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Environmental Justice

by Joela Jacobs

The term “environmental justice” (Umweltgerechtigkeit) refers to a movement toward equity in environmental questions, and it brings together concerns about the planet with those about people, or environmentalism with social justice. Beginning in the late 1970s in the United States with landmark lawsuits and spearheaded by scholars such as Robert D. Bullard, environmental justice was initially inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, later expanded to feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, and most recently Indigenous rights in the work of Kyle Powys Whyte and Dina Gilio-Whitaker. Goals of environmental justice scholars and organizations (ranging from NGOs to the US Environmental Protection Agency) include, for instance, combatting environmental racism (sometimes used as a synonym for environmental injustice) and other disparities in environmental harm exposure of marginalized groups by studying such cases, increasing awareness through publishing and protesting, and contributing to policymaking. 

Cases of environmental racism regarding land appropriation, resource extraction, water, or hazardous waste that made headlines are often tied to place names: from Warren County, NC via Standing Rock in Dakota to Flint, MI—where neither the environment nor the people were protected because they were marginalized and thus had less agency in media and politics. Put simply, environmental justice today (including what David Naguib Pellow calls “critical environmental justice”) is intent on showing that the environmental concerns of predominantly low-income people or those in the Global South, of Black, Latinx, or Indigenous families, of women, queer folks, and religious minorities (or any intersection thereof) have been systematically ignored, and how this harms both people and planet over generations. 

In Germanophone contexts, there is a comparatively less extensive body of scholarship that explicitly refers to environmental justice or Umweltgerechtigkeit, and it has primarily emerged in more recent years, mostly in the fields of environmental history, law, geography, and environmental studies. While German protest culture has been focused extensively on environmental concerns since the 1980s (e.g., to “save the forest” or against nuclear waste deposits and going along with the formation of the Green Party), these activities have rarely included a focus on social justice aspects or specific marginalized groups. In contrast, lawsuits in the US have established a clear connection between racial disparities and the history of zoning, housing, and labor, but neighborhoods in Germanophone countries also show separation by income, education, age groups, and occasionally in terms of religious, linguistic, and cultural orientation. 

Bullard (2002) therefore explains environmental justice in terms of three aspects: geographic, social, and procedural equity. The first assesses spaces, such as the proximity of neighborhoods to hazardous, noxious, and unwanted infrastructure like landfills, water treatment plants, nuclear power plants, etc. The second is concerned with intersectional identity aspects such as race, gender, etc. and the likelihood of marginalized populations to live near such places and/or work in them. Here, studies show clear correlations, which is due to the third aspect: If procedures are less accessible to people, be it because they take place far away, during work hours or religious holidays, or without offering translation services, the unequal status quo can be maintained without interference from the community affected by it. These three aspects are just as prevalent in the German-speaking world, and an unequal exchange in terms of environmental burdens is operative on a global scale (emphasized in the concept of “environmentalism of the poor” and exemplified in cases such as Shell spilling oil in the Niger Delta). Indeed, environmental justice concerns even extend to outer space.

While much of the scholarship mentioned above is more attuned to the social sciences and empirical methods, environmental humanities and its intersection with German studies are nonetheless certainly concerned with the same inequalities: Approaches such as ecofeminism and queer ecology, or concepts such as decolonization and Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” (2011) are closely related to environmental justice and share many similar concerns, even if they might assess different materials with other methods. Concepts and data from environmental justice therefore lend themselves particularly well to transfer into certain areas of literary and cultural studies, such as the genre of the Autosoziobiographie or the examination of spaces in literature and film as well as cultural discourses about migration and Islamophobia. 

A view onto environmental justice (and the related notion of climate justice) also makes clear that environmentalism and its discourses are culturally specific (e.g., one intersection of environmental justice in India pertains to caste). Hence “German environmentalism,” for instance, is worth studying and teaching as a distinct phenomenon. Ultimately, environmental racism also paves the way for considering its related reverse, racist environmentalism (see also the work of Ghassan Hage, whose 2017 book asks, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?). Racist, gendered, and ableist histories of environmentalism range from appropriating sacred sites from Indigenous peoples for US National Parks to contemporary German ecofascist headlines claiming that refugees are killing local songbirds for food. While environmental justice frameworks cannot resolve all the complex conflicts and contradictions arising between the needs of various people and their environments, they nonetheless ask us to address their concerns with more systemic equity.

Reference Works

  • Bolte, Gabriele, Christiane Bunge, Claudia Hornberg, Heike Köckler, and Andreas Mielck, eds. Umweltgerechtigkeit: Chancengleichheit bei Umwelt und Gesundheit: Konzepte, Datenlagen und Handlungsperspektiven. Göttingen: Hofgrefe, 2012.
  • Bullard, Robert D. “Confronting Environmental Racism in the Twenty-First Century.” Global Dialogue 4, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 34–48.
  • Di Chiro, Giovanna. “Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 298–320. New York: Norton, 1996.
  • Ehemann, Eva-Maria Isabell. Umweltgerechtigkeit: Ein Leitkonzept sozio-ökologisch gerechter Entscheidungsfindung. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020.
  • Hein, Jonas, and Florian Dünckmann. “Narratives and Practices of Environmental Justice.” Die Erde 151, no. 2–3 (2020): 59–66. DOI:10.12854/erde-2020-524
  • Holifield, Ryan, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Gordon Walker, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice. London: Routledge, 2018.
  • Newton, David E. Environmental Justice: A Reference Handbook, Second Edition. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.
  • Pellow, David Naguib. What is Critical Environmental Justice? Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2018.
  • Raddatz, Liv, and Jeremy Mennis. “Environmental Justice in Hamburg, Germany.” The Professional Geographer. 65, no. 3 (2013): 495–511. DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2012.700500
  • Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. New York: NYU Press, 2014.