As Michael says, “Everything is environmental justice”, and well “everything” is a lot, but it’s also true. Take fair elections. They may not seem at first glance to be connected to environmental justice, but in places without fair and equal representation, those who stand to suffer the most have the least power to protect themselves from environmental injustices like climate change vulnerabilities, pollution, and displacement.
In red-lined and gerrymandered states across the US, privileged political and economic elites vote against clean energy and line their pockets with money from oil and coal lobbyists, but coal ash doesn’t wind up in their water supplies. They invite and encourage pollution hotspots like data centers, power plants, and refineries to build or dump in poor, rural, disproportionately racialized communities with willful disregard for the health and welfare of the people, the surrounding land, and the water supply. Because dumping—both literal and metaphorical—always occurs downstream.
We’ve seen this kind of inequality before in places like Flint, Michigan, where it’s been twenty years and the primarily Black community is still only beginning to see justice. We see it continuing in climate-vulnerable communities, especially along the coasts where rising sea levels threaten those who can’t afford to leave. We see it across Appalachia, where mountain top removal mining contaminates water, air, and creates ever-worsening health crises. Now, maybe more than ever, we need free elections. To move the scales towards justice everyone must have a voice, and those voices must be represented equally.
In this way, environmental justice is connected to gender equality, to disability rights, to fair lending practices, to immigration and labor laws, to education, and communication. The list is endless because, ultimately, environmental justice challenges unequal and failing systems; it demands new ways of thinking, of communicating, of being.
Environmental justice reminds us, more than anything, that we are all (and always) connected. I hope the works collected here in our beautiful tenth issue show how much those connections matter.
Thanks to all of you for an amazing decade.
