Toxic legacies and environmental justice

Abstract

Unjust exposure to toxic hazards is a pivotal and long-standing concern within the environmental justice movement. The disproportionate siting of toxic waste near to minority and low-income communities in the United States sparked the first environmental justice protests in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This chapter situates anti-toxic struggles within the environmental justice movement, discussing the legacies of significant toxic disasters and anti-toxic movements within the United States and globally. With countless instances of toxic injustice around the world, some cases have been highlighted in the historical record, while most remain neglected. The chapter addresses the uneven public attention given to particular toxic injustices through discussing two related themes: “Black Love Canals” (Bullard 1990) and “slow Bhopals” (Zavestoski 2009), drawing on environmental justice concepts of “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) and “expendability” (Pellow 2018). The conclusion reflects on the enduring global problem of unjust toxic exposures.