Special Issue on Environmental Justice
Over thirty years has passed since community activists gathered together and fought back against toxic dumping in their town of Afton in Warren County, North Carolina. The decades-long resistance that took place in Warren County marked the founding of the environmental justice movement in the United States, a movement that, to this day, is predominantly led by women of colour. The framework of environmental justice has since been adopted and adapted in activist and academic circles around the world. However, though environmental justice is a relatively new term, the idea is centuries old. As Agyeman et al. point out, Indigenous peoples on the land now called Canada have long been “articulating environmental injustices in relation to loss of land, Aboriginal title, and devastation of their traditional territories and the life forms they support” (7). This issue of UnderCurrents therefore encourages broad and inclusive interpretations of environmental justice as a tool for expressing intersections and alliances between social and environmental movements.