Environmental Justice

Damayanti Banerjee & Michael M. Bell

A disproportionate burden of environmental problems are borne by the poor and by communities of color, as documented by a large body of scholarship on what has come to be called environmental justice. Although the early literature on environmental justice primarily focused on questions of unequal distribution of environmental “bads” in the United States, recent years have witnessed studies of environmental justice on a global scale and a broadening understanding of what constitutes environmental justice. Both the U.S.-based and international studies have had a close relationship with the development of social movements working to overcome these inequalities, a true instance of the mutualism between the academe and civil society that many have called for in all areas of research. Concern for environmental justice has thus significantly grown over the years both within the United States and elsewhere. This entry describes the development of this movement, the research that examines Three ...

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