Chapter 1 from "From the Ground Up" describes several different tributaries of the environmental justice movement. Briefly, what were they and what did they each contribute? What did they have in common?
The civil rights movement influenced the enviro. justice because of their dedication to equality, which comes into play when different groups face ‘disproportionate’ levels of enviro. hazards. This tributary is largely church-based, which may or may not be relevant in the current ej movement (I’m not sure!). I like Cole’s insight that some leaders from the original movement now hold significant political sway, and can effect change from within the system. This seems important for the ej movement as well. Second, the anti-toxic movement grew out of Silent Spring and Love Canal. Communities took action to fight for human health and pollution control. The movement was concerned with linking our physical environment with our bodies and health. Civil rights focused on creating social justice for all, but the confluent of these two tributaries is in events such as Warren Co. Civil rights activists protested a toxic waste disposal site to ensure pollution-free/healthy lives for all people. Both have strong roots in grassroots organization. Third, academics have influenced the ej movement. While the article didn’t say this directly, I feel that the value of academics was to allow the grassroots efforts with a way to approach the oppressing systems. These systems could be esoteric sciences or bureaucratic political systems, where interested scientists, lawyers or other professionals could help grassroots activists get their voices heard. This is a more top-down approach to ej. The native American movement contributes a strong emphasis on self-determination—that because we all have our own connections with our environments, we can dictate what our environment looks like—regardless of one’s political sway. Self-determination is an idea that runs through most of the influential tributaries. This movement has a similar grass-roots approach. The labor movement carries on the motif of self-determination, but also has strands of the anti-toxic and civil rights movements. All workers need to ensure safe and healthy workplaces, and unions (slightly different than the previously popular grassroots efforts) were the way to activate change. The traditional environmentalists appear to have hindered the ej movement. I was surprised to read this passage. However, I am grateful to have my preconceived notions put in check. The elitism and perhaps unintentional narrow-mindedness of preservation and conservation may have contributed to environmental Injustice. Focusing on legislation that may have negative consequences on other people’s environments strikes me as unfortunate. The summit seems to have sparked the environmental justice movement as a phenomenon that could stand independent of the tributaries. Perhaps its success was due to the conglomeration of the other groups and their similarities. Networking among the groups allowed participants to identify their common motives, backgrounds, and perspectives. Lastly, I am surprised and disheartened to read about the divisiveness within the umbrella of environmental movements. Specifically that “traditional environmentalists” those interested in “environmental justice” have so little common ground.
Cole discusses several important tributaries to the environmental justice movement. He focuses first on the Civil Rights Movement, which pressed for social change and equality for all races. The Civil Rights Movement contributed both experienced activists and techniques for battling injustice to the environmental justice movement such as sit-ins and marching. I think the way in which Cole ties the Civil Rights Movement to academics, another tributary to the E.J. Movement, is interesting. He points out that while people of color are fighting for equality, researchers in the 1960's are finding that "environmental hazards had a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income people". I believe this research strengthens both movements, as it elucidates a critical problem that could be remedied by the goals of the civil rights and environmental justice movements.
The Anti-Toxics Movements is also discussed as a major tributary to the environmental justice movement. This movement focused on 'pollution prevention' to eliminate toxic waste produced by industries. Like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Toxics Movement also contributed methods, such as linking activists together, to the E.J. Movement.
Three other struggles fed into the Environmental Justice movement as well. Native Americans have always fought for their land, often focusing on "land and environmental exploitation". Years of fighting for self-determination and against destructive land use helped tie the struggles of the Native Americans with the E.J. Movement. Also fighting for self-determination were the farmer-workers of the 1960's who became part of the Labor Movement. This movement pushed for a ban on dangerous pesticides. Cole points out that the struggles of the farmer-workers, Native Americans, and African Americans are very similar. He goes further to discuss the traditional environmentalists who contributed both positively and negatively to the E.J. Movement. These environmentalist seemed to me very distanced from the grassroots environmental justice movement. Cole explains that while there were good intentions behind the laws and ideas, there were unexpected and negative consequences, such as excluding people without field expertise from decision making. It seems unfortunate that these good intentions could not contribute more the the environmental justice movement.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the fight for social, political, and economic justice for people of color, happened mostly in the southern United States, but also in many northern urban areas. It was dominated by grassroots church activism, including the leadership of the prominent Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The earliest environmental justice activists were also from churches and “seasoned” by the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights activists contributed to the Environmental Justice Movement by bringing their skills in “direct action,” the understanding that the social and economic structure of the U.S. subjected people of color to hazardous environments than to whites, and the knowledge of how to provoke a political response. They used well-known techniques such as marches and civil disobedience to fight for environmental justice.
The Anti-Toxics Movement was also a grassroots movement, and it picked up steam in the 70s under President Jimmy Carter, who declared that the Love Canal and a community in Times Beach, were hazardous and had to be evacuated. Many examples of local action followed after these two momentous events. While most of the activists were inexperienced and lacking in political organization, small local struggles slowly became expansive fights through linking together to create a full-fledged movement. The goal of the movement was to eliminate the use of toxic chemicals so as to eliminate toxic waste. This idea of “pollution prevention” has, over the years, become “national policy.” To the Environmental Justice Movement, and Anti-Toxics Movement brought the understanding that toxic assaults were part of the U.S.’s economic structure, and so, in order to improve the effected community, the structure of corporations and the economy must be changed.
Academics helped produce and shape the Environmental Justice Movement too. Starting in the 60s, researchers released reports claiming that a disproportionate amount of low-income people and people of color suffered from a hazardous environment. Researchers’ findings and pushing for government response led to federal engagement in the movement, such as with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and the Executive Order on Environmental Justice. Their findings also sparked local activism and supported their case that there was a pattern of minority oppression in the United States in regard to hazardous environments. Academics have also served as witnesses during litigations for the oppressed communities.
Native American struggles revolve mainly around self-determination in land use. They have been fighting for more than five hundred years, and accelerated greatly in the 60s and 70s. The Environmental Justice Movement has benefited from the American Indians experience of centuries of fighting for self-determination and fighting against land exploitation, and being the first in the U.S. to combat environmental racism. The Movement also uses the Indian’s concept of self-determination in its fight to give the affected communities of environmental injustice their own, powerful voices.
The Labor Movement contributed to the Environmental Justice Movement through farmers’ struggles to have control over their work environment. The 60s saw the influential farm-worker movement led by Cesar Chavez. Unions such as the United Farm worker began banning dangerous pesticides like DDT, and the U.S. federal ban of the pesticide finally came to pass after a lawsuit brought on by migrant farm laborers.
The author believes that the traditional environmental movement has been an obstacle to the goals of social justice movements more than it has contributed to them.
The fight for self-determination, the goal of health and safety of marginalized peoples, and the drive to end racism and economic exploitation of people and land unified many activists. They share a motive to protect their community, they share a low-income, working-class background that distrusts using solely legal strategies, and they share the desire to change the structures of the U.S. that call for broad social injustice. Brought together by the 1991 First National People of color Environmental Leadership Summit, these tributaries, now unified, gave birth to the national Environmental Justice Movement.
I found From the Ground Up by Cole and Foster, which is authored by two lawyers to be refreshing and informative. They critiqued traditional environmentalist’s use of litigation and thus more or less critiqued themselves and their profession a bit since they are both lawyers. It makes me appreciate the lens through which they wrote. I really liked the title, which is about the internal perspective of the Environmental Justice Movement and its emphasis on making change from the “ground up” not from the sky down or top down. The idea and strategy of EJ turns social structure and hierarchies upside-down giving a pure element of equality to the movement. The goals to create and maintain a healthy change for the people affected by Environmental Injustice and Racism, include empowerment through self-determination and agency. Largely poor and working-class people of color with similar motives, backgrounds, and perspectives and their communities are affected by environmental abuse and are involved in the fight for EJ. In my opinion, it makes sense for those who are experiencing the environmental abuse to be the ones in charge of recognizing and stopping it, not other sources who do not live, work and play in the degradation and cannot truly understand or care deeply enough about the impact it has on the inhabitants lives. (“The external perspective casts a critical eye on the political economy of environmental degradation, including the structure of environmental decision-making in disaffected communities”.) The definition of Environment in the EJ movement is “where we live, where we work, where we play, and where we learn” really hits home. If this place where your life takes place is dangerous to your health and the health of your children and the standards of living are not decent the basic human rights are being infringed upon and the future of the people and physical land is in jeopardy. The EJ River and its tributaries: The Civil Rights Movement, The Anti-Toxics Movement, Academics, Native American Struggles, The Labor Movement, and Traditional Environmentalists (a small creek) is vital to the humans that inhabit the earth and the earth itself.
The readings and lectures given Monday have taught me so much. There was a lot of information that i was reading and hearing for the first time. Its crazy how woven together the movement of EJ is to the Civil Rights Movement. I think it definitely needs to be recognized that the roots of the Civil Rights Movement and those of the EJ are essentially the same...they seek to correct the injustices that occur where the majority of people work, play, and live. They want to help those low income and underrepresented minorities that are often subject to discrimination. EJ as a movement is helping society as a whole because it is helping the health of the environment. But specifically it focuses on helping people of poverty and color because those are the people that live in the places where these injustices occur. The underlying event is environmental racism, but many times this is not addressed because who ever wants to talk about race openly in institutions and higher education. Certainly people in government, who are making policies, do not want to.
It was striking how the progression of interests relating to injustice and the environment started out and got to where it is today. From radical environmentalism and dealing with biodiversity to social ecology and realizes that there is a great connection between humans and nature. Over time we have come to the realization that we as humans and as a society need to be more conscious about things we release into the air and water and things we put in the ground.
The fact that we now have bodies of literature that document environmental injustices is amazing. It shows how there is a growing population of people that see the things going on around us. There is a growing understanding that we need to change things and there is a growing concern that has been transforming into action being taken place and plans being implemented. Growth is wonderful; especially in this case when it means attempting to create equality amongst people and help to preserve our precious mother earth who we neglect far too carelessly.
Environmental justice has 6 tributaries in which it takes its rich history. The first movement is the civil rights movement, it used grassroots activism, and was strongly church based. The EJM took from this, when it gained steam in the 1980s as church based leaders who were comfortable with tactics of civil rights leaders of the 1960s. The civil rights movement contributed a history of and experience with direct action, a perspective that unproportional environmental hazards were directly related to social and economic structures that created obvious segregatrion and racial opression, and an experience of impowerment through political empowerment. The second tributary is the Anti-Toxins Movement. This movement reached prominance when President Carter albeled Love Canal a disastor area in the 1970s. The movement charactoristically converted thought from being about land use, to being about social impanct and human health attributed to land use. It was charactorized by a lack of political orginization, and primarily the voices of concern were those of woman. Very imporatntly it orgainized in an umbrella fashion which contributed to the EJM ability to make actions "technically sophisticated adnd strategically coherent". It used technology to prove, which is a very wide used concept now and it further contributed to the prevention of environmentally racist issues. The third tributary is academics. They discovered there was a disproportionate impact on people of color and low income people from environmental hazards than from other people. It also contributed the Michigan Group that made the issue national, which sparked local action across the country. It led to policy changing in local, state, and federal government. The fourth tributary is the Native American struggle that contributed 500 years of a struggle for self ditermination and resistance to surrendering land and being replaced in depleded and hazardous environments. It added to the EJM philosophy of self determination. The Labor movement is the fifth tributary. It fought for working conditions and contributed lawsuits that led to the ban of DDT chemical spraying. It created a more resounding focus of unions on occupational safety and health. The final tributary are the Traditional Environmental Movement, whose main contribution was that lawsuits are now the primary and sometimes only strategy employed by traditional groups such as the Sierra Club, which was created during this movement. This movement actually seems to have contributed as an enemy to the other movements though, not as an allie. These tributaries had much in common in their fights for justice. They all charactoristically have motive, background, and perspective. Many of them used grassroots activism, including the civil rights, the academc, the native american, and the labor movement. Also these movements all involve people advocating for those who have been disenfranchised in some form or another.
The civil rights movement contributed to make awareness among ordinary people that environmenal hazards do not occur in random communities but specific environment where grassroots organization should stand to demand what the citizens should deserve to live healthy. The anti-toxic movement was relatively disorganized one to combat against political dominance in environlmental issues, but the example of ove Canal signifies that the goal can be achieved if the members hold strong will to change the politics and have positive impact on the environment that they live. I believe that the residents were given another dwelling area as a compensation after all, so the movement specifically on Love Canal did not reach the optimal solution to clean up the pollution to be livable place again. The movement is more about environmental hazards and its impacts on humans rather than the impacts on all living creatures. The academic discusses the correlations between the racial orientation or ethnic background of community dwellers and their problems on the environment through conducting research and bringing the issues in the teaching processes. It directly caught the policy makers' attention because of the power that academy holds in U.S. environmental struggle. Native American Movement certainly is a precursor to the EJ movement because of their faulty images in terms of living in nature with harmony. Their created images reinforce the importance of nature without heavy pollution since their narratives are strong enough to persuade the other side through historical anecdotes and historical facts. The labor movement focuses on the conditions of workers in the work places because the conditions were not pleasant to continue working. It contributes the EJ movement because the focus is the effects of working conditions that were worse in most cases in the areas of people of color. The movement signifies that the discrimination occurs everywhere by seeking loopholes of common laws and morality. Lastly the tradisional environmentalists date back to the late 1800s when people started realizing that there are less bird species and other aminals and began concentrating on conservation and nature protection addressed by John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Rachel Carson also warned the human impacts on the environment in 1960s. The environmental movement prospered in 1960s due to the high demand of civil rights among minority and their needs for better living conditions. What all the movement have in common is the connectedness of the movements how each of the movement is somewhat interdependent to each other, stimulating different movement at the same time as the needs for the participants altered.
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The civil rights movement influenced the enviro. justice because of their dedication to equality, which comes into play when different groups face ‘disproportionate’ levels of enviro. hazards. This tributary is largely church-based, which may or may not be relevant in the current ej movement (I’m not sure!). I like Cole’s insight that some leaders from the original movement now hold significant political sway, and can effect change from within the system. This seems important for the ej movement as well.
Second, the anti-toxic movement grew out of Silent Spring and Love Canal. Communities took action to fight for human health and pollution control. The movement was concerned with linking our physical environment with our bodies and health. Civil rights focused on creating social justice for all, but the confluent of these two tributaries is in events such as Warren Co. Civil rights activists protested a toxic waste disposal site to ensure pollution-free/healthy lives for all people. Both have strong roots in grassroots organization.
Third, academics have influenced the ej movement. While the article didn’t say this directly, I feel that the value of academics was to allow the grassroots efforts with a way to approach the oppressing systems. These systems could be esoteric sciences or bureaucratic political systems, where interested scientists, lawyers or other professionals could help grassroots activists get their voices heard. This is a more top-down approach to ej.
The native American movement contributes a strong emphasis on self-determination—that because we all have our own connections with our environments, we can dictate what our environment looks like—regardless of one’s political sway. Self-determination is an idea that runs through most of the influential tributaries. This movement has a similar grass-roots approach.
The labor movement carries on the motif of self-determination, but also has strands of the anti-toxic and civil rights movements. All workers need to ensure safe and healthy workplaces, and unions (slightly different than the previously popular grassroots efforts) were the way to activate change.
The traditional environmentalists appear to have hindered the ej movement. I was surprised to read this passage. However, I am grateful to have my preconceived notions put in check. The elitism and perhaps unintentional narrow-mindedness of preservation and conservation may have contributed to environmental Injustice. Focusing on legislation that may have negative consequences on other people’s environments strikes me as unfortunate.
The summit seems to have sparked the environmental justice movement as a phenomenon that could stand independent of the tributaries. Perhaps its success was due to the conglomeration of the other groups and their similarities. Networking among the groups allowed participants to identify their common motives, backgrounds, and perspectives.
Lastly, I am surprised and disheartened to read about the divisiveness within the umbrella of environmental movements. Specifically that “traditional environmentalists” those interested in “environmental justice” have so little common ground.
Cole discusses several important tributaries to the environmental justice movement. He focuses first on the Civil Rights Movement, which pressed for social change and equality for all races. The Civil Rights Movement contributed both experienced activists and techniques for battling injustice to the environmental justice movement such as sit-ins and marching. I think the way in which Cole ties the Civil Rights Movement to academics, another tributary to the E.J. Movement, is interesting. He points out that while people of color are fighting for equality, researchers in the 1960's are finding that "environmental hazards had a disproportionate impact on people of color and low-income people". I believe this research strengthens both movements, as it elucidates a critical problem that could be remedied by the goals of the civil rights and environmental justice movements.
The Anti-Toxics Movements is also discussed as a major tributary to the environmental justice movement. This movement focused on 'pollution prevention' to eliminate toxic waste produced by industries. Like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-Toxics Movement also contributed methods, such as linking activists together, to the E.J. Movement.
Three other struggles fed into the Environmental Justice movement as well. Native Americans have always fought for their land, often focusing on "land and environmental exploitation". Years of fighting for self-determination and against destructive land use helped tie the struggles of the Native Americans with the E.J. Movement. Also fighting for self-determination were the farmer-workers of the 1960's who became part of the Labor Movement. This movement pushed for a ban on dangerous pesticides. Cole points out that the struggles of the farmer-workers, Native Americans, and African Americans are very similar. He goes further to discuss the traditional environmentalists who contributed both positively and negatively to the E.J. Movement. These environmentalist seemed to me very distanced from the grassroots environmental justice movement. Cole explains that while there were good intentions behind the laws and ideas, there were unexpected and negative consequences, such as excluding people without field expertise from decision making. It seems unfortunate that these good intentions could not contribute more the the environmental justice movement.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, the fight for social, political, and economic justice for people of color, happened mostly in the southern United States, but also in many northern urban areas. It was dominated by grassroots church activism, including the leadership of the prominent Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The earliest environmental justice activists were also from churches and “seasoned” by the Civil Rights Movement. Civil rights activists contributed to the Environmental Justice Movement by bringing their skills in “direct action,” the understanding that the social and economic structure of the U.S. subjected people of color to hazardous environments than to whites, and the knowledge of how to provoke a political response. They used well-known techniques such as marches and civil disobedience to fight for environmental justice.
The Anti-Toxics Movement was also a grassroots movement, and it picked up steam in the 70s under President Jimmy Carter, who declared that the Love Canal and a community in Times Beach, were hazardous and had to be evacuated. Many examples of local action followed after these two momentous events. While most of the activists were inexperienced and lacking in political organization, small local struggles slowly became expansive fights through linking together to create a full-fledged movement. The goal of the movement was to eliminate the use of toxic chemicals so as to eliminate toxic waste. This idea of “pollution prevention” has, over the years, become “national policy.” To the Environmental Justice Movement, and Anti-Toxics Movement brought the understanding that toxic assaults were part of the U.S.’s economic structure, and so, in order to improve the effected community, the structure of corporations and the economy must be changed.
Academics helped produce and shape the Environmental Justice Movement too. Starting in the 60s, researchers released reports claiming that a disproportionate amount of low-income people and people of color suffered from a hazardous environment. Researchers’ findings and pushing for government response led to federal engagement in the movement, such as with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and the Executive Order on Environmental Justice. Their findings also sparked local activism and supported their case that there was a pattern of minority oppression in the United States in regard to hazardous environments. Academics have also served as witnesses during litigations for the oppressed communities.
Native American struggles revolve mainly around self-determination in land use. They have been fighting for more than five hundred years, and accelerated greatly in the 60s and 70s. The Environmental Justice Movement has benefited from the American Indians experience of centuries of fighting for self-determination and fighting against land exploitation, and being the first in the U.S. to combat environmental racism. The Movement also uses the Indian’s concept of self-determination in its fight to give the affected communities of environmental injustice their own, powerful voices.
The Labor Movement contributed to the Environmental Justice Movement through farmers’ struggles to have control over their work environment. The 60s saw the influential farm-worker movement led by Cesar Chavez. Unions such as the United Farm worker began banning dangerous pesticides like DDT, and the U.S. federal ban of the pesticide finally came to pass after a lawsuit brought on by migrant farm laborers.
The author believes that the traditional environmental movement has been an obstacle to the goals of social justice movements more than it has contributed to them.
The fight for self-determination, the goal of health and safety of marginalized peoples, and the drive to end racism and economic exploitation of people and land unified many activists. They share a motive to protect their community, they share a low-income, working-class background that distrusts using solely legal strategies, and they share the desire to change the structures of the U.S. that call for broad social injustice. Brought together by the 1991 First National People of color Environmental Leadership Summit, these tributaries, now unified, gave birth to the national Environmental Justice Movement.
I found From the Ground Up by Cole and Foster, which is authored by two lawyers to be refreshing and informative. They critiqued traditional environmentalist’s use of litigation and thus more or less critiqued themselves and their profession a bit since they are both lawyers. It makes me appreciate the lens through which they wrote.
I really liked the title, which is about the internal perspective of the Environmental Justice Movement and its emphasis on making change from the “ground up” not from the sky down or top down. The idea and strategy of EJ turns social structure and hierarchies upside-down giving a pure element of equality to the movement. The goals to create and maintain a healthy change for the people affected by Environmental Injustice and Racism, include empowerment through self-determination and agency. Largely poor and working-class people of color with similar motives, backgrounds, and perspectives and their communities are affected by environmental abuse and are involved in the fight for EJ.
In my opinion, it makes sense for those who are experiencing the environmental abuse to be the ones in charge of recognizing and stopping it, not other sources who do not live, work and play in the degradation and cannot truly understand or care deeply enough about the impact it has on the inhabitants lives. (“The external perspective casts a critical eye on the political economy of environmental degradation, including the structure of environmental decision-making in disaffected communities”.)
The definition of Environment in the EJ movement is “where we live, where we work, where we play, and where we learn” really hits home. If this place where your life takes place is dangerous to your health and the health of your children and the standards of living are not decent the basic human rights are being infringed upon and the future of the people and physical land is in jeopardy.
The EJ River and its tributaries: The Civil Rights Movement, The Anti-Toxics Movement, Academics, Native American Struggles, The Labor Movement, and Traditional Environmentalists (a small creek) is vital to the humans that inhabit the earth and the earth itself.
The readings and lectures given Monday have taught me so much. There was a lot of information that i was reading and hearing for the first time. Its crazy how woven together the movement of EJ is to the Civil Rights Movement. I think it definitely needs to be recognized that the roots of the
Civil Rights Movement and those of the EJ are essentially the same...they seek to correct the injustices that occur where the majority of people work, play, and live. They want to help those low income and underrepresented minorities that are often subject to discrimination. EJ as a movement is helping society as a whole because it is helping the health of the environment. But specifically it focuses on helping people of poverty and color because those are the people that live in the places where these injustices occur. The underlying event is environmental racism, but many times this is not addressed because who ever wants to talk about race openly in institutions and higher education. Certainly people in government, who are making policies, do not want to.
It was striking how the progression of interests relating to injustice and the environment started out and got to where it is today. From radical environmentalism and dealing with biodiversity to social ecology and realizes that there is a great connection between humans and nature. Over time we have come to the realization that we as humans and as a society need to be more conscious about things we release into the air and water and things we put in the ground.
The fact that we now have bodies of literature that document environmental injustices is amazing. It shows how there is a growing population of people that see the things going on around us. There is a growing understanding that we need to change things and there is a growing concern that has been transforming into action being taken place and plans being implemented. Growth is wonderful; especially in this case when it means attempting to create equality amongst people and help to preserve our precious mother earth who we neglect far too carelessly.
Environmental justice has 6 tributaries in which it takes its rich history. The first movement is the civil rights movement, it used grassroots activism, and was strongly church based. The EJM took from this, when it gained steam in the 1980s as church based leaders who were comfortable with tactics of civil rights leaders of the 1960s. The civil rights movement contributed a history of and experience with direct action, a perspective that unproportional environmental hazards were directly related to social and economic structures that created obvious segregatrion and racial opression, and an experience of impowerment through political empowerment.
The second tributary is the Anti-Toxins Movement. This movement reached prominance when President Carter albeled Love Canal a disastor area in the 1970s. The movement charactoristically converted thought from being about land use, to being about social impanct and human health attributed to land use. It was charactorized by a lack of political orginization, and primarily the voices of concern were those of woman. Very imporatntly it orgainized in an umbrella fashion which contributed to the EJM ability to make actions "technically sophisticated adnd strategically coherent". It used technology to prove, which is a very wide used concept now and it further contributed to the prevention of environmentally racist issues.
The third tributary is academics. They discovered there was a disproportionate impact on people of color and low income people from environmental hazards than from other people. It also contributed the Michigan Group that made the issue national, which sparked local action across the country. It led to policy changing in local, state, and federal government.
The fourth tributary is the Native American struggle that contributed 500 years of a struggle for self ditermination and resistance to surrendering land and being replaced in depleded and hazardous environments. It added to the EJM philosophy of self determination.
The Labor movement is the fifth tributary. It fought for working conditions and contributed lawsuits that led to the ban of DDT chemical spraying. It created a more resounding focus of unions on occupational safety and health.
The final tributary are the Traditional Environmental Movement, whose main contribution was that lawsuits are now the primary and sometimes only strategy employed by traditional groups such as the Sierra Club, which was created during this movement. This movement actually seems to have contributed as an enemy to the other movements though, not as an allie.
These tributaries had much in common in their fights for justice. They all charactoristically have motive, background, and perspective. Many of them used grassroots activism, including the civil rights, the academc, the native american, and the labor movement. Also these movements all involve people advocating for those who have been disenfranchised in some form or another.
The civil rights movement contributed to make awareness among ordinary people that environmenal hazards do not occur in random communities but specific environment where grassroots organization should stand to demand what the citizens should deserve to live healthy. The anti-toxic movement was relatively disorganized one to combat against political dominance in environlmental issues, but the example of ove Canal signifies that the goal can be achieved if the members hold strong will to change the politics and have positive impact on the environment that they live. I believe that the residents were given another dwelling area as a compensation after all, so the movement specifically on Love Canal did not reach the optimal solution to clean up the pollution to be livable place again. The movement is more about environmental hazards and its impacts on humans rather than the impacts on all living creatures. The academic discusses the correlations between the racial orientation or ethnic background of community dwellers and their problems on the environment through conducting research and bringing the issues in the teaching processes. It directly caught the policy makers' attention because of the power that academy holds in U.S. environmental struggle. Native American Movement certainly is a precursor to the EJ movement because of their faulty images in terms of living in nature with harmony. Their created images reinforce the importance of nature without heavy pollution since their narratives are strong enough to persuade the other side through historical anecdotes and historical facts. The labor movement focuses on the conditions of workers in the work places because the conditions were not pleasant to continue working. It contributes the EJ movement because the focus is the effects of working conditions that were worse in most cases in the areas of people of color. The movement signifies that the discrimination occurs everywhere by seeking loopholes of common laws and morality. Lastly the tradisional environmentalists date back to the late 1800s when people started realizing that there are less bird species and other aminals and began concentrating on conservation and nature protection addressed by John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Rachel Carson also warned the human impacts on the environment in 1960s. The environmental movement prospered in 1960s due to the high demand of civil rights among minority and their needs for better living conditions. What all the movement have in common is the connectedness of the movements how each of the movement is somewhat interdependent to each other, stimulating different movement at the same time as the needs for the participants altered.
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