Just Environmentalism

Abstract

Thirty years ago, the environmental justice movement emerged as a powerful critique of traditional environmentalism, which had largely ignored the distribution of environmental harms and the ways in which those harms were concentrated on the poor and communities of color. This Article calls for a similarly groundbreaking reimagination of both mainstream environmental policy and environmental justice: we argue that, to truly embrace justice, environmentalists must take account, not only of the ways that environmental harms uniquely impact vulnerable populations but also of the costs that environmental protection imposes on the most vulnerable among us.