Evolution of the Environmental Justice Movement: Activism, Formalization and Differentiation (original) (raw)
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The Environmental Justice Movement (EJM) is a collective of smaller community movements that are concerned about toxins that affect the health of their communities. Large non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that address environmental justice globally or nationally do not necessarily give advice, resources or structure to the community struggles that occur in urban landscapes. The most powerful environmental groups, Greenpeace and The Sierra Club, have historically focused on preservation and protection, not on toxins and exposure of urban communities to contaminated groundwater and factory emissions. Grassroots leaders of the smaller EJMs could gain more traction if they partnered with non-governmental organizations. NGOs may be based in one nation with international branches or restricted to one or more nation-states. New alliances are forming between community-based organizations and organizations with national and global resources and expertise. These alliances are not necessar...
Social Justice Research, 2001
Over the last two decades in the United States, mainstream environmental organizations have reduced, rather than increased, democratic participation by citizens in environmental problem-solving. The environmental justice movement, on the other hand, has served to enlarge the constituency of the environmental movement by incorporating poorer communities and oppressed people of color into environmental decision making process; build community capacity by developing campaigns and projects that address the common links between various social and environmental problems; and facilitate community empowerment by emphasizing grassroots organizing over advocacy. This paper outlines the different components in the environmental justice movement. It is our contention that if researchers and policymakers continue to conceive of the ecological crisis as a collection of unrelated problems, then it is possible that some combination of regulations, incentives, and technical innovations can keep pollution and resource destruction at "tolerable" levels for more affluent socioeconomic populations. However, poor working class communities and people of color which lack the politicaleconomic resources to defend themselves will continue to suffer the worst abuses. However, if the interdependency of issues is emphasized as advocated by the environmental justice movement, then a transformative environmental politics can be invented.
This research expands upon organizational ecology theory to examine variations in founding of organizations in the formalized sector of the environmental justice movement across U.S. counties for two time periods (1990–1999 and 2000–2008). Cross-movement effects are examined to determine if founding is more or less likely to occur in counties where related civil rights and environmental organizations are located. Consistent with the notion of agglomeration effects, we hypothesize that during the 1990s the relationship among civil rights density, environmental density, and environmental justice founding is positive and suggests cooperative efforts. That is, environmental justice organizations should form in counties where civil rights organizations and environmental organizations exist. Because the focus of environmental justice organizations may have expanded over time and created a more competitive atmosphere, cross-movement relationships that were positive across counties during the 1990s are hypothesized to turn negative across counties during the 2000s. Multivariate analysis suggests mixed support for these hypotheses. Specifically, civil rights density is positively associated with environmental justice founding during the 1990s and negatively associated with environmental justice founding during the 2000s—suggesting potential cooperative and then competitive effects across counties over time. However, the correlations between environmental density and environmental justice founding, while positive and statistically significant during the 1990s, are not statistically significant during the 2000s. Thus, in the case of organizations in the formalized sector of the environmental and environmental justice movements it appears that there is a trend toward competitive effects even as those effects have yet to materialize.
Environmental Justice
The environmental justice movement (EJM) in the United States has grown in size and in its cultural and political importance in climate and environmental policy circles. This growth has meant that the organizations and leaders that make up the EJM and their respective areas of focus are also evolving. The social movement capacities of the EJM are important predictors of the future success of the movement as the climate crisis bears down on vulnerable communities worldwide. As a part of designing a leadership program for environmental justice (EJ) activists based at The New School, this landscape assessment surveyed and interviewed more than 200 EJ movement activists across the country to explore the priorities, strategies, challenges, and social movement capacities of the EJM. The study reveals that EJM activists work across a diverse set of issues and rank climate justice among their highest priority issues. They overwhelmingly rely on base building, coalitions, and organizing strategies to do their work. In reflecting on the movement's contemporary approaches, activists articulated the importance of shared frameworks such as climate justice to shift popular narratives and action on climate change. The climate justice frame reflects a critical, intersectional, and reconstructive conceptualization of the climate crisis that requires disrupting the status quo approaches to climate change. The study points to some of the challenges and opportunities ahead for realizing such a contentious and transformative climate justice vision led by EJM activists in a moment of expanding political opportunity and risk.
Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 21, 2014 20 Abstract In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice. Keywords: Political ecology, environmental justice organizations, environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, activist knowledge Joan Martinez-Alier a 1 Isabelle Anguelovski a Patrick Bond b Daniela Del Bene a Federico Demaria a Julien-Francois Gerber c Lucie Greyl d Willi Haas e Hali Healy a Victoria Marín-Burgos f Godwin Ojo g Marcelo Porto h Leida Rijnhout i Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos a Joachim Spangenberg j Leah Temper a Rikard Warlenius k Ivonne Yánez l
2021
With the goal of exploring the engineering and scientific challenges of environmental justice organizations (EJOs), we present the results of 47 interviews with representatives of US-based EJOs. Methodologically, we use a deductive-inductive approach to identifying salient categories in the interview coding process. We identify a structure of three overarching themes for potential interactions between EJOs and engineers and scientists: (1) organizational goals; (2) engineering and scientific challenges; and (3) experiences with engineers and scientists. Our findings reveal a breadth of EJO goals and myriad engineering and scientific challenges ranging from community development, clean and just energy transactions, climate change adaptation, and water and air quality monitoring. We also find activity-based opportunities for engineers and scientists like data collection, management, and analysis; online platform building; GIS mapping; and causation analyses. We find that engineers and...
Organizing for Environmental Justice: From Bridges to Taro Patches
Governance, Development, and Social Work, 2014
The redistribution of power is a primary goal of most community organi- zations, as people from disenfranchised groups come together to influence the policies, practices, or attitudes that affect their lives. Through models of social and community development, groups with less power are able to achieve sustainable improvements to the challenges they are facing, ulti- mately leading to social change (Link & Ramanathan, 2011). Within the field of environmental justice, community groups generally seek procedural or distributive changes, thereby gaining influence over decision-making processes (procedural) or access to material resources such as good jobs and clean air, water, and land (distributive). Using the theoretical lens of social movement theory, we present our case studies to describe the issues confronting these groups and their processes for achieving their visions. The goal of this chapter is to provide concrete examples of current environmental justice organizing efforts, an analysis of factors that influence both their success and development, and a discussion of how an understanding of social movement theory may provide useful insight for future efforts.
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice.