Lemons into lemonade

Abstract

Before the term "environmental racism" was coined in 1982, the issue of environmental justice was, for the most part, invisible in the national arena, whether as a civil rights or environmental concern. In the two decades since, there has been a huge swell of activity across the country. Over the last several years, civil rights lawyers and poverty lawyers have joined this campaign. In many respects, a new specialty has emerged because these lawyers, sometimes acting in concert with environmental lawyers, are filing complaints with government agencies and in the courts that not only use traditional environmental litigation strategies, but also traditional civil rights litigation strategies to allege racial or ethnic bias in the siting of pollution-generating facilities in various communities - the central focus of this essay. The case law on environmental justice has developed in three broad "issue" areas. Procedural Justice addresses whether the environmental laws, regulations, policies, or evaluation criteria are applied uniformly or enforced equally by environmental regulators. Geographic Justice concerns whether minority and/or low-income communities are disproportionately burdened by exposure to environmental harms and risks. And Social Justice looks at whether race or class play a role in the government's decisionmaking to issue a permit to site a pollution-generating facility in a particular community.