What is Environmental Justice? 

Environmental Justice occurs when all people, regardless of race, gender, socioeconomic status, or national origin, have meaningful involvement and fair treatment with respect to development, implementation, and enforcement of  environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Environmental Justice ensures that every person has the ability to live, learn, work, and exist in a safe and clean environment. 

What is Environmental Injustice? 

Environmental injustice is the disproportionate exposure of Black, Indigenous, and communities of color and low socioeconomic status to pollution and poor quality of life through unequal environmental protection laws, regulations, and practices.

Strategies

Community Outreach and Engagement:

• Long-term partnerships
• Cultivate community engagement and ownership
• Create community led strategies/ programs 
• Resources:
  • Best Practices for Meaningful Community Engagement (Groundwork USA)
  • Engaging Your Community: A Toolkit for Partnership, Collaboration, and Action (jsi.com)

Hold Working Groups with EJ Organizations: 

• Partner-driven action
• Strategic guidance 
• Mobilize resources
• Resources
  • How to Lead Collective Impact Working Groups (FSG)

Take an Intersectional Approach:

• Draws connections to every environmental inequality
• Provides tools to analyze issues holistically
• Critically evaluate environmental issues
• Resources
  • CFP: Environmental Justice & Deep Intersectionality (Discard Studies)
  • Intersectionality and Environmental Justice —(The Collaborative on Health and the Environment)

Introduce Green Jobs:

• Work with the community to create solutions
• Address environmental damages and introduce a transition plan
• Fund/ support workers through the transition from one sector to another
• Resources
  • Green Jobs Report (WE ACT for Environmental Justice)

Indigenous Rights:

• Ensure freedoms to practice traditions,cosmologies and relationships with nature 
• Support Indigenous access to healthy land, air, and water. 
• Prevent/cease industrial development on or near Indigenous land (DAPL and NAPL)
• Resources
  • Indigenous Environmental Network