Activists and scientists use a variety of perspectives to understand climate change and climate activism. In this section, we will look at Environmental Justice, Environmental Race Theory, Ecofeminism, Youth Climate Change Activism, and Critical Environmental Justice theories and actions.

Figure 5.11 Silent Spring Book Cover: Environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote the book Silent Spring. Published in 1962, it described how the pesticide DDT was killing birds. As a result DDT was banned, and eagles, brown pelican and osprey populations have rebounded. However, bird populations generally are in still in decline, one component in the loss of biodiversity.

In addition to warming temperatures and loss of wildlife, we can look at climate change through the lens of the social problems process. As we examine the history of how the environmental movement began in the United States, we begin with environmentalist and author Rachel Carson. In her book Silent Spring (1962), she described how the use of toxic pesticides was killing populations of robins and causing deeper environmental damage. This book highlights the work of activists of the time making claims about problems in the environment.

By raising these issues with books, articles, and debates, activists used the media in various ways to engage people. Public awareness steadily grew concerning the connection between human activity, ecological degradation, and the dramatic loss of biodiversity. Out of this awareness, the environmental movement formed to put pressure on political institutions to address the damage that had already occurred and prevent further harm from happening in the future. As a result of an increase in public awareness and an admirable concerted effort by the environmental movement, many governments banned or restricted the use of DDT and similar pesticides. The changes in laws, regulations, and policies have saved many threatened species. They have also held polluting industries accountable for the damage that they caused.

5.4.1 What is Environmental Racism?

Environmental racism is the burdening of economically and socially disadvantaged communities with a disproportionate share of environmental hazards. The term was first coined in 1982 by Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis during what many consider to be one of the earliest environmental justice actions in the US when residents of Warren County, North Carolina came together to protest the siting of a toxic landfill in a predominantly Black community (Bullard 2000:29-30). Chavis (1994) defined environmental racism as:

racial discrimination in environmental policymaking and enforcement of regulations and laws, the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, the official sanctioning of the presence of life-threatening poisons and pollutants for communities of color, and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the environmental movement (xii).

Environmental sociologist Robert D. Bullard is often described as the ‘Father of Environmental Justice’. His book Dumping on Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (1990) was the first book describing environmental justice. Bullard affirmed his position on EJ as one operating “under the assumption that all Americans have a basic right to live, work, play, go to school, and worship in a clean and healthy environment”, and argued that civil rights and EJ were intricately connected (p. xiii). Bullard discussed a landmark study he conducted in 1979 concerning the spatial locations of all the municipal solid-waste sites in Houston, Texas that was part of the first class-action lawsuit in the US to charge environmental discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, was in response to the siting of a landfill in a suburban middle-class neighborhood in which Bullard described as “an unlikely location for a garbage dump––except that over 82 percent of its residents were African American (p. xiv)”.

Results from Bullard’s research inspired him to investigate four other Black communities in the South to see if there was indeed a correlation between race and increased exposure to toxic facilities and other locally unwanted land uses. His research findings revealed that “the siting of local waste facilities was not random” (p. xiv) but were in fact clear examples of institutional racism––laws and policies that have intentionally and systematically marginalized Black communities for generations.

Bullard’s groundbreaking research provided convincing evidence of environmental discrimination.He defined environmental discrimination as the “disparate treatment of a group or community based on race, class, or some other distinguishing characteristic,”an experience he saw as a “fact of life” for Black communities. At the center of this legacy of discrimination, he argued, was structural and individual racism which led to the “impoverishment of Black communities . . . [making] it easier for Black residential areas to become the dumping grounds for all types of health-threatening toxins and industrial pollution” (p. 7). Dumping on Dixie set in motion a sustained scholarly interest in EJ issues. It also illustrated how and why past injustices continue to affect and harm historically oppressed communities today. As Bullard clearly showed, environmental racism is much older than the environmental justice movement.

Many other scholars and activists, particularly Indigenous scholars and activists, place its origin to the moment Europeans first arrived in the so-called “New World” and laid claim to the land. Indigenous scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) argued in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, that “everything in US history is about the land,” at least in terms of increasing European and Euro-American wealth and power­.

Researcher and activist David Pellow who wrote the book What is Critical Environmental Justice? agrees. He argues that although EJ scholarship and organized grassroots activism are relatively new, environmental injustice was a major component of the European colonization agenda. From the theft of nearly all Indigenous historical lands; the extermination of entire cultural groups and millions of Indigenous peoples; the control, commodification, and over-exploitation of natural resources, and the enslavement of millions of Indigenous and African peoples to ‘work the land’, environmental racism has been a problem in the U.S. from the start.

5.4.2 What is Environmental Justice?

Environmental justice (EJ) is an intersectional social movement pioneered by African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Latinx, lower-income, and other historically oppressed populations fighting against environmental discrimination within their communities and across the world. Environmental justice is also an academic theory (a form of scientific analysis) found within an evolving field of interdisciplinary scholarship. As a social movement, EJ is rooted in the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement and its fight to end racial segregation and structural inequality in the 1950s and 1960s (Bullard 2000); however, environmental injustice can be traced much further back in US history to the exploitation and extermination of millions of Indigenous peoples and the violent seizure of their ancestral lands as a result of European and Euro-American colonization and warfare (Jarratt-Snider and Nielson 2020).

The EJ movement began to receive widespread public attention in the early 1980s after a series of grassroots actions took place against the polluting practices of toxic industries and the unjust neglect that historically marginalized communities experienced by federal and state governments. With a deep awareness of institutional racism and the socioeconomic inequalities in the US and elsewhere, early EJ activists recognized that all forms of injustice were interconnected.Therefore the struggle for a healthy environment must also include access to quality schools and education, adequate and safe housing, green spaces, access to fresh food and clean water, and sustainable employment opportunities (Checker 2007). What makes this movement unique as well as strong is the intersectionality of the injustices it seeks to address, as well as the diverse communities it brings together to address various types of social inequities (Schlosberg 2007).

The Environmental Protection Agency (2018) defines EJ as the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, class, color, national origin or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental law, regulations, and policies”. To many activists and scholars, however, the EPA’s definition holds little weight considering that polluting industries are rarely, if ever, held accountable for the harm they cause (Pellow 2017).

Many EJ activists and scholars also recognize how social inequalities of all kinds are deeply embedded within the structure of the government; therefore, they find it hard to rely on government oversight to protect their communities while it is often the legal system that allows these injustices to occur in the first place (Estes 2019). This has pushed and inspired many communities invested in the cause of EJ to create their own local solutions to keep their communities safe by forming alliances and participating in direct action campaigns, investing in mutual aid efforts, and practicing direct democratic principles to achieve their goals (Pellow 2017).

5.4.3 What is EcoFeminism?

Figure 5.12 Gender inequality is showing up… in climate change [YouTube Video]. Please watch this 18 minute TED talk. Canadian researcher Amber Fletcher has interviewed farm women to see how climate change is impacting agriculture in Canada. How is this information new to you?

Women and children are disproportionately impacted by climate change. The video in 5.12 explores this topic in more detail. In response to this, and to other gendered inequalities, women and nonbinary people are thinking, reasearching and taking action. This strand of feminist theory and action is called ecofeminism. Ecofeminism connects the domination of women to the domination of the environment. In the article Ecofeminism: Encouraging Interconnectedness with Our Environment in Modern Society, researchers Mondal and Majumder (2019) write,”bringing together feminism and environmentalism, ecofeminism argues that the domination of women and the degradation of the environment are consequences of patriarchy and capitalism (n.p).”

In addition to being a theory of that fundamentally names the intersectionality of the oppression of women and non-binary people with the desctruction of the environment, ecofeminism champions taking action. women themselves say that they must become climate change activists to create a world in which their children can not only survive but thrive. In the Ted talk EcoGrief and Ecofeminism, Heide Hutner tells her own story of cancer. She also links her grief and her activism to the activism of women around the world. Similarly, Terry Tempest Williams tells the story of The Clan of the One-Breasted Women. She is able to connect the event of nuclear testing with the health of her family. She describes how this leads her to activism.

5.4.4 What is Youth Climate Activism?

Figure 5.13 Greta Thunberg – School Strike for Climate Change

Figure 5.14 Autumn Peltier, youth water activist at the World Economic Forum 2021

The faces you see in the pictures in figures 5.13 and 5.14 have one thing in common. They are all young people.

Greta Thunberg is a youth activist from Sweden. She began protesting in front of government offices in 2018 with other young people. This small action has grown into a worldwide movement, using youth energy and new forms of social media to mobilize and educate people. For example, Fridays for Future describes itself this way:

#FridaysForFuture is a youth-led and -organised movement that began in August 2018, after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every schoolday for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis. She posted what she was doing on Instagram and Twitter and it soon went viral. (Fridays for Future 2022)

Autumn Peltier is a world-renowned water protector, activist, and citizen of the Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada. Since she was 8 years old, she has fought for clean water in Canada. In 2019, Peltier was appointed as the Anishinabek Nation Chief Water Commissioner following the death of her great-aunt, Josephine Mandamin, who had been the previous Chief Water Commissioner and remains in that position today. In The teen fighting to protect Canada’s water – meet Autumn Peltier [YouTube Video], she tells her story.

In a recent article Karen O’Brian, Elin Selboe, and Bronwyn Hayward propose that young people engage in three kinds of activism when it comes to climate change and environmental justice: dutiful dissent, disruptive dissent, and dangerous dissent. The dutiful dissenters create change by working within the system. They may work with school organizations to create recycling programs or policies around investment. “Through dutiful dissent, youth activists work within existing systems to express their discontent with business as usual and to promote alternative responses to climate change” (O’Brian, Selboe, and Hayward 2018). In contrast, disruptive dissenters stage strikes and protests that highlight inequalities and injustices.

Disruptive actions explicitly challenge power relationships, as well as the actors and political authorities who maintain them, often through direct protests and collective organization. They may involve starting or joining petition campaigns or boycotts, disrupting international climate meetings to draw attention to hypocrisy and exclusion of important voices, or protesting key concerns through political marches or rallies. (O’Brian, Selboe, and Hayward 2018)

Finally, dangerous dissenters begin to create alternatives to existing structures and systems as a way of creating social change. “Dangerous dissent challenges existing paradigms or ways of understanding the relationship between climate change and social change.” For example, The Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers tell the story of the Sonoran Desert on both sides of the US-Mexico border. They provide alternative explanations of ecological issues and alternative methods of creating change. The dangerous dissenters can “enable people to present organized challenges to mainstream power relationships and conventional environmental behavior.” (O’Brian, Selboe, and Hayward 2018) In each of these three models, youth activists are leading actions and movements for social change for the environment.

5.4.5 What is Critical Environmental Justice?

Critical environmental justice (CEJ) is often referred to as the ‘second generation’ of environmental justice activism and scholarship. While it recognizes the important groundwork laid out by earlier activists and academics, CEJ considers how all forms of structural inequality put targeted communities at risk of environmental harm, and how all forms of inequality essentially violate the human right to live in a healthy, safe, and thriving environment.

By drawing on numerous fields of inquiry (i.e., critical race studies, Black feminist studies, Indigenous EJ, gender and sexuality studies, and more–– CEJ strives to understand, document, and radically oppose intersectional forms of injustice that perpetuate oppression and exploitation on multiple levels. Pellow (2018), a notable scholar in the field, argued that there are four main limitations to ‘first generation’ EJ studies.

First, EJ studies tend to focus on only one or two types of categories at a time, usually race and/or class, rather than looking at how multiple forms of discrimination can occur for some individuals and whole communities simultaneously.

 Second, EJ studies tend to examine the causes, outcomes, and solutions to environmental injustice issues on a single level or at a specific location rather than considering the host of environmental problems people face today on a community as well as a global scale. For example, the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest not only impacts local Indigenous communities in the region, it reduces carbon sinks for the whole planet, therefore contributing to the climate crisis.

Third, first-generation EJ studies tend to almost exclusively rely on legislative or institutional reform to address environmental injustice issues, ignoring the fact that it is these same power structures that permitted and even produced the environmental and social harm in the first place.

Finally, Pellow points out that while traditional EJ studies recognize that historically marginalized communities are more likely to live in highly contaminated locations, entire populations of people are treated as expendable by political power structures and industries, not just particular communities located in a particular place (14-17). This means that even if a community is displaced due to a chemical spillage, the potential for them to experience environmental harm in one form or another remains even if they are relocated somewhere deemed safe. This is due to the discrimination they experience every day in the larger context of society.

In short, critical environmental justice takes a holistic approach to understand, expose, and ultimately resist the practices and policies of governments and industries that prioritize profit over the lives of people, all other life forms, and even the future of our planet.