Environmental racism

Environmental racism is an academic term used to describe the perception of environmental injustice within a racialized context. In some Western nations, environmental racism refers to socially marginalized racial minority communities which are thought to be subjected to disproportionate exposure of pollutants, the denial of access to sources of ecological benefits (such as clean air, water, and natural resources), or both. Within an international context, environmental marginalization may apply to disadvantaged ecological relationships between industrialized nations and the Global South, and is often associated with colonialism, neoliberalism, and globalization. Instances of so called environmental racism can include exposure to toxic waste, flooding, pollution from heavy industrial or natural resource extraction developments, lack of utilities such as clean water, or exclusion from land management and natural resource-related decision making.

Historically, the term is tied to the environmental justice social movement that began in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. There is discourse on environmental racism in the U.S. among progressive academics and climate advocacy groups who focus on cases from other countries.

On the international level, policies that have been described as environmentally racist included corporations exporting dirty technologies, dangerous chemicals or waste materials banned by domestic laws to developing countries, with lax environmental policies and safety practices (pollution havens).

The first report to draw a relationship between race, income, and risk of exposure to pollutants was the Council of Environmental Quality's "Annual Report to the President" in 1971. After protests in Warren County, North Carolina, the United Church of Christ commissioned a report exploring the concept.

In 1979, Robert D. Bullard, a sociologist at Texas Southern University, completed a report describing the futile attempt of an affluent African-American community in Houston, Texas to block the siting of a hazardous waste landfill in their community. This paper provided evidence that race, not just income status, was a probable factor in this local "uninvited" land-use decision. In 1977, Sidney Howe, Director of the Human Environment Center, suggested that people positioned in a lower socioeconomic level of their respective communities were exposed to more pollution than others, and that those creating the most pollution live in the least polluted places. He used the term environmental justice to describe the corrective measures needed to address this disparity. Those claims have not been evaluated.

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