What exactly is the Study of Environmental Justice (EJ)?
Environmental justice as a social movement has grown rapidly since the early 1990s in response to concerns about disproportionate environmental burdens in poor, indigenous, and minority communities. The University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment(SNRE) played an early and important role in helping bring national attention to this emerging social and political problem. In 1990, two SNRE faculty members, Bunyan Bryant and Paul Mohai, organized the nation’s first academic environmental justice conference to examine the links between race, class, and environmental hazards. The conference, Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse, was one of the initiatives instrumental in President Bill Clinton’s signing of the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898, which required all federal agencies to design and implement programs to address environmental justice issues. Broadly construed, the Environmental Justice field of study is concerned wit
