Built From the Ground Up: Why Environmental Justice Belongs to Communities

Whose Movement Is It?, a series co-produced by NPQ and the Environmental Justice Oral History Project, is a call to action for those at the forefront of environmental justice decision-making, drawing on insights, hopes, and visions for the future from some of the foundational women organizers of the environmental justice movement.

In the autumn of 1982, residents organized inside Coley Springs Baptist Church in Warren County, NC, to stop the state from burying PCB-contaminated soil in their community. For six weeks, men, women, and children marched and lay down in the road in front of trucks hauling toxic waste. More than 500 people were arrested. It was from a jail cell in Warren County that the term “environmental racism” was first spoken aloud—not coined by a scientist or a policy office, but by the people living closest to the harm, organizing without institutional permission.

This year marks 250 years since a different group of people decided they, too, would no longer wait for permission from the institutions above them. As the country marks the semi-quincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, it’s worth remembering that the American experiment, like the environmental justice movement 206 years later, was built the same way: locally, informally, and with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in mind.

A Movement Built to Stay Local

Environmental justice was built on an understanding of the importance of locality and intentionality. The movement’s founders were not building a national institution; they were responding to what was poisoning their water, air, and children in the town where they lived. That hyperlocal character has sometimes been described as a weakness—a movement fractured into silos, unable to coordinate at scale. It’s a fair critique, but also an incomplete one. Decentralization is a large part of why the environmental justice movement has stayed effective where more institutionalized environmentalism has not. A community organization answers to the community it’s from; it cannot drift from its founding mission the way a large nonprofit can, because it has no distance to drift.

That principle has deep roots in the civil rights movement, which environmental justice grew out of, a movement whose most consequential victories rarely started with a national strategy. Four college students sitting down at a segregated Greensboro lunch counter in February 1960 had no mandate from any national organization. Within two months, tens of thousands of students in dozens of cities had staged sit-ins of their own, each one organized locally and stitched together only after the fact into something resembling a coordinated movement.

Decentralization is a large part of why the environmental justice movement has stayed effective where more institutionalized environmentalism has not.A few years earlier, a single woman refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus became the spark for a year-long boycott sustained not by a citywide carpool network improvised block by block, church by church, and ride by ride. In both cases, the power came from the same place: a hyperlocal action specific enough to be immediately understandable on the ground and moving the needle enough that other communities recognized their own struggle in it and picked it up. Warren County would use that same mechanism, almost without realizing it, a generation later.

Hazel M. Johnson practiced that strategy without ever calling it a model. Living in the Altgeld Gardens public housing complex on Chicago’s South Side, surrounded by what she called a “toxic doughnut” of landfills and industrial polluters, Johnson founded People for Community Recovery in 1979—unpaid, unaffiliated with any national environmental organization, working block by block with her own neighbors. By 1991, delegates at the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit were calling her the “mother of environmental justice”—not the leader of a big green nonprofit, but a community ambassador and leader of her local tenant council.

The Role Institutions Must Play

None of this means institutions have no role. States can use the Clean Water Act to block a pipeline, as North Carolina and Virginia did to stop the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, the fight Donna Chavis spent years organizing as a Lumbee elder in Robeson County. Federal agencies can fund microgrids and community benefit plans, the way the Department of Energy did under Shalanda Baker’s direction before that framework was dismantled within weeks of a change in administration. Private developers can write community benefit agreements that keep clean energy investment from repeating the harms it claims to fix. Journalists can spend a year on one story, the way Jane Kay’s reporting on Tucson’s contaminated water gave Rose Marie Augustine’s community the exposure it needed to act. Even the largest environmental nonprofits can still choose to redirect funding and platform toward the organizations already doing the work.

State and federal government, the municipalities, the private sector, journalists and researchers who disseminate information, and the Big Green nonprofits that have spent a century building institutional power.  The question asked of each one is the same: does this institution support community-led environmental justice work, or does the institution itself try to lead the work?

By 1991, delegates at the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit were calling her [Hazel M. Johnson] the “mother of environmental justice”—not the leader of a big green nonprofit, but a community ambassador and leader of her local tenant council.

The distinction matters more than it might seem. An institution that funds, amplifies, or defers to community leadership extends the movement’s reach without changing its shape. An institution that tries to run the movement risks doing what large institutions do by default: smoothing out the specificity that made the original organizing effective in the first place, replacing a tenant council’s urgency with a program office’s timeline. Big Greens’ own diversity numbers, which have declined for the first time on record in the years since they publicly pledged to do better, aren’t proof that institutions can’t help: They’re proof of what happens when an institution tries to hold the wheel instead of handing it back.

The Women Who Carried It

Nearly every pivot point in US environmental justice movement history was led by a woman whose name took decades to attach to the work.

In the spring of 1776, as her husband sat in Philadelphia debating the shape of the new nation, Abigail Adams wrote to ask that the new laws “remember the ladies” and not hand husbands the same unchecked power the colonies were fighting to escape from the Crown. It would be nearly a century and a half before the country followed through on that request.

Dollie Burwell and Angella Dunston represented an intergenerational coalition that organized the church basements and phone trees that got Warren County’s protesters into the streets. Vernice Miller-Travis mapped the geospatial data behind the 1987 Toxic Wastes and Race report that gave the movement its first hard evidence. Individuals like Pam Tau Lee, Susana Almanza, Peggy Shepard, and Dr. Mildred McClain were the conveners who established the 17 Principles of Environmental Justice that continue to undergird all best movement practice. Individuals like Leslie Fields, Rev. Susan Hendershot, and Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine of the Gullah Geechee Nation have dedicated their careers to building institutions across policy, culture, and faith designed to serve all of us. None of them waited for a national office to tell them the work mattered.

Two hundred fifty years after a woman in Braintree, MA, asked to be remembered in the laws her husband was helping write, and more than 40 years after a jail cell in Warren County gave the environmental justice movement its name, the work record catches what was always true continues. This movement was built in kitchens, church basements, and tenant council meetings, by people—disproportionately women—who had no institution behind them and built one anyway. The stakeholders examined in the stories that follow all have something to offer to the work, but none of them are the work itself. That belongs, as it always has, to the communities doing it.