Environmental justice and healthy communities

Technical Report · Fri Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 1995

OSTI ID:125926

The environmental justice movement has come a long way since its birth a decade ago in rural and mostly African American Warren County, North Carolina. The selection of Warren County for a PCB landfill, they brought national attention to waste facility siting inequities and galvanized African American church and civil rights leaders` support for environmental justice. The demonstrations also put {open_quotes}environmental racism{close_quotes} on the map and challenged the myth that African Americans are not concerned about or involved in environmental issues. Grassroots groups, after decades of struggle, have grown to become the core of the multi-issue, multiracial, and multi-regional environmental justice movement. Diverse community-based groups have begun to organize and link their struggles to issues of civil and human rights, land rights and sovereignty, cultural survival , racial and social justice, and sustainable development. The impetus for getting environmental justice on the nations`s agenda has come from an alliance of grassroots activists, civil rights leaders, and a few academicians who questioned the foundation of the current environmental protection paradigm--where communities of color receive unequal protection. Whether urban ghettos and barrios, rural {open_quotes}poverty pockets,{close_quotes} Native American reservations, or communities in the Third World, grassroots groups are demanding an end to unjust and nonsustainable environmental and development policies.

• Research Organization: National Association of Environmental Professionals, Washington, DC (United States)
• OSTI ID: 125926
• Report Number(s): CONF-9506115--
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
LOW INCOME GROUPS
MINORITY GROUPS
POLITICAL ASPECTS
PUBLIC OPINION
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FACTORS
USA