Burnt orange skies, suffocating air, dying trees—I used to think that climate change was a far-off issue that was distant from my community, but all that changed after the fall wildfire season of 2020. Having heard that these wildfires were made so much worse by global warming, I started to become more connected to the issue of climate change, reading countless articles about the fires and learning more and more about the environment. I realized just how much climate change was shaping the world I lived in—and just how much people in communities across the globe were suffering daily from its effects.
In recent years, environmental justice—the idea that to effectively protect our planet, we must protect those who are most vulnerable to its destruction and resolve inequalities—has begun to reach the forefront of environmental discourse. With the rising intensity of climate disasters, it has become clearer that people of color and marginalized, lower income communities are bearing the brunt of environmental harm. These communities are more likely to live in areas susceptible to environmental hazards and pollution by factories. According to the NAACP, 71% of African Americans are located in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards, as opposed to 58% of white Americans. And this disparity has alarming health effects—the EPA has also found that Black people are exposed to 1.54 times more fine particulate matter than white people and have a 3 times higher chance of dying from air pollution.
These jarring disparities are not just coincidences: the United States government has actively been implementing policies that force lower-income, Black, and brown communities into polluted areas and make it harder for them to access the resources they need to recover from disasters. Tracing back to the 1930s, redlining policies from the Federal Housing Administration designated minority communities as “dangerous” or “risky”, making it much harder for them to receive loans and buy houses. Generations have gone by as U.S. policy has continued to reify this institutional racism, pushing communities into cycles of poverty. Because these historically disadvantaged areas have less political power, corporations and governments have found it convenient to place power plants, factories, and other sites of industrial pollution within them. As a result, these, often formerly redlined, areas are significantly more likely to be designated as Superfund sites, which means that they have considerably high levels of toxic waste.
Not only are these minority neighborhoods affected by pollution, but they are also more susceptible to climate impacts. Researchers at the Science Museum of Virginia and the Portland State University found that historically redlined districts, on average, experience 5 degrees Fahrenheit more warming than districts that were not redlined. All this makes clear that climate change is not something we can solve only by pledging to reduce emissions or investing in green technology. We need to address the systemic issues that have made the fight through climate change significantly harder for low-income, Black, and brown communities.
In 1991, the United Church of Christ held its first Environmental Leadership Summit for people of color, calling on climate activists of color from across the United States to do just that. Many of these activists and leaders believed that the environmental movement at that time failed to consider the unique experiences of people of color, focusing primarily on preserving the purity of nature instead of doing what is best for the communities most affected by climate change. They came up with a set of principles guiding the idea of environmental justice, some of which include demanding that public policy be free from bias and based on mutual respect, calling for universal protection from nuclear testing and toxic waste, protecting the rights of victims of environmental harm to be compensated, pushing for worker safety, and protecting the sovereignty of Native peoples.
Principles like these have continued to guide the environmental movement, urging people to fight against pollution and environmental destruction in vulnerable communities. For example, in 2020, activists and organizers filed a Title VI civil rights complaint against the Illinois EPA, pushing them to reform their unjust permitting process. This was because the Illinois EPA allowed for the relocation of a scrap metal shredding operation from a wealthy white area to the primarily Black and Latino Southeast Side. The lawsuit came to a settlement in 2024, by which the Illinois EPA toughened permitting oversight in lower-income and primarily Black and brown neighborhoods. Air permit applications will now have to consider the “location of sensitive populations and various socioeconomic indicators”. While these local victories demonstrate a lot of progress, federal actions under the Trump administration threaten to undo these years of hard-fought gains.
Recently, however, President Trump’s administration has enacted policies making it harder for environmental justice to be ensured. Trump overturned a Clinton-era executive order requiring government agencies to consider environmental justice issues when creating their regulations, rescinded the Justice40 initiative which aimed to award 40% of benefits from federal climate and infrastructure investments to marginalized communities. He seeks to collapse the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which indicates a significant deprioritization of environmental justice and the environmental movement as a whole.
With the rise of activism through protests, public outreach, and environmental justice-based lawsuits such as Held v. Montana—which secured the right of youth to a livable climate—our society has been building momentum. Youth in particular have taken a stand: groups such as the Sunrise Movement, 350, and Project Zero Hour have been working to make critical local change as well as putting pressure on federal agencies and officials. Now, on-the-ground organizing, hope, and solidarity are more important than ever. We must look back to the principles of environmental justice and center voices that have been underrepresented in the environmental movement. We must resist the debilitating negative rhetoric about our planet that we are surrounded with on the news and social media. And we must fight for the future through localized, targeted action.