Championing Equity

On a fall morning in 1991, over one thousand civil rights leaders and environmental activists from all fifty states and beyond made their way to Washington, DC, for a demonstration outside the Capitol. But the event was no mere protest. 

Over four days, participants in the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit took part in meetings that transformed the meaning of environmentalism, connecting it to struggles for racial and economic justice. Sponsored by the United Church of Christ, the summit set the foundations for the burgeoning environmental justice movement in the United States. 

Today, the movement is flourishing like never before. Environmental justice is at the core of the Biden-Harris Administration’s policy agenda, and UC Berkeley scholars are at the vanguard. A multidisciplinary team of researchers affiliated with the campus-wide Climate Equity and Environmental Justice (CEEJ) roundtable is working with impacted communities to address environmental racism, achieve environmental equity, and shrink the climate gap—the disparate impacts that a warming world is imposing on poor people and communities of color.

Momentum of a movement

The movement’s roots, though, go back almost half a century. In the late 1970s, civil rights groups such as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began grappling with what was, at the time, an overlooked form of racial discrimination. Less visible than segregated campuses or police brutality, environmental harms have long disproportionately affected the most marginalized communities in the country. 

A long history of redlining and other actions by lawmakers and city planners has resulted in the ongoing disenfranchisement of people of color. Highways and oil refineries were disproportionately built in Black neighborhoods, creating widespread displacement and exposure to toxic air pollution, and Latinx children are more likely than white kids to attend a school next to a toxic waste dump.

But traditional environmentalists did not usually consider these polluted places part of the environment—a word generally used to refer to areas of pristine wilderness that were the focus of predominantly white nonprofits, like the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy. At the 1991 summit, the group of mostly Black, Indigenous, and Latinx activists argued that the term should be extended to some of America’s most toxic places.  

Cancer Alley, the so-called 85-mile stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge—home to over 150 petrochemical plants and populated by mostly Black residents—was the environment, they said. So was Afton, North Carolina, where, since the early 1980s, a toxic waste landfill poisoned the soil with cancer-causing polychlorinated biphenyls. 

“Our movement redefined environmentalism,” said Robert Bullard during last November’s Albright Lecture at Rausser College. Bullard, a sociologist known as the Father of Environmental Justice, revealed in the 1970s that almost all landfills, incinerators, and garbage dumps in Houston were placed in predominantly Black neighborhoods. “The environment is where we live, work, play, worship, learn, as well as the physical and natural world,” said Bullard, who helped organize the 1991 summit and later created the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. “Environmental justice embraces the principle that all people are entitled to equal protection of our environment, housing, transportation, energy, health, and civil rights. We are talking about all these things coming together.”

In the years following the summit, the movement snowballed. The first environmental justice centers were created at historically Black colleges and universities, and these centers helped formulate the seventeen principles of environmental justice. They demanded an end to the production of toxic and hazardous wastes and asserted a right for affected groups to participate as equal partners in the planning process at every level of decision-making.

In February 1994, President Clinton, flanked by Bullard in the Oval Office, signed Executive Order 12898, which required every federal agency to make achieving environmental justice part of its mission. 

Integrating Environmental Justice

Since then, California activists and researchers have paved the way. Environmental justice advocates opposed the state’s 2006 cap-and-trade program, arguing instead for a carbon tax. But in 2012, environmental justice organizations worked with legislators to mandate that 35% of cap-and-trade monies must be invested to benefit environmentally disadvantaged communities. “They made lemonade out of lemons,” says Rachel Morello-Frosch, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM) and the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley. 

Almost $30 billion has been raised by the cap-and-trade program over the last twelve years, but the funds are only helpful if they flow into communities that need them the most. Morello-Frosch, who co-chairs the CEEJ roundtable, has been working with state and federal government agencies to help pinpoint areas most burdened by pollution.

Morello-Frosch has collaborated with California’s Environmental Protection Agency to help develop and update CalEnviroScreen, the nation’s first online mapping tool for identifying disproportionately polluted communities. Initially launched in 2013, the tool informs California Climate Investments, the entity that awards grants that fund everything from programs for air pollution abatement and safe drinking water to sustainable farming, tree planting, and high-speed rail.  

Safe water is a particularly urgent need. California’s water is especially vulnerable to climate change, with mountain snowpacks shrinking, frequent drought, and underground aquifers running dry. The predominantly Latinx rural communities along the Central Coast and in the San Joaquin Valley are most vulnerable. These households tend to be reliant on shallow and intermittent backyard wells—which are often contaminated. 

“Backyard domestic wells are not regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” says Morello-Frosch. “Many of them are contaminated with nitrates and other pollutants due to agricultural activities, as well as oil and gas development activities in these regions.”

Morello-Frosch has been studying the health impacts of these wells, which include adverse maternal health and birth outcomes. She has also been working with the Community Water Center, a nonprofit water justice organization based in the San Joaquin Valley, to develop the Drinking Water Tool, which empowers affected communities by uncovering threats to local groundwater and providing information on how to get involved in water management decisions. 

“Community partnerships have improved the rigor, relevance, and reach of our science,” says Morello-Frosch. “They’ve enabled us to do novel projects in ways we would not have been able to do ourselves. And they’ve ensured that we keep asking relevant questions and guarantee that the science is translated to inform policy and regulatory change in ways that improve the health of the communities that we study.”

Water is also a focus for Michael Mascarenhas, an environmental sociologist and professor in ESPM. To research his 2024 book, Toxic Water, Toxic System: Environmental Racism and Michigan’s Water War, Mascarenhas worked closely with activists over many years to understand the roots of Michigan’s water crisis. He revealed how community organizers, through a tireless campaign, fought to bring environmental justice to majority Black cities in the state—a battle they are still fighting today.

And Morello-Frosch, for her part, is now applying her expertise in mapping areas disproportionately affected by climate change and toxic pollution to the whole country. When President Biden took office in 2021, he signed Executive Order 14008, which asserted an ambition to integrate environmental justice into the administration’s efforts to tackle climate change. The result was the Justice40 Initiative, which funnels 40% of the benefits of certain federal climate investments toward disadvantaged communities that suffer from pollution and underinvestment. And the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act unlocked $369 billion in climate and clean energy investments—and required that $60 billion be spent on helping communities disproportionately exposed to environmental pollution. 

This money is now funding everything from the purchase of electric school buses and the replacement of lead pipes to the protection of low-income households from storms and floods. Morello-Frosch, along with Bullard, sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, where she recommends how best to spend the funds and how to measure success. 

“We’re helping develop what we call an environmental justice scorecard,” she says. “It’s an accountability tool that tracks and measures how 40 percent of benefits actually flow to the relevant communities.”  

Morello-Frosch has also been helping to build the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, a federal version of CalEnviroScreen. She is focused on ensuring the most vulnerable communities are protected from climate change impacts, while “helping to develop accountability and information-sharing structures across agencies that have a commitment to embedding environmental justice and equity in their work,” she says.  

This unprecedented influx of federal funds requires work at the grassroots level, too. Applying for federal grants can be complicated and time consuming, and the process demands expertise that underserved communities often lack. Last year, Daniel Kammen, who leads the CEEJ roundtable with Morello-Frosch, received a $1.4 million state grant to build tools to help underserved California cities and counties build climate-action plans and limit their carbon emissions. These plans will help disproportionately burdened towns unlock much-needed federal funds.

Environmental justice is growing at Berkeley, too. In 2021, the CEEJ roundtable hired five tenure-track assistant professors to work alongside the campus’s well-established researchers who have long been leaders in the field. These early-career scholars are advancing environmental justice from across diverse fields—ranging from climate migration and engineering to sociology and climate-adaptation design. “They are a remarkable group,” says Kammen, who is the James and Katherine Lau Distinguished Professor of Sustainability in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG). “There’s an amazing community here.” 

The growth is necessary. With environmental justice in the public eye like never before, and with billions of dollars now in the mix, it is vital that researchers keep a keen eye on the environmental justice initiatives that are springing up and monitor them for unintended consequences. 

Paige Weber, an economist by training, is doing just that. She’s analyzing the equity impact of green policies with a powerful set of quantitative methods, which she thinks are suited to understand some of the trade-offs involved in environmental policy making. “It’s amazing for the environmental justice field that so many different disciplines are now bringing their tools to the problem,” says Weber. “I want my work to complement the perspectives of other disciplines working on similar questions.”

Weber, an assistant professor in ERG who joined Berkeley last year, digs into environmental policies to uncover potential trade-offs. Could cleaning up a low-income, heavily polluted area cause property prices to rise, forcing residents out? As an environmental economist, Weber attempts to quantify the costs and benefits of environmental policies to understand their short- and long-term impacts, as well as unintended consequences. 

Sometimes, Weber points out, crafting policy that advances environmental justice and effectively combats climate change is a balancing act. In 2022, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1137, requiring all new oil and gas drilling sites to be set back at least 3,200 feet from sensitive sites like homes, schools, hospitals, and parks. But in a paper published last year, Weber and co-authors showed that although setting back wells from vulnerable sites does have the largest health benefits compared with other measures, such as excise and carbon taxes, the policy could not achieve the state’s 90% greenhouse gas mitigation target without additional restrictions.

“We found that setback restrictions are effective in generating health benefits,” says Weber, “but that the state will have to combine it with another policy, like a carbon tax, to get to the greenhouse gas emissions reductions it wants to achieve.”

Environmental trade-offs can have more vicious effects, too. In their rush to extract rare earth metals crucial for the green-energy transition, mining companies risk harming communities and ecosystems around the world. “Projects that aim to do good may end up having inadvertent socioenvironmental consequences that negatively affect local communities,” says Youjin Chung, an assistant professor in ERG and ESPM.

Although the environmental justice movement began in the US, environmental injustice has no boundaries. Developing countries are on the frontline of climate-change risk while having contributed the least to carbon emissions.  “The low-carbon energy transition is an uneven geographical process that has the potential to assign someone else’s landscapes and lives to social and environmental devastation,” says Chung. “It is often framed as: These are the green sacrifice zones that have to be created in the Global South in order for us to achieve sustainability outcomes in the Global North.”

Chung, who focuses on East Africa, is analyzing an ongoing attempt by an Australian mining company to extract neodymium-praseodymium (rare earth elements required for building generator and motor magnets in wind turbines and electric vehicles) from southwest Tanzania. Using ethnographic methods, she is finding that residents of the village where the mine will be built have mixed opinions: while some are excited about the employment opportunities the mine may bring, everyone is worried about pollution and other social costs.

“Water trickles down from the mountain-top mining site to the village,” says Chung. “That’s their source of drinking water and a place of cultural rituals.” As part of the National Science Foundation-supported project, Chung is working with colleagues in natural and physical sciences who are developing more efficient, less toxic methods for processing the metals. As the green transition accelerates, says Chung, it is vital that the quest for critical minerals proceeds in a way that minimizes social and environmental harms.

Moving closer to home, there’s no shortage of well-intentioned but disproportionately harmful environmental policies. Take wildfires. Megafires are becoming increasingly common, and the smoke disproportionately smothers Indigenous communities. Part of the problem, says Peter Nelson, an assistant professor in ESPM and the Department of Ethnic Studies, is the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge from forest management decisions. 

Nelson, who is Coast Miwok and a tribal citizen of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, studies environmental stewardship at the intersection of environmental science, Indigenous environmental studies, and Native American studies. For thousands of years, Native Californians used controlled burnings to manage land. But a blanket policy of fire suppression has caused a buildup of vegetation that fuels fires of intense destructive power. 

Nelson is now trying to rekindle these traditional practices. Last year, he received a state grant of nearly $1 million to work closely with tribal entities to expand the use of prescribed fire. By bringing landowners, local communities, and tribal leaders around the table to support Indigenous approaches to fire, he says, we can reduce the risk of megafires and the impacts they cause for everyone.

Clearing the air—for all

Morello-Frosch points out that in heavily segregated cities, such as Detroit, Newark, and Memphis, the air is worse overall, for everybody, than it is in less racially divided places. One reason for this is that segregated cities are often more spread out, which means people must drive more to access jobs, amenities, and other services. And in racially divided areas, communities of color have less political power—leading to wealthier white groups from cleaner parts of the city more easily shunting hazards into poorer areas. 

“This degrades environmental quality for everyone,” she says. “If we’re not investing in the improvement of air quality or water infrastructure, it affects everybody, even though marginalized groups are disproportionately more impacted.”

Despite progress that has resulted from the environmental justice movement over the past fifty years, it is overwhelmingly disadvantaged groups who are still struggling to breathe. It is this urgent fact, and others like it, that remains at the core of the movement—at Berkeley and beyond. “People of color breathe other people’s air,” says Bullard. Black children, he points out, are four times more likely to die of asthma than white children—and “when you talk about a kid who can’t breathe because of a poor environment,” he says, “people should be mad as hell, in the streets protesting.”