Highways and Bi-Ways for Environmental Justice

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the past, present, and future of the environmental justice movement as illustrated by the highway between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama and the highway system surrounding the City of Atlanta in neighboring Georgia. The essay is divided into three parts. The first part describes environmental justice, seeking both to place it in a broader historical perspective and to discuss how it relates to civil rights law and environmental law. The second part undertakes a closer examination of the challenges presented by efforts to fashion positive law to address environmental justice norms. This discussion considers why it has proven so difficult for both civil rights and environmental law to evolve in a responsive fashion. Particular attention is paid to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has been an area of emphasis for many in the environmental justice movement. Finally, the essay speculates on where progress is more likely to be made in the future in terms of securing legal bases for the promotion of environmental justice objectives. The essay concludes that the two highways that bookend the essay suggest possible bi-ways to environmental justice based on both environmental and civil rights laws

Environmental Justice in Alaska

This article also appeared on p. 3 of the Summer 2018 print edition.Pamela Cravez, editor of the Alaska Justice Forum, gives an overview of articles in the Summer 2018 edition, which addresses environmental contaminants in Alaska, some of the programs in place to deal with them, and the lasting impact that they are having on Alaska Native communities

Green of Another Color: Building Effective Relationships Between Foundations and the Environmental Justice Movement

The aim of this report is to help forge more effective partnerships between and within the environmental justice movement and the philanthropic community. In particular, the report should serve as an important educational tool for current and potential funders by: (1) providing information regarding the importance and accomplishments of the environmental justice movement over the last ten years, including those of the strategic networks; (2) demonstrating the gross underfunding the movement by the philanthropic community in general, and the Environmental Grantmakers Association membership in particular, in relation to other segments of the environmental movement; (3) providing recommendations as to which grantmaking practices would be most appropriate given the structure and needs of the movement, (4) discussing the importance of diversity and inclusive practices in foundation settings for improving environmental grantmaking practices and for overcoming the funding barriers currently confronting the environmental justice movement; and (5) evaluating the manner in which grantmakers can better utilize their institutional clout to support the work of the environmental justice movement beyond the disbursement of grants by undertaking mission-related investing strategies and mission-related shareholder actions against socially and ecologically irresponsible companies. We envision this document as being a valuable resource for foundation staff, officers, and board members, as well as individual donors and participants in the environmental justice movement

Equality is Not Necessarily Just: Toward a Procedural and Relational View of Evironmental Justice

This paper is the latest in a series of articles written to conceptualize an alternative to the distributive paradigm espoused by the environmental justice movement. It is clear that early studies such as the "Toxic Waste and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites" prepared by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ exposed the potential our present model of environmental regulation has to create distributional inequities and forced policymakers to identify how the burdens as well as the benefits of environmental protection are spread among groups of persons.It is also clear to me that distributive theories of environmental justice are inadequate to justify a more just environmental policy or support the aims of the environmental justice movement. I share with Iris Marion Young a view that the distributive paradigm's implicit assumption that social judgments are about what individual person have, how much they have, and how that amount compares with what other persons have and the belief that this focus on possession is limiting. Distributive theories of justice tend to preclude thinking about what people are doing according to what institutionalized rules, how their doings and havings are structured by institutionalized relations that constitute their positions, and how the combined effects of their doings has recursive effects on their lives. What I attempt to do in this paper is to shift the focus of the discussion away from the distribution and on the decision-making structures and procedures which determine what there is to distribute, how it gets distributed, who distributes and what the distributive outcome is. To paraphrase Ms. Young, environmental injustice occurs not simply because some persons have cleaner air and water than others' environmental injustice derives as much from the corporate and legal structures and procedures that give some persons the power to make decisions that affect millions of other people

Measuring Corporate Environmental Justice Performance

Measures of corporate environmental justice performance can be a valuable tool in efforts to promote corporate social responsibility and to document systematic patterns of environmental injustice. This paper develops such a measure based on the extent to which toxic air emissions from industrial facilities disproportionately impact racial and ethnic minorities and low-income people. Applying the measure to 100 major corporate air polluters in the United States, we find wide variation in the extent of disproportional exposures. In a number of cases, minorities bear more than half of the total human health impacts from the firm's industrial air pollution.This Working Paper was revised in June 2009.Corporate social responsibility; corporate environmental performance;

Environmental justice

Environmental protection