EJ Toolkit

Defining Environmental Justice 

Environmental Justice (EJ) recognizes the inherent links between people’s environments and their socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other intersecting identities. It recognizes that low-income, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and people of color more broadly and disproportionately bear the effects of environmental pollution and destruction. As such, these groups simultaneously lack fair and just access to nature and its benefits (i.e. environmental racism). 

At its core, EJ is about:

1) recognizing and repairing past environmental harms against low-income, BIPOC, and marginalized communities

2) preventing these harms from repeating

3) guaranteeing access to livable, vibrant environments and amenities for all.

The EJ Movement  

As stated by the Energy Justice Network, “The environmental justice movement isn’t seeking to simply redistribute environmental harms, but to abolish them.” 

The 17 Principles of Environmental Justice, adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, is a guiding framework for the EJ movement. These principles envision environmental equity and management, and move toward re-establishing “spiritual interdependence to the sacredness of our Mother Earth”, as well as “political, economic and cultural liberation that has been denied for over 500 years of colonization and oppression”. 

In the United States, the environmental justice movement gained much of its visibility through direct action and contestation by poor Black communities. Many cite the 1982 Warren County demonstrations as the beginning of the US EJ movement. In Warren County, community members protested the siting of a toxic, PCB-containing landfill in their rural and predominantly Black North Carolina community.

Environmental Justice at SERC 


At SERC, we are guided by the EJ movement’s history and ongoing grassroots struggles. Inspired by the work of the Students of Color Environmental Collective, SERC aims to give better environmental justice resources to all UC Berkeley students, staff, and faculty. We provide toolkits like this one, as well as programming and guidance that will help us collectively nourish, navigate, and push the environmental and EJ movements forward.

Three students holding signs at a climate protest

SERC staff at the 2022 Global Day of Climate Action March in San Francisco. Photographed by Andy Meyers. 

Resources

These resources have been curated by students at SERC since 2017 and continue to be updated. If you come across any resources that you want to share through this folder or have any additional comments, please get in touch with our current Environmental Justice Associate, Michelle Soto, at michelle.sotoo@berkeley.edu with the subject topic [EJ Resource Submission]. Thank you! 

Readings & Articles

Multimedia

Toolkits & Activities 

Get Involved 

SERC offers a wide range of opportunities to get involved with environmental justice on campus. Each semester in collaboration with the ASUC Eco-Office, we host Environmental Justice Trainings that are open to the entire campus community. We also have programming and volunteering opportunities including our anti-racist eco book club, Environmental Justice Coalition, and Environmentalists of Color membership. 

Local EJ Work Resources 

A community blocks a wave

Art by Ricardo Levins (2006).

Protestors holding signs

Reverend Ben Chavis, a religious leader and activist who coined the term “environmental racism”, with fellow demonstrators at the 1982 Warren County protests (Greg Gibson/AP).

Learn about environmental justice history: