducing human damage to the environment (often construed as “wilderness”) but ignored social justice issues and the everyday spaces where people live. Thus, an EJ agenda was badly needed.

Although early images associated with environmental racism often emphasize black communities, the environmental racism component of EJ had a wide umbrella that included many other people of color—among others, Latinos, Native Americans, and U.S. Asian and Pacific Islander communities. For example, the SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP), active since the 1980s supporting the rights of communities of color in the U.S. Southwest, easily found a place under this banner. In 1990, organizers in the Native American community formed the Indigenous Environmental Network. Also in 1990, SWOP wrote a now-famous letter to the so-called Group of 10 mainstream environmental organizations (for example, the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation), which were predominantly white and male, pointing out their exclusionary structure and issues. Responding to grassroots pressure, some of the Group of 10 began to diversify their organizations and issues. In a key development in 1991, the First National People of Color Environmental Justice Leadership Summit met in Washington, D.C., and adopted 17 principles (Principles of Environmental Justice, 1991). This would prove to be a transformative and radical reframing of environmental justice.