Berry lost that mayoral race, but has continued to fight for access to clean water and sanitation. After teaming up with a group from Flint, Michigan â another predominantly Black and lower-income community with a history of contaminated water â Berry learned that Denmark was allowing HaloSan, a non-EPA-approved pesticide, to be pumped into the cityâs water supply. Although Denmark told residents in 2018 they discontinued the use of HaloSan, Berry said the work to ensure residents have access to clean and affordable water isnât over.
More than 2 million people living in the United States lack access to safe drinking water and sanitation, according to a report from the US Water Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on sustainable water access in the country. Experts say that extreme weather events associated with the climate crisis are likely to exacerbate existing issues with the water infrastructure in the US, and that poor communities are likely to feel t
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For a long time, the face of the climate movement was white. But with growing public awareness of climate change came the recognition that its impacts are disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
The problem, according to many Black climate advocates, is that awareness is not enough.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin is one of the best-known advocates for what she calls the “Black climate agenda”: a movement that seeks to correct the failures of the climate movement to include Black people and that wants to see racial justice at the center of climate policy conversations.
The origins of environmental justice and why it’s finally getting the attention it deserves
Decades of research show that Black and brown communities are on the front lines of environmental harms. Can those longstanding injustices be remedied?
ByAlejandra Borunda
Email
Sociologist Robert Bullard has spent four decades making the case that environmental harms have disproportionately affected communities of color across the United States. So when one of President Joe Biden’s first moves after inauguration was to sign an executive order that pledged to “advance environmental justice” in his efforts to address the climate crisis, Bullard was ecstatic.
“Now, environmental and racial justice is the centerpiece, not a footnote,” says the professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University.
Overview
It is widely recognized that the environmental justice movement first gained traction in 1982 in a predominately African-American community in Warren County, North Carolina. University of Michigan professors Bunyan Bryant (a graduate of EMU) and Paul Mohai were pioneers in the movement. Bunyan Bryant who in 1972 had become the first African American to join the SNRE faculty attended a meeting at the Federation of Southern Cooperative in Sumter County. Shortly after, he joined with Professor Mohai in Ann Arbor.
In the early 1990s, during the Clinton years, it was the period when the environmental justice concept “hit the radar” of the EPA and federal government. Professors Byrant and Mohai led a team of academics and activists to advise the U.S. EPA on environmental justice policy. Drs. Bryant and Mohai published