ABSTRACT
Environmental hazards affect human lives every day. In many communities, people share their neighborhoods with incinerators and toxic chemical plants. Plastic bottles, discarded electronics, and other wastes are frequently exported across national boundaries to countries that did not produce them. And hazardous pesticides, stored in eroding drums, primarily in the global South, leak toxins into the surrounding ecosystems. This grim reality is exacerbated by the fact that environmental hazards disproportionately affect poor communities, communities of color, and other marginalized communities around the globe. This uneven exposure to environmental risks is variously termed environmental inequality, environmental racism, and environmental injustice. Over the past four decades, a body of scholarship and a social movement have emerged in response, and scholars and activists have rallied around the term environmental justice (EJ) – the notion that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental health laws and regulations (Bullard 1996).
