Environmental justice names the consistent and well-documented pattern by which the costs of industrial production and environmental degradation fall disproportionately on communities that are poor, nonwhite, and politically marginalized — not by coincidence but by the logic of power seeking the path of least resistance. The people who breathe the worst air, drink the most contaminated water, and live nearest to hazardous facilities are rarely the people making the decisions that produce those conditions. Environmental justice insists that the environment is not a separate issue from race and class but one of the places where those inequalities are most lethally visible.
Juana