Lindwall, C. (2023, August 22). The Environmental Justice Movement. Natural Resources Defence Council. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/environmental-justice-movement

This article is stating how environmental justice is the idea that people of all colors should have the same environmental rights and environmental benefits. Because of people with low incomes (usually people of color), these people are living in worse environmental areas( for example; pollution) than the more wealthy, and this it has been shaped by hundreds of years of racism in the Americas. The source also states that people living in lower income areas are more effected by multiple environmental issues at once, leading the people living there to have higher environmental and monetary risks. The source talks about the Warren County protests, where the North Carolina government sorted oil laced with PCBs in a low income relatively black community. The public were outraged and this resulted in protests with people lying down on the ground to stop the trucks from moving. These nonviolent protests resulted in more than 500 arrests and laid the groundwork for more environmental protests in the future.

 

This is a helpful article because it explains first of all what environmental racism really is and how it’s been used throughout history. I think this article was well written and a pretty easy read. It is especially good for someone who is just starting to look into environmental justice because it explains it in simple terms and then gets progressively more complicated, which is much easier to understand than simply reading an article and not knowing what is going on. My two big takeaways was that environmental racism affects more than just people living in worse environments, but people who are living somewhere and people decide to try and ruin their environment as well, through malicious intent or not.