political science and international relations." --Book Jacket.

Environmental risks and harms affect certain geographic areas and populations more than others. The environmental justice movement is aimed at having the public and private sectors address this disproportionate burden of risk and exposure to pollution in minority and/or low-income communities, and for those communities to be engaged in the decision-making processes. Environmental Justice provides an overview of this defining problem and explores the growth of the environmental justice movement. It analyzes the complex mixture of environmental laws and civil rights legal theories adopted in environmental justice litigation. Teachers will have online access to the more than 100 page Teachers Manual.

Environmental justice is the concept that minority and low-income individuals, communities and populations should not be disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards, and that they should share fully in making the decisions that affect their environment. This volume examines the sources of environmental justice law and how evolving regulations and court decisions impact projects around the country.

This unique study of social harm offers a systematic and critical discussion of the nature of environmental harm from an eco-justice perspective, challenging conventional criminological definitions of environmental harm. The book evaluates three interconnected justice-related approaches to environmental harm: environmental justice (humans), ecological justice (the environment) and species justice (non-human animals). It provides a critical assessment of environmental harm by interrogating key concepts and exploring how activists and social movements engage in the pursuit of justice. It concludes by describing the tensions between the different approaches and the importance of developing an eco-justice framework that to some extent can reconcile these differences. Using empirical evidence built on theoretical foundations with examples and illustrations from many national contexts, ‘Environmental harm’ will be of interest to students and academics in criminology, sociology, law, geography, environmental studies, philosophy and social policy all over the world.

The Fifth Edition is updated to take account of new developments in the law, new regulations, and new cases, as well as the multiple and ongoing regulatory changes and reversals among the Obama, Trump, and Biden Administrations. In addition, the casebook has been modified throughout to call more attention to environmental justice issues. Chapter 1 (RCRA and CERCLA) and Chapter 4 (Clean Air Act) now have expanded discussions of how environmental justice issues arise in the context of pollution control permitting. Chapter 2 (NEPA) includes two of the Standing Rock Sioux decisions about the Dakota Access Pipeline. In addition, the Introduction chapter has been revamped to more thoroughly introduce non-statutory approaches to environmental law, including constitutional and common-law approaches to the public trust doctrine and a brand new section on the Rights of Nature movement, emphasizing the environmental justice and indigenous rights tie-ins to those movements, before shifting to a discussion of why states and the federal government would choose statutes, a theme continued at the beginning of Chapter 1. The challenge of the Fifth Edition is the ongoing changes to environmental regulations in the opening year of the Biden Administration. The Fifth Edition updates through June 2021 and points to resources for keeping track of new developments. It discusses continuing regulatory issues such as climate change under the Clean Air Act and "waters of the United States" under the Clean Water Act in some detail, emphasizing the issues in contention and explaining why the EPA's regulatory approach continues to evolve.

“Let this book immerse you in the many worlds of environmental justice.”—Naomi Klein We are living in a precarious environmental and political moment. In the United States and in the world, environmental injustices have manifested across racial and class divides in devastatingly disproportionate ways. What does this moment of danger mean for the environment and for justice? What can we learn from environmental justice struggles? Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger examines mobilizations and movements, from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Environmental justice movements fight, survive, love, and create in the face of violence that challenges the conditions of life itself. Exploring dispossession, deregulation, privatization, and inequality, this book is the essential primer on environmental justice, packed with cautiously hopeful stories for the future.

Environmental justice is a significant and dynamic contemporary development in environmental law. Rechtschaffen, Gauna and new coauthor O'Neill provide an accessible compilation of interdisciplinary materials for studying environmental justice, interspersed with extensive notes, questions, and a teacher's manual with practice exercises designed to facilitate classroom discussion. It integrates excerpts from empirical studies, cases, agency decisions, informal agency guidance, law reviews, and other academic literature, as well as community-generated documents. This second edition includes new chapters addressing climate change, international environmental justice, and a capstone case study. It also adds expanded coverage of risk and the public health, empirical environmental justice research, and environmental justice for American Indian peoples.