An environmentalist is a person who is concerned with and/or advocates for the protection of the environment. An environmentalist can be considered a supporter of the goals of the environmental movement, "a political and ethical movement that seeks to improve and protect the quality of the natural environment through changes to environmentally harmful human activities". An environmentalist is engaged in or believes in the philosophy of environmentalism or one of the related philosophies.
Trade justice is a campaign by non-governmental organisations, plus efforts by other actors, to change the rules and practices of world trade in order to promote fairness. These organizations include consumer groups, trade unions, faith groups, aid agencies and environmental groups.
Environmental racism, ecological racism, or ecological apartheid is a form of institutional racism leading to landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal being disproportionately placed in communities of color. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
Environmental communication is "the dissemination of information and the implementation of communication practices that are related to the environment. In the beginning, environmental communication was a narrow area of communication; however, nowadays, it is a broad field that includes research and practices regarding how different actors interact with regard to topics related to the environment and how cultural products influence society toward environmental issues".
David Naguib Pellow is Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously he was Professor, Don Martindale Endowed Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Minnesota and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His area of specialisation include issues concerning environmental justice, race and ethnicity, labour, social protest, animal rights, immigration, free trade agreements, globalization, the global impacts of the high tech industry in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere.
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse.
Deep Green Resistance (DGR) is a radical environmental movement that views mainstream environmental activism as being ineffective. The group, which perceives the existence of industrial civilization itself as the greatest threat to the natural environment, strives for community organizing to build alternative food, housing, and medical institutions. The organization advocates sabotage against infrastructure, which it views as necessary tactics to achieve its goal of dismantling industrial civilization. Religious and ecological scholar Todd LeVasseur classifies it as an apocalyptic or millenarian movement.
Robert Garner is a British political scientist, political theorist, and intellectual historian. He is a Professor Emeritus in the politics department at the University of Leicester, where he has worked for much of his career. Before working at Leicester, he worked at the University of Exeter and the University of Buckingham, and studied at the University of Manchester and the University of Salford.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Green criminology is a branch of criminology that involves the study of harms and crimes against the environment broadly conceived, including the study of environmental law and policy, the study of corporate crimes against the environment, and environmental justice from a criminological perspective.
Robert J. Brulle is an American environmental sociologist and professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University. He is also an associate professor of public health at the Drexel University School of Public Health. He advocates aggressive political action to address global warming.
Carl Anthony is an American architect, regional planner, social justice activist, and author. He is the founder and co-director of Breakthrough Communities, a project dedicated to building multiracial leadership for sustainable communities in California and the rest of the nation. He is the former President of the Earth Island Institute, and is the co-founder and former executive director of its urban habitat program, one of the first environmental justice organizations to address race and class issues.
Environmental privilege is a concept in environmental sociology, referring to the ability of privileged groups to keep environmental amenities for themselves and deny them to less privileged groups. More broadly, it refers to the ability of privileged groups to keep an exclusive grip on the advantages of "social place," including non-ecological amenities. It has been characterized as "the other side of the coin" from environmental racism. Like other forms of racial privilege, it does not depend on personal racism, but rather structural racism. Environmental privilege is a consequence of both class and racial privilege with respect to access to the overall environment, influencing the social and economic realm. It is the result of cultural, economic, and political power being wielded. It provides exclusive access to environmental facilities such as elite neighborhoods that contain exclusive rivers, parks, and open areas to particular people. These groups are more likely to participate in sustainable efforts and have access to premium amenities. Furthermore, during the COVID-19 epidemic, wealthy communities were able to better adhere to safety protocols.
Racial capitalism is a concept reframing the history of capitalism as grounded in the extraction of social and economic value from people of marginalized racial identities, typically from Black people. It was described by Cedric J. Robinson in his book Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, published in 1983, which, in contrast to both his predecessors and successors, theorized that all capitalism is inherently racial capitalism, and racialism is present in all layers of capitalism's socioeconomic stratification. Jodi Melamed has summarized the concept, explaining that capitalism "can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups", and therefore, for capitalism to survive, it must exploit and prey upon the "unequal differentiation of human value."
Robert Bernard Gottlieb is an American academic, activist, journalist, and writer. From 1997 to 2015, he was the Henry R. Luce Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy at Occidental College where he also served as co-founder and executive director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute. He has written fourteen books on regional politics and economies, global cities, and environmental, food, and social justice topics.
Julie Sze is Professor of American Studies at University of California, Davis. Her research deals with environmental justice, inequality and culture; race, gender and power; and community health and activism.
Dumping in Dixie is a 1990 book by the American professor, author, activist, and environmental sociologist Robert D. Bullard. Bullard spotlights the quintessence of the economic, social, and psychological consequences induced by the siting of noxious facilities in mobilizing the African American community. Starting with the assertion that every human has the right to a healthy environment, the book documents the journey of five American communities of color as they rally to safeguard their health and homes from the lethal effects of pollution. Further, Bullard investigates the heterogeneous obstacles to social and environmental justice that African American communities often encounter. Dumping in Dixie is widely acknowledged as the first book to discuss environmental injustices and distill the concept of environmental justice holistically. Since the publication of Dumping in Dixie, Bullard has emerged as one of the seminal figures of the environmental justice movement; some even label Bullard as the "father of environmental justice".
Biological inequity, also known as biological inequality, refers to “systematic, unfair, and avoidable stress-related biological differences which increase risk of disease, observed between social groups of a population”. The term developed by Centric Lab aims to unify societal factors with the biological underpinnings of health inequities – the unfair and avoidable differences in health status and risks between social groups of a population - such that these inequalities can be investigated in a holistic manner.
Environmental conflicts or ecological distribution conflicts (EDCs) are social conflicts caused by environmental degradation or by unequal distribution of environmental resources. The Environmental Justice Atlas documented 3,100 environmental conflicts worldwide as of April 2020 and emphasised that many more conflicts remained undocumented. Parties involved in these conflicts include locally affected communities, states, companies and investors, and social or environmental movements; typically environmental defenders are protecting their homelands from resource extraction or hazardous waste disposal. Resource extraction and hazardous waste activities often create resource scarcities, pollute the environment, and degrade the living space for humans and nature, resulting in conflict. A particular case of environmental conflicts are forestry conflicts, or forest conflicts which "are broadly viewed as struggles of varying intensity between interest groups, over values and issues related to forest policy and the use of forest resources". In the last decades, a growing number of these have been identified globally.
