Environmental Justice in America - Criminal Justice

Environmental justice in America refers to the movement, body of law, and research tradition concerned with the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens across racial, ethnic, and economic groups, alongside meaningful participation by affected communities in environmental decision-making. The concept emerged from grassroots organizing against the disproportionate siting of hazardous facilities in minority and low-income neighborhoods, and it has since developed into a substantial body of empirical research documenting patterns of unequal environmental exposure. Within green criminology, environmental justice provides a central framework for understanding why certain communities bear the heaviest costs of environmental harm regardless of their contribution to the underlying pollution. The discussion that follows traces the movement’s origins, surveys the empirical evidence documenting environmental disparities, and examines how legal and regulatory institutions have responded.

Introduction

The environmental justice movement is conventionally traced to a series of protests in Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982, where residents of a predominantly Black community organized against the siting of a hazardous waste landfill in their vicinity. Robert Bullard’s subsequent research on the siting of waste facilities near Black communities in the American South provided the movement with empirical grounding, documenting patterns that transformed what had begun as localized protest into a broader analytical framework connecting race, class, and environmental risk (Bullard, 1990). The Warren County protests are widely credited with catalyzing a wave of academic and governmental attention to environmental inequality that continues to shape research and policy.

The movement’s early framing emphasized distributive justice, focused on where hazardous facilities were sited and which communities bore the resulting exposure, but subsequent scholarship expanded this framing considerably. David Pellow’s research on grassroots environmental justice organizing has argued that procedural justice, concerning who participates in environmental decision-making, and recognition justice, concerning whose knowledge and concerns are taken seriously by regulators, are equally central to understanding environmental inequality (Pellow, 2007). This broader conception continues to inform how researchers and advocates approach environmental justice questions across a range of policy domains beyond hazardous waste siting specifically.

Origins and Development of the Movement

Robert Bullard’s early research, often credited as foundational to the environmental justice field, documented that hazardous waste facilities in the American South were disproportionately located near Black communities even when controlling for factors such as land value and industrial zoning that might otherwise explain the siting pattern (Bullard, 1990). This finding challenged prevailing assumptions that facility siting reflected purely economic or technical considerations, suggesting instead that racial dynamics played an independent role in determining which communities bore environmental risk. Bullard’s subsequent work extended this analysis to a broader range of environmental hazards and geographic regions, establishing a durable empirical tradition within environmental justice research.

The United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice published an influential national study in 1987 documenting that race was the strongest predictor of proximity to hazardous waste facilities across the United States, a finding that extended Bullard’s regional analysis to a national scale and lent institutional credibility to environmental justice claims beyond individual case studies. This report is frequently cited as a turning point that moved environmental justice from a set of local grievances toward a recognized field of policy analysis with implications for federal regulatory practice.

Federal recognition of environmental justice concerns followed gradually, culminating in a 1994 executive order directing federal agencies to identify and address disproportionately high adverse effects of their programs on minority and low-income populations. David Naguib Pellow’s research on the institutionalization of environmental justice within federal agencies has argued that this executive order, while symbolically significant, produced uneven implementation across agencies with varying levels of genuine commitment to environmental justice analysis in their regulatory decision-making (Pellow, 2004).

Academic institutionalization followed a parallel trajectory to federal policy recognition, with environmental justice research gradually moving from sociology and geography departments into criminology, public health, and law programs during the 1990s and 2000s. Dedicated academic centers, conference sections, and specialized journals emerged to support this expanding scholarly community, providing infrastructure for the empirical research examined in the following section.

Empirical Evidence of Disparate Exposure

A substantial body of quantitative research has examined whether race and class predict proximity to environmental hazards independent of other explanatory factors, with findings generally supporting the existence of measurable disparities even after controlling for income, property values, and industrial zoning history. Paul Mohai and Robin Saha’s methodologically rigorous analysis of hazardous waste facility siting found that racial composition remained a significant predictor of facility proximity even using distance-based measurement techniques designed to address methodological criticisms of earlier studies (Mohai & Saha, 2007). This methodological refinement strengthened confidence that observed disparities reflected genuine patterns rather than artifacts of how earlier researchers had measured geographic proximity.

Dorceta Taylor’s comprehensive analysis of environmental racism and residential mobility has documented that racial and economic disparities in environmental exposure often predate rather than follow facility siting, since housing discrimination and residential segregation constrained where Black and low-income households could live well before many hazardous facilities were built nearby (Taylor, 2014). This temporal ordering complicates a purely market-based explanation for observed disparities, since it suggests that residential patterns shaped by discriminatory housing policy created the demographic conditions that later facility siting decisions exploited rather than caused independently.

Exposure disparities extend beyond hazardous waste facilities to encompass air pollution, water contamination, and industrial accident risk, with research consistently finding that Black, Hispanic, and low-income communities experience elevated exposure across multiple pollution categories simultaneously. Sally Simon’s analysis connecting corporate environmental crime to social inequality has argued that these overlapping exposures compound each other’s health effects, meaning that communities facing multiple simultaneous environmental burdens experience cumulative harm that facility-by-facility regulatory analysis tends to understate (Simon, 2000).

Legal and Regulatory Responses

Legal remedies for environmental justice claims have faced substantial doctrinal obstacles, particularly because federal civil rights law generally requires proof of discriminatory intent rather than merely discriminatory effect, a standard that has proven difficult to satisfy in most facility siting litigation. Luke Cole and Sheila Foster’s analysis of the environmental justice movement’s legal strategy documents how this intent requirement pushed advocates toward administrative and political remedies rather than litigation as the primary vehicle for addressing environmental disparities (Cole & Foster, 2001). This strategic shift reflects a broader pattern in which environmental justice advocacy has relied more heavily on regulatory reform, community organizing, and public pressure than on courtroom victories.

State and local governments have adopted a range of environmental justice policies, including cumulative impact assessment requirements and community notification mandates, intended to give affected residents greater voice in permitting decisions that would previously have proceeded with minimal local input. These policy innovations vary considerably in their enforcement mechanisms and practical effect, with some jurisdictions treating environmental justice analysis as a substantive constraint on permitting decisions and others treating it as a largely procedural requirement without binding consequence for the ultimate outcome.

Federal agencies beyond the EPA have incorporated environmental justice analysis into their own regulatory processes with varying degrees of rigor, reflecting the uneven implementation that followed the 1994 executive order establishing environmental justice as a formal federal policy consideration. David Pellow’s research on the institutionalization of environmental justice within federal agencies has argued that agencies with stronger internal environmental justice offices and dedicated staff have produced more substantive analysis than agencies where environmental justice review remained a nominal compliance exercise (Pellow, 2004).

Environmental Justice within Green Criminology

Within green criminology, environmental justice research has increasingly informed analysis of corporate and state environmental offending, since the communities bearing the heaviest exposure to environmental harm are frequently the same communities least able to mobilize regulatory or prosecutorial attention when violations occur. Michael Lynch, Paul Stretesky, and Michael Long’s research connecting environmental justice to criminological theory has argued that this pattern reflects a broader structural relationship between social inequality and vulnerability to environmental victimization (Lynch, Stretesky, & Long, 2015).

This criminological extension of environmental justice research treats disparate exposure not merely as an unfortunate distributional outcome but as a form of victimization requiring the same conceptual attention criminology gives to other patterns of unequal harm. Rob White’s eco-justice framework situates environmental justice as one of three interlocking justice concerns, alongside ecological and species justice, that together define green criminology’s normative commitments regarding who and what counts as deserving protection from environmental harm (White, 2013).

Ongoing research within this tradition examines how environmental justice concerns intersect with corporate targeting decisions, enforcement disparities, and the availability of criminal versus civil remedies when violations occur in different types of communities, a set of questions explored in greater depth in the discussion of race, class, and environmental crime that follows.

Conclusion

Environmental justice in America has developed from a series of localized protests into a substantial research tradition and body of regulatory practice, united by sustained attention to how race, class, and political power shape the distribution of environmental risk. Empirical research spanning several decades has consistently documented measurable disparities in exposure to hazardous facilities and pollution, disparities that persist even after accounting for alternative explanations rooted in economics or land use planning alone. These findings have proven more durable than the legal remedies available to address them, given the doctrinal obstacles facing discrimination-based litigation in this domain.

The criminological significance of environmental justice research extends beyond documenting exposure disparities to illuminating how vulnerability to environmental harm intersects with vulnerability to weak regulatory and criminal justice response, a connection explored further in the discussion of race, class, and environmental crime that follows. Continued attention to environmental justice remains essential given the persistence of the disparities documented here, disparities that regulatory reform efforts to date have only partially addressed.

References and Further Reading

Been, V. (1994). Locally undesirable land uses in minority neighborhoods: Disproportionate siting or market dynamics? Yale Law Journal, 103(6), 1383–1422.
Braithwaite, J. (1984). Corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Bryant, B., & Mohai, P. (Eds.). (1992). Race and the incidence of environmental hazards: A time for discourse. Westview Press.
Bullard, R. D. (1990). Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Westview Press.
Bullard, R. D. (2000). Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality (3rd ed.). Westview Press.
Checker, M. (2005). Polluted promises: Environmental racism and the search for justice in a southern town. New York University Press.
Cole, L. W., & Foster, S. R. (2001). From the ground up: Environmental racism and the rise of the environmental justice movement. New York University Press.
Faber, D. (1998). The struggle for ecological democracy: Environmental justice movements in the United States. Guilford Press.
Lynch, M. J., Long, M. A., Stretesky, P. B., & Barrett, K. L. (2017). Green criminology: Crime, justice, and the environment. University of California Press.
Lynch, M. J., Stretesky, P. B., & Long, M. A. (2015). Defining crime: A critique of the concept and its alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan.
Mohai, P., & Saha, R. (2007). Racial inequality in the distribution of hazardous waste: A national-level reassessment. Social Problems, 54(3), 343–370.
Pellow, D. N. (2004). Garbage wars: The struggle for environmental justice in Chicago. MIT Press.
Pellow, D. N. (2007). Resisting global toxics: Transnational movements for environmental justice. MIT Press.
Simon, D. R. (2000). Corporate environmental crimes and social inequality: New directions for environmental justice research. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(4), 633–645.
Skinnider, E. (2011). Victims of environmental crime: Mapping the issues. International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy.
South, N. (1998). A green field for criminology? A proposal for a perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 2(2), 211–233.
Stretesky, P. B., Long, M. A., & Lynch, M. J. (2013). The treadmill of crime: Political economy and green criminology. Routledge.
Taylor, D. E. (2014). Toxic communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility. New York University Press.
White, R. (2013). Environmental harm: An eco-justice perspective. Policy Press.
Zilney, L. A. (2011). Environmental crime: Enforcement, policy, and social responsibility. CRC Press.