Unequal Protection Revisited: Planning for Environmental Justice, Hazard Vulnerability, and Critical Infrastructure in Communities of Color

Environmental injustice occurs when marginalized groups face disproportionate environmental impacts from a range of threats. Environmental racism is a particular form of environmental injustice and frequently includes the implementation of policies, regulations, or institutional practices that target communities of color for undesirable waste sites, zoning, and industry. One example of how the United States federal and state governments are currently practicing environmental racism is in the form of building and maintaining toxic prisons and immigrant detention prisons, where people of color and undocumented persons are the majority of inmates and detainees who suffer disproportionate health risk and harms. This article discusses the historical and contemporary conditions that have shaped the present political landscape of racial and immigration conflicts and considers those dynamics in the context of the literature on environmental justice. Case studies are then presented to highlight specific locations and instances that exemplify environmental injustice and racism in the carceral sector. The article concludes with an analysis of the current political drivers and motivations contributing to these risks and injustices, and ends with a discussion of the scale and depth of analysis required to alleviate these impacts in the future, which might contribute to greater sustainability among the communities affected.

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Conditions and Consequences of ELULU Improvement: Environmental Justice Lessons from San Francisco, CA

Journal of Planning Education and Research ◽

10.1177/0739456x20929407 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 0739456X2092940

Author(s):

Miriam Solis

Keyword(s):

Environmental Justice ◽

San Francisco ◽

Low Income ◽

Planning Process ◽

Community Based ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

Neighborhood Relationship ◽

Locally Unwanted Land Uses

Existing locally unwanted land uses (ELULUs) are disproportionately located in low-income communities of color. As ELULUs fall into disrepair, can planners redevelop them in ways that advance environmental justice and, if so, how? Through a case study of a San Francisco ELULU redevelopment planning process, this article highlights the central role of community-based organizing in generating policy changes that promoted certain environmental justice outcomes. A reconceptualization of the agency-neighborhood relationship was key. Findings also identify the obduracy of infrastructure and directed redress as central planning considerations and tensions.

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Communities of Color Respond to Environmental Threats to Health: The Environmental Justice Framework

Building Health Coalitions in the Black Community ◽

10.4135/9781452204796.n6 ◽

2014 ◽

pp. 81-100

Keyword(s):

Environmental Justice ◽

Environmental Threats ◽

Communities Of Color

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Ecowomanism

Worldviews Global Religions Culture and Ecology ◽

10.1163/15685357-02001002 ◽

2016 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

pp. 5-14 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Melanie L. Harris

Keyword(s):

Native American ◽

Environmental Justice ◽

Religious Practices ◽

Third Wave ◽

Spiritual Beliefs ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

Intersectional Analysis ◽

Theoretical Frame ◽

Women Of African Descent ◽

Human And Nature

This essay provides a definition and theoretical frame for ecowomanism. The approach to environmental justice centers the perspectives of women of African descent and reflects upon these women’s activist methods, religious practices, and theories on how to engage earth justice. As a part of the womanist tradition, methodologically ecowomanism features race, class, gender intersectional analysis to examine environmental injustice around the planet. Thus, it builds upon an environmental justice paradigm that also links social justice to environmental justice. Ecowomanism highlights the necessity for race-class-gender intersectional analysis when examining the logic of domination, and unjust public policies that result in environmental health disparities that historically disadvantage communities of color. As an aspect of third wave womanist religious thought, ecowomanism is also shaped by religious worldviews reflective of African cosmologies and uphold a moral imperative for earth justice. Noting the significance of African and Native American cosmologies that link divine, human and nature realms into an interconnected web of life, ecowomanism takes into account the religious practices and spiritual beliefs that are important tenets and points of inspiration for ecowomanist activism.

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Vulnerable Bodies

Theories of the Flesh ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190062965.003.0018 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 281-292

Author(s):

Julie Avril Minich

Keyword(s):

Social Justice ◽

Working Class ◽

Environmental Justice ◽

Environmental Ethics ◽

Environmental Hazards ◽

Pesticide Poisoning ◽

Social Justice Movements ◽

Mission District ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

Justice Movements

This essay examines how the Chicana feminist muralist Juana Alicia fosters environmental justice activism that values vulnerable lives in her two most famous murals, both painted at Twenty-Fourth and York Streets in San Francisco’s Mission District: Las Lechugueras (1983) and La Llorona’s Sacred Waters (2004). It explores how Juana Alicia gives visual form to an environmental ethics that prompts a politics of inclusion, equitable resource distribution, and bodily diversity. Juana Alicia’s murals remind us what antiracist, feminist, disability, environmental, and other social justice movements share: an investment in radical interdependence between different kinds of bodies and beings. They depict disabilities created by environmental hazards (including pollution, pesticide poisoning, and the privatization of water) without reducing disability to tragedy, prompting viewers to envision a world in which working-class communities of color are not forced to bear the brunt of environmental risk.

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Marrying Anthropocentrism to Ecocentrism: The Rising Voices of Dissent in American Environmentalism

American Studies Journal ◽

10.18422/66-01 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 66 ◽

Author(s):

Mohamed E. Bakari

Keyword(s):

Environmental Justice ◽

Environmental Movement ◽

Environmental Hazards ◽

Contemporary History ◽

Communities Of Color ◽

National Consensus

In light of multiple significant incidents in its contemporary history, the American environmental movement (EM) seems to be at a crossroads as the national consensus on this movement—forged during the 1970s—starts to crack under the strain of rising challenges. Communities most adversely affected by environmental hazards—usually referred to as communities of color and labor—now seem to be estranged from and ignored by a mostly ecocentric movement they can hardly identify with. Against such a backdrop,I examine the emergence of new dissenting ‘anthropocentric’ voices within the American EM—most notably the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM)—and discuss the multiple facets of the anthropocentric-ecocentric divide and its bearing on the evolution of the movement. I will further analyze whether the emerging sustainability discourse will be able to contain this ideological divide and offer a reconciliation framework for a harmonization of these movements’ objectives, policies, and modes of activism.

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