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The residents of Carver Terrace endured many institutional failures, made worse by systemic racism: the way land use was(n’t) regulated, racialized housing markets, the way science and law was practiced, and encounters with outside agencies and other interactions that framed people of color as problematic and undeserving (Čapek, 1999). What about the five EJ frame dimensions that I identified earlier—Are they still relevant? Yes, but they are part of a bigger picture (and EJ frame) with many more dimensions.

Communities continue to struggle to get accurate information (dimension 1) about the safety of their land and homes, whether the problem is fracking, tar sands oil pipelines, urban air and water pollution, runoff from massive poultry or hog operations, pesticide drift, Indigenous sovereignty rights, and much more. Due to the hostility to regulation built into capitalism, citizens often don’t get information without a fight. They hold agencies, politicians, and corporations accountable through protests, legal suits, and political action, as well as by creating alternative resources. When FUSE/CTCAG discovered that an important federal health assessment was withheld from the community, they held a press conference but also worked with the grassroots Environmental Health Network to collect their own data—a good example of what Phil Brown (1992) calls popular epidemiology (see Chapter 5 in this volume). Today, various nonprofit organizations continue to sidestep reluctant government agencies to study environmental health impacts and to share the information. Recently, researchers at the Silent Spring Institute, a public-interest nonprofit research organization, found that black hair products contain “multiple chemicals linked to cancer, asthma, infertility, and more” (Helm, Nishioka, Brody, Rudel, & Dodson, 2018). Researchers focusing on the “environmental injustice of beauty” found that employees of nail salons (predominantly Asian American and African American women) are disproportionately exposed to toxins from the products they work with (Zota & Shamasunder, 2017). EJ enters the most intimate spheres of our lives, especially where information is lacking. The European Union has stricter regulations for many everyday items, but U.S. corporations resist labeling their products and politically frame precautions as unnecessary, as if the labels themselves were toxic. Organizations like the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have stepped into the gap to provide important health information to the public, but the struggle for accurate information continues.

The problem is not just an information deficit. People want to be heard in an unbiased, respectful way (frame dimension 2). Sometimes disrespectful treatment results simply from an overworked bureaucracy, but beyond that, community residents have often felt the sting of second-class citizenship and—in places like Carver Terrace, Flint, and many others—racism. Carver Terrace residents who traveled to Dallas to get more information were locked out of the EPA regional office building and the police were called. Beginning with their lawsuit and extending through their struggle for a fair buyout price, they were assumed to be “wanting something for nothing.” The grassroots Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice provided a space where they could be respected, sending a team door to door to collect residents’ stories, and creating a public forum that included representatives of federal agencies and EJ groups, amplifying the residents’ voices in a system that didn’t want to “hear” them. More recently, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests created a space where Indigenous rights could be affirmed instead of erased from public view, despite strenuous efforts to shut down the protests. Social media, in addition to mainstream and progressive media outlets, spread the word nationally and globally, and the DAPL opposition eventually gained support from the Obama administration. The importance of such “alternative spaces” shouldn’t be underestimated, even if victory isn’t immediately within reach. For example, many conscience constituents have transformative experiences in such spaces, a reframing of personal and collective identity that inspires them to work for social change—like the Native American youth who organized ReZpect Our Water, creating a community of runners who publicized opposition to the pipeline, and organized a protest relay run from North Dakota to Washington, D.C. (Greene, 2017). At the same time, Indigenous Sami youth protested Norway’s investments in DAPL. An energized Indigenous Caucus convened at the U.N. Climate Change conference in Bonn, Germany, to strategize (Monet, 2018). Creating alternative networks and spaces is important, given that the “state” is an unreliable ally—the Trump administration turned a deaf ear to EJ and approved the pipeline. Finding a way to be truly heard remains a creative and challenging struggle, but countless groups are mobilizing for EJ at local, regional, national, and international levels.

The other EJ frame dimensions I mentioned (the right to democratically decide the future of contaminated communities, the right to compensation, and solidarity with other contaminated communities) also continue to be relevant. I would now simply say “communities,” since toxic contamination isn’t the only issue (and never was). While Carver Terrace fought for a buyout and relocation, some other EJ battles are about staying in place and claiming health, dignity, and other human rights. Flint residents, where children’s development was tragically compromised by lead contamination, had no choice but to stay in place and to call for accountability at all levels of government. By then, a more established and experienced EJ movement came to their assistance, including EJ scholars Paul Mohai (Mohai, Pellow, & Roberts, 2009) and Michael Mascarenhas (2007), who testified before the Michigan Civil Rights Commission (Michigan Department of Civil Rights, 2016). But the question of compensation hovers disturbingly over every EJ case. Who will pay for all the damage done to people’s bodies and dreams when they encounter environmental injustice? Who will pay to relocate Shishmaref, a community whose suffering has been caused by others (especially when the “others” are less visible)? The answer is “no one,” in the absence of strategic organizing and framing that provides an effective leverage point for justice. This makes the fifth EJ frame dimension more important than ever: building solidarity with other communities through sharing information, creating networks, joining in protests, and working at multiple levels for social justice. This means co-inventing an inclusive future that draws on EJ research and that uses imaginative organizing and framing skills to create alliances between groups that can support EJ together, even if temporarily. Coalition building is difficult but necessary work, since not only EJ, but also racism, is receiving new infusions of energy.