Get Confronting Environmental Racism In The 21st Century

Environmental justice issues and examples include inadequate access to healthy food, inadequate transportation, air and water pollution, and unsafe homes.

The contemporary environmental movement arose primarily from concerns in the late 19th century about the protection of the countryside in Europe and the wilderness in the United States and the health consequences of pollution during the Industrial Revolution.

Environmental racism refers to how minority group neighborhoods—populated primarily by people of color and members of low-socioeconomic backgrounds—are burdened with disproportionate numbers of hazards including toxic waste facilitates, garbage dumps, and other sources of environmental pollutions and foul odors that ...

True environmental justice refers to redistributing decision-making power back to vulnerable communities that are systemically impacted by environmental racism. Practice Self-Education. ... Elevate the Voices of Impacted Communities. ... Hold Your Representatives Accountable. ... Use the Power of Boycott.

The initial environmental justice spark sprang from a Warren County, North Carolina, protest. In 1982, a small, predominately African-American community was designated to host a hazardous waste landfill. This landfill would accept PCB-contaminated soil that resulted from illegal dumping of toxic waste along roadways.

For example, everyone would have the ability to evacuate, have access to sandbagging materials, and even more broadly everyone would have the right to live somewhere that wasn't vulnerable to flooding based on harmful laws and policies.

The environmental justice movement emerged in the late 1980s when a blistering report exposed massive disparities in the burden of environmental degradation and pollution facing minority and low-income communities.