Environmental Justice

Abstract

In the 1960s, both the environmental and civil rights movements achieved important legislative goals in the United States. Mainstream environmentalism and its political precedents, however, had for a long time predominately included middle and upper-class white males (Gottlieb, 2005; Taylor, 1995, 2000). Only in the 1980s—especially after a series of high-profile protests over the siting of a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) dump in majority African-American Warren County, North Carolina in 1982—did scholars and media focus on racial justice activists who were also actively engaging with environmental issues, giving greater attention to environmental justice activism and the rise of environmental justice studies.