The Roots, Impacts, And Solutions Of Environmental Justice

In 1978, a transformer company owned by Robert Ward based in Raleigh, North Carolina, started dumping industrial waste containing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, along rural roads across 14 counties. During this time, Ward Transformer Company paid a trucking company to drive approximately 240 miles, along North Carolina highway shoulders, illegally spraying 31,000 gallons of PCB-contaminated oil in a crime deemed the “midnight dumpings".¹

PCBs are highly carcinogenic compounds whose production was banned by the United States in 1979. They are used in industrial and consumer products and can inflict a range of adverse health effects, including skin problems, endocrine disruption, and cognitive issues. Despite their ban in 1979, PCBs are still manufactured and exist in many older products, posing health risks for nearby animals and humans.

In the wake of Ward’s illegal dumping, residents of Warren County—one of the poorest counties in the nation at the time, with a 65% African American population—began to notice contamination. By 1982, the Governor of North Carolina had selected the Warren County community of Afton, as a hazardous waste dumpsite. The dump would contain PCB-contaminated soil and similar waste collected from Ward’s illegal dumping. As landfill construction began, local residents protested and inspired more prominent activism on their behalf. Longtime civil rights activist Benjamin Chavis tied the protests to the struggle for racial equality.

Studies soon showed that it was far from an isolated incident for hazardous waste facilities to be disproportionately located in or near poorer, marginalized communities. A movement grew out of an awareness of environmental racism, one that was largely new for the mainstream environmental movement’s predominantly White and affluent members and leaders. The movement’s scope grew into a pursuit of environmental justice, which is often defined as the equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits.

The same year that Robert Ward began illegally dumping toxic waste, a high-profile court case highlighted the structural barriers to environmental justice. In Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., a African American neighborhood of homeowners in Houston sued the Southwestern Waste Management Corp., arguing that a permit for a new facility violated their constitutional rights. A judge ruled in favor of the waste management company.

According to sociologist Robert Bullard, who collected data for the lawsuit and has since been dubbed “the father of environmental justice”—of the plaintiffs in the case, 85% of the plaintiffs in the case owned their homes and were considered middle-class. Bullard claimed that in Houston, during the time of the case, all of the city-owned landfills and 75% of the city-owned incinerators were in African American neighborhoods, even though they made up only 25% of the population.

Over the last few decades, a growing awareness of environmental degradation has catalyzed the environmental justice movement. As the connections between environmental issues and other issues are increasingly understood, it’s clear that the quest for environmental justice extends across backyards and boardrooms.

Air Pollution

One of the deadliest impacts of our global addiction to fossil fuels is air pollution. Air pollution from dirty fossil fuels kills an estimated eight million people per year, almost 20% of all deaths.² Air pollution is a serious impediment to quality of life, and as with many other aspects of environmental degradation, its impacts are asymmetrically borne by the most vulnerable among us.

In America, seemingly innocuous decisions about where to build dirty infrastructure—highways, pipelines, and industrial plants, among others—have had lasting and unequal consequences. Nearly every source of fine particulate matter, America’s most pervasive and deadly air pollutant, disproportionately affects Americans of color regardless of where they live or how much money they make.

In total, pollution from particulate matter (PM)—2.5 particles with diameters less than 2.5 micrometers, or 1/30th the width of a human hair follicle—accounts for between 85,000 and 200,000 premature U.S. deaths each year. But those deaths are not spread equally. A 2021 study published³ found that African American people are exposed to 21% more fine-particle pollution compared to average Americans, while the exposure was 18% greater for Asian Americans and 11% higher for Hispanics. White Americans have 8% less pollution exposure than the average.

Premature death caused by air pollution isn’t as easy to pinpoint or highlight as death from natural disasters or other singular, isolated events. It happens over long periods during which pollutants pile up and affect all manner of bodily systems. Its unbalanced distribution is a direct result of pollution being disproportionately concentrated in and near communities of color.

Polluters like Robert Ward have historically denigrated marginalized communities to the point of turning them into sacrifice zones or areas permanently impaired by heavy environmental degradation or economic disinvestment. Not too far from Houston is one of America’s most infamous sacrifice zones: Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, where the risk of cancer from toxic air is as much as 50 times higher than the national average.⁴ This 85-mile stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River accounts for a quarter of America’s petrochemical production and has a large population of disaffected African American residents who have borne the brunt of pollution for decades.  

Cancer Alley reflects just how closely race and pollution intersect across the country. According to the American Lung Association’s 2021 State of the Air report, of the nearly 20.7 million people living in the 13 counties with failing grades for ozone, short-term particle pollution, and year-round particle pollution, 14 million are people of color. “People of color were 61 percent more likely than White people to live in a county with a failing grade for at least one pollutant,” the ALA report states, “and over three times as likely to live in a county with a failing grade for all three pollutants.”⁵

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Urban Heat

In many urban cores, the natural land cover gives way to dense concentrations of manmade material—asphalt and concrete, for example—that absorb and retain heat. Furthermore, waste heat generated by energy usage warms city air. This leads to the so-called urban heat island effect in which an urban area is significantly warmer than surrounding areas due to human activity.

A closer look at this effect reveals that its impact is often unequal within cities because of environmental injustice. Wealthier areas tend to contain more vegetation and green space, both of which provide shade and reflect solar radiation, keeping temperatures cooler.

In the U.S., studies have found a statistically significant relationship between neighborhood income and tree cover. One study published in 2013 found that all else equal, the greatest racial disparity in the distribution of heat risk-related land cover characteristics was between African Americans and whites.⁶ This is environmental injustice in action, and as climate change continues, the consequences will be deadly.

Sharp differences were found in extreme heat risk based on race. Today, about 64% of all African American people in the U.S. experience a dangerous heat wave, defined as more than three consecutive days of a heat index above 100 degrees. Three decades from now, that figure is projected to rise to 79%. In comparison, just over 40% of white people in the U.S. experience a dangerous heat wave today, and about 60% will face one three decades from now.⁷

This is in part a result of environmental injustice. Hotter neighborhoods are often the same areas that have been subject to redlining, a racist practice in which banks and insurance companies systematically limit financial activity to communities of color. In a study of 108 urban areas nationwide, the formerly redlined neighborhoods of nearly every city studied were hotter than the non-redlined neighborhoods, some by nearly 13 degrees Fahrenheit.⁸

Redlining restricts economic opportunity, inhibiting residents’ ability to create wealth and either directly or indirectly create a more comfortable lived environment with more trees and green spaces. One study found that in 37 cities across the U.S., formerly redlined neighborhoods have about half as many trees on average as the highest-rated predominantly white neighborhoods on those maps.⁹

The Reality Of Environmental Justice Legislation

The aforementioned Inflation Reduction Act devotes nearly $370 billion toward the climate crisis. Most of that funding is geared toward incentivizing the production and adoption of cleaner technologies like renewable energy and battery storage. Some of it is earmarked for environmental justice, such as $27 billion for a national green bank dedicated to helping disadvantaged communities, as well as funding for air pollution monitoring and neighborhood access and equity grants.

While the legislation will be a decisive lever in the domestic and global transition away from fossil fuels, it also contains provisions that may exacerbate existing instances of environmental injustice. These include opening up more federal land and waters to oil and gas drilling and a commitment from Democratic Senate leadership to streamline the permitting process for energy infrastructure projects, including fossil fuel pipelines.

That might negatively affect communities like Port Arthur, Texas; an area historically home to a disproportionately high concentration of industrial polluters—including America’s largest oil refinery—in relation to its population.¹¹ Residents worry that developers may use the Inflation Reduction Act to help expand fossil fuel infrastructure. A third of Port Arthur’s population is African American, and it’s just one of many communities on or near the Gulf Coast that have felt the impacts of environmental injustice for decades, if not centuries.

The Inflation Reduction Act underlines the compromises often required to get environmental legislation across the finish line. It also underscores the need to look beyond lawmakers to advance environmental justice principles. Businesses across the country can take the mantle of responsibility and help their communities by considering environmental justice a key aspect of their organization.