Environmental Justice vs. Disadvantaged Communities
Environmental justice recognizes disadvantaged communities that generally are low-income and minority-populated areas disproportionately affected by pollution. The environmental problems such groups of people experience are broad, compromising air, soil, and even water. Ideally, environmental law and policy should address the disproportion and problems generated. Nevertheless, that is not the current situation, and very little to nothing is being done to find an effective solution. This essay seeks to identify the relationships between poverty, demographic patterns, and air pollution. Furthermore, this essay will demonstrate a far more complicated situation, "This inequality is enhancing the gap between poor and affluent social groups based on the ethnic or racial composition of the neighboring community" (Taylor, 2020). These actions result in minority communities being subject to disproportionate health and welfare impacts from a particular facility creating a never-ending social imbalance.
Environmental justice emerged from the activism of communities of color and minorities in the U.S. in the last decades of the twentieth Century (Taylor, 2020). Today environmental justice is used to describe a worldwide network of social movements that are outspoken and critical of the imbalance and depredations resulting from unchecked expansion and neo-colonial logic of non-renewable energy use of modern industrial development (Ramcilovic-Suominen, 2022). The pursuit of environmental justice is not only a social or political issue, but also foremost a moral issue. Environmental justice represents a struggle for human rights, healthy surroundings, and flourishing democracies that are directed by citizens of communities once negatively affected by financial and ecological degradation. Environmental justice questions the excessive and unnecessary burden of harmful contamination, waste disposal, and ecological annihilation borne by colored communities, low-income neighborhoods, and colonized regions.
Many global factors drive environmental injustice, and each country has different circumstances, but similarities can be found, especially when people migrate from rural to urban areas. Because environmental justice is the principle that all people have the right to live in a clean and healthy environment, it is just as important to consider how people in rural areas are affected as it is to consider people in urban areas. In fact, due to a variety of systemic drivers, such as poverty, lack of resources, and poor infrastructure, many rural residents are forced to relocate to urban areas in search of a better quality of life (Satterthwaite, 2013). This can be seen as an example of rural environmental injustice, as those who are already struggling are forced to endure even more difficult living conditions by moving to a city. In addition, it creates environmental problems in both rural and urban areas, as the population density in cities increases while natural areas are destroyed (Satterthwaite, 2013). Moreover, as the transition happens, people lose their political patronage and social networks, making them more vulnerable to the evils of "city life" (Chu & Michael, 2019). They face conflicts in communities with stark gender, social class, caste, and religious and ethnic divisions. Furthermore, they face elevated exposure to environmental risks due to the inability to secure job opportunities, get access to public and financial services, and, at times, mobilize against displacement (Chu & Michael, 2019). These factors enhance their vulnerability, making it easy to pray for those who can abuse the system in favor of financial gain. Nowadays, it is difficult to prohibit the construction of industrial facilities based on a disproportionate impact on low-income, minority communities. As a result, minorities experience severe environmental injustice as they are often invisible to the official state apparatus or, worse, are actively erased from cities through force or discriminatory development policies (Chu, 2019). Their situation becomes extreme to the point that they face only two options: live with the problem or pack the little they have and move away to start from scratch.
In the U.S., Approximately 60 percent of American homes still have lead-based paint in them (Bullard, 2007). While low-income children are eight times more likely than those of affluence to live where lead paint is found in homes, and African-American children are five times more likely than White children to suffer from lead...
…the housing market, a lack of affordable housing options, and language barriers (Collins, 2016. While the situation may seem bleak, there are a number of organizations working to address the issue.To create changes, some authors emphasize the necessity for more representative and inclusive decision-making processes considering differential interests, values, and priorities (Anguelovski et. at, 2014). In comparisn, others remark on the significance of accounting for how the benefits and drawbacks of adaptation actions should be shared and allocated across communities. This is especially the case where residents experience varying levels of adaptive capacity, socioeconomic status, and political voice (Satterthwaite, 2013). Nonetheless, both groups agree that there is a real problem to be addressed, and the imbalance is real. After all, industrial high-pollutant facilities do not build their factories in affluent communities. Health-based violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) were more recurrent in poorer communities with higher proportions of Latin or Black residents; the effects of race and ethnicity were not apparent in more affluent communities (Schaider, 2019).
Affected communities can advocate for social policies that uphold the right to adequate, democratic participation and representation of frontline communities in environmental decision-making (Suiseeya, 2020). Some have redefined the core meanings of "environment" and the interrelationships humans-nature, challenging current environmental movements towards more participation and inclusion regarding changes, sustainability, and social-political representation (Chu, 2019).
In conclusion, no segment of society should monopolize a clean environment, nor the existing disparity gap should keep growing. Today, some communities are forced to bear the brunt of our global pollution problem without much help from society or authorities, and changes are needed. For decades, industrial toxins, polluted air, contaminated drinking water, municipal and fills locations, lead smelters, incinerators, and hazardous waste facilities have disproportionately impacted society. The imbalance affects people of color, working-class communities, and the poor (Bullard, 1993). Ecological inequities in the world result from several factors, including the distribution of wealth, housing and real estate practices, and land use planning. Taking all these issues together, these factors give rise to what can be called "environmental injustice"…
References
Anguelovski Isabelle, Chu Eric, Carmin JoAnn (2014), "Variations in approaches to urban climate adaptation: experiences and experimentation from the Global South," Global Environmental Change Vol 27, pages 156–167.
Bullard, R. D. (1993). Anatomy of environmental racism and the environmental justice movement. Confronting environmental racism: Voices from the grassroots, 15, 15-39.
Bullard, R. D. (2004). Making Environmental Justice a Reality in the 21st Century. Contributing Editors, 5.
Collins, Chuck, and others, "The Ever-Growing Gap" (Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, Racial Wealth Divide Initiative, and Corporation for Enterprise Development, 2016), available at https://ips-dc.org/report-ever-growing-gap/.
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