January/February 2005

Global Balance

Environmental Justice: The Canary in the U.S. Social Justice Movement Mine?

By Ludovic Blain

The U.S. environmental justice movement is an excellent example of the advances and limits of domestic social justice movements. Despite the environmental justice (EJ) movement’s successful efforts to place people of color into leadership positions (which counters our historic exclusion from decision-making roles in progressive movements), there remain unique challenges that are simultaneously caused by and, unfortunately, mask its successes. When this canary coughs, Americans committed to justice should listen.

Our nation has a long history of parallel movements for social justice – one focused on changing society, another fighting to make the movement itself more like the utopia it is trying to create. This has occurred, for instance, in the women’s movement (which has had women of color, immigrants, and lesbians fighting for inclusion for more than a century) and the civil rights movement (which had SNCC and Septima Clark battling for the inclusion of youth).

The EJ movement has fought to diversify almost exclusively white environmental organizations. In the late 1980s, EJ leaders campaigned to force the “Group of 10” national environmental groups to end their exclusion of people of color. But the EJ movement has been more than a fight for internal inclusiveness. EJ activists have defeated incinerators, improved lead poisoning laws, gotten corporations to clean up pollution, gained increased mass transit funding, and even won a presidential executive order. More than scattered governmental and corporate policy changes, our biggest impact may have been to spur a significant rethinking of American environmentalism to include forging fairer power relationships. This has brought issues of racial justice, anti-imperialism, and redistribution of wealth into the dialogue.

At the same time, the EJ movement may be one of the most contentious contemporary movements. For many of us Gen-Xers, the meetings and conferences sound like the Boomers’ recollection of epic intra-progressive movement battles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Stories of struggles between regions, racial and ethnic groups, and professionals and community leaders are rampant, and make the movement appear to be in crisis.

Everyone's seated at the table: now what?

But many of the challenges mentioned by movement leaders, as well as funders, should actually be viewed as successes. Take, for example, the contentious Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit held in 2002, attended by 1,300 activists. (The first summit, in 1991, also gathered hundreds of people of color active at local, national, and international levels.) Youth took over a portion of the 2002 summit, saying that their issues, analyses, and contributions were overlooked. To any person who regularly attends conferences, this dynamic shouldn’t be surprising – indeed, if youth are present at all at adult-oriented conferences, they are often little more than window dressing. What was surprising to me (a veteran conference organizer who attended both summits) was how many youth attendees there were, and that they were engaged enough in the movement to seize control of the event rather than leave in disgust.

A similar breakthrough is needed to address the simmering tension between community leaders and technical professionals. That tension exists in every movement in which I’ve participated. The EJ movement, though, has two unique characteristics: (1) the professionals are more often than not the same race and/or ethnicity as the community residents, and (2) the community leaders have enough power to sustain disagreements, rather than getting steamrolled. This means that disagreements between different sectors of the movement don’t necessarily break down on traditional racial lines, because races and ethnicities are represented throughout the movement – victims, advocates, and organizers, and technical experts, funders, and policymakers. Why should we expect that cohesion based on racial identity would trump the institutional perspectives and interests people are hired to protect?

The EJ movement’s successes at inclusion have brought challenges not faced by other, less developed movements. These experiences remind us that inclusion is crucial, and a job as yet undone in many movements, but one that produces challenges of its own. A movement where marginalized people are actually engaged, rather than solely mobilized – where they actually have a say, or even a veto – is one where discussions are longer and more heated, where tensions build and even become public. It is certainly not a movement that is streamlined, hierarchical, and centralized. However, the alternative is “smoother” movements run on the traditional model, movements that exclude the same people society does. That strategy may be prettier, but ultimately it seems unlikely to be as successful.

Ludovic Blain co-founded several environmental justice groups, including the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance. He’s also worked on media justice, consumer protection, and election reform, and is now associate director of the Democracy Program at Demos. Ludovic also publishes generationalprogress.org, a blog on generational leadership transition challenges within progressive nonprofits.