Environmental Justice as Racial Justice: Climate Change in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter

Historically, it has been very easy to detach ourselves from the words “climate change”. Climate change was perhaps an equation in which humans were not the problem nor the solution; it was more feasibly imagined as a Pixar short, a school project, or a talking point. It was never something that had concrete implications, and certainly never something that could pose any sort of threat to our lives. But slowly and surely, we are beginning to reconcile our lofty, abstract ideas of what climate change means with its cruel, none-too-distant reality. This reality demands we acknowledge the harrowing truth that when it comes to environmentalism, not everyone is created equal. With the turbulent onset of the Black Lives Matter movement—a social justice and human rights movement started in 2013 with an eponymous hashtag, in protest of the systemic oppression of Black people—our generation has been ushered into a resounding new moment, in which we are called upon to reexamine everything we’d formally held as right, acceptable, and just. In the conversation surrounding environmental activism, the subject of racial justice will often be neglected. To many, it would seem that these issues bear no relation. But as it happens, environmental injustice is just one facet of the institutional racism that threatens vulnerable Black, Indigenous, and colored communities across the country.

In an interview conducted with the GreenPeace Organization, Dr. Robert Bullard (commonly cited as the father of environmental justice) challenges the idea that environmental justice can be approached with an “indifference” to issues of race and socioeconomic standing (Reid, 2018). He establishes that “race trumps class” when it comes to problems such as pollution, however the two more often work in concert. In a 2018 study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and published in the American Journal of Public Health, it was found that communities of color face more air and water pollution than their White counterparts (Mikati, Benson, Luben, Sacks, & Richmond-Bryant, 2018). More specifically, Black people bear the biggest environmental burden of any other demographic. They are exposed to up to twice the amount of pollutants than the average American faces, while an American living below the poverty line will face about 1.35x more. Such pollutants include soot, lead, carbon monoxides, and nitrogen oxides, and are commonly associated with heart and lung diseases. Dr. Bullard attributes these disparities to the conclusion that race and racism suffuse every aspect of our lived experience—a fact that Black people have had to contend with their whole lives.

And certainly, law and legislation could tell us just as much. Such areas point to an unconscious bias on the part of policymakers that translates to their patterned disregard for minorities and marginalized groups in the formulation of policy. In the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, some of the demands made by the organization include a reformation of the legislative system that consistently neglects and harms them. And Black people are not the only ones who have suffered at the hands of such a system: Indigenous groups occupy a tenuous position in the conversation about environmental justice, where they are far too often neglected in discussions of which they should be at the forefront. The Commission for Racial Justice, in a publication co-authored by Dr. Bullard, found that about 50% of all Native Americans live in communities with uncontrolled hazardous waste sites (Bullard, Mohai, Saha, & Wright, 2007). Although Native American tribes are considered sovereign, much of their land is held in trust, meaning the federal government holds title to the land on behalf of the tribes. This is an incredibly harmful circumstance, because it means the government will often make decisions regarding such lands at their own discretion and at the expense of its inhabitants. For example, in 1997, the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians Reservation in Utah was cited as a high-level nuclear waste dump (Kamps, 2001). Amidst allegations of a 200 million-dollar payoff, Keith Lewis, an indigenous advocate for Indian rights, commented, “there is nothing moral about tempting a starving man with money.”—something the US federal government has a tendency of doing.

As the threat of climate change looms nearer, in part thanks to the corporate interests that beckon them, more and more Black, Indigenous, and marginalized groups stand to suffer as a result. As institutionalized racism would have it, they are the first ones to face the repercussions of an environmentally irresponsible country. Where just 100 companies have been the source of more than 70% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since 1988 (Griffin, 2017), climate change and pollution consistently and overwhelmingly burden these vulnerable groups. The institutions we entrust with the task of upholding justice and ensuring peace have been severely remiss in their duties when it comes to Black, Indigenous, and marginalized people. In many cases, environmental activism is a matter of their survival. As such, these groups are owed environmental justice. And as the Black Lives Matter movement has shown us, where there is no justice, there is no peace.