Geographies of environmental justice

Abstract

The concept of environmental justice, from its earliest emergence in the civil rights politics of the United States, has always been intensely geographical. The legal and political contestation of proposals to site polluting and toxic facilities in predominantly poor and black communities, which formed the central political mobilisation of the US environmental justice movement, focused on questions of distribution, inequality and injustice which resonate with long standing traditions of geographical enquiry and analysis. The body of US based literature on environmental justice contains substantial contributions by geographers, including multiple empirical studies of patterns of location of industrial and waste sites, historical research on processes of co-evolution of urban and industrial development, and analysis of environmental justice activism in general and in particular settings. Not surprisingly much of this work has been framed by the particularities of environmental justice in the US. Whilst there are significant exceptions, attention has predominantly been given to the socio-spatial distribution of pollution and ‘toxicity ’ within US national borders, to the politics of race and civil rights, and to policy responses to accusations