Research Project

After more than three decades of environmental justice activism and legislative reform in the United States, marginalized communities continue to face disproportionate impacts from environmental pollution. New Jersey is not an exception, and questions over the evolution and effectiveness of the state’s environmental justice movement are raised as communities of color continue to bear the brunt of environmental harms, despite a long history of community activism and environmental justice legislation. To explore these tensions, this paper performs a detailed review of the literature on environmental justice, documentary analysis of key environmental justice laws and policies in New Jersey, and informal discussions with two environmental justice practitioners who have worked at the state and community levels. Through these means of qualitative analysis, and drawing upon the concept of structural pollution, the paper highlights persistent gaps, including shortcomings in regulation and enforcement, within the development of New Jersey’s environmental justice policy and governance landscape that have allowed for the continuation of disproportionate environmental harm towards marginalized communities. The hope in identifying this disconnect is to better inform and advance a more comprehensive planning and decision-making process that is less reactive to what are surface-level symptoms of much larger systems of civil rights and environmental inequalities.