The Environmental Justice Movement In The San Joaquin Valley

The distribution of pollution and lack of water access throughout the San Joaquin Valley is an issue of environmental justice because it disproportionately affects poor people and people of color. The term “environmental justice” represents both a movement and an idea. The idea of environmental justice is multifaceted. David Schlosberg, a political theorist and environmental justice scholar believes it contains three main aspects: distribution, recognition, and participation. Distribution refers to the fact that low-income communities and communities of color disproportionately face environmental burdens. Recognition comes from acknowledgment of the unfair distribution of these burdens by the mainstream environmental movement and policymakers
In contrast with the environmentalist’s definition of nature, which does not include the built environment, environmental justice scholars define the natural environment to be where people live, work, and play and do not believe in as stark a divide between human and nature, especially in certain cultures, where lifestyles are more ecologically sound. The environmental justice movement is also different from the environmental movement because while the leaders and followers of the environmental movement are largely white and middle class, the leaders of the environmental justice movement had their origins in social, political, and civil rights activism, and the followers are largely people of color and women. Overall, the movement merges environmentalism and social justice and calls for the recognition of the ways in which environmental hazards and pollution disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income
They served as an important trigger for other events that raised awareness and support for the nascent movement, the first of which was a Government Accountability Office report in 1983 that investigated the demographic characteristics of communities surrounding four major toxic waste sites. The report found that three of the four communities were majority African American and that all were disproportionately African American. In 1987, the UCC Commission for Racial Justice sponsored a report titled Toxic Waste and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, which found race to be a major predictor for the location of hazardous waste sites. The UCC study was the first national-level analysis of the demographic characteristics of the communities surrounding toxic waste sites. Sociologist Robert Bullard’s book, Dumping in Dixie, published in 1990, supported the findings of the UCC report. Dr. Bullard’s book not only found that the locations of hazardous facilities conform to historical segregation patterns in the South but also that the government and industry intentionally selected disadvantaged communities for the placement of hazardous waste