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Environmental justice became a national social movement in the 1980's through a
process very different from other U.S. environmental movements. People in
poor minority communities created groups to fight environmental burdens that:
- resulted from being targeted by industry for activities that threaten the
environment (e.g., use, storage, and disposal of toxic chemicals) and
- produced high rates of environmental illness.
While local protests decreased such threats to some communities, the groups
realized another effective way to prevent harmful environmental impacts was to
develop a loose, national, multicultural coalition of such community groups to
collectively speak out for environmental justice and to challenge others with
similar interests to also speak out.
In 1991, representatives from hundreds of these community groups came together
in Washington, D.C. for the First National People Of Color Environmental
Leadership Summit. Through a challenging four-day process of development by
consensus, Summit delegates created the Principles of Environmental
Justice. The Principles defined the ethics and broader goals of the
environmental justice movement. The Summit delegates decided to keep the focus
of the movement at the community group level with communication between the
groups supported through a series of networks. By that time, the
origin and actions of the environmental justice movement had been described in
seminal documents
such as the United Church of Christ report "Toxic Waste
and Race", the SouthWest Organizing Project "Letter to the Group of Ten", the Panos Institute report
"We Speak for Ourselves", and the books Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards, and
Dumping in Dixie.
Training, legal and policy, and research tools have been leveraged to support
environmental justice efforts with mixed results in part because they were not
always created in partnership with, and in a manner that met the needs of, poor
minority communities. In 2002, representatives of hundreds of these groups
convened at the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership
Summit. The second Summit
focused on identifying lessons learned from actions during the past decade and
forging a vision for the future.
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