I’ve got a confession to make. For the first several years of my environmental career, I completely missed the point. There, I’ve said it.
I was that earnest twentysomething focused entirely on carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion—all critically important issues, don’t get me wrong. But I somehow managed to write dozens of articles about environmental problems without ever seriously grappling with the question of who was being harmed the most, and whose voices were being heard the least in the search for solutions.
My wake-up call happened on a rainy Tuesday in Port Talbot, that industrial town on the Welsh coast dominated by its massive steelworks. I was there researching an article about air pollution, armed with my portable air quality monitor and a list of statistics about particulate matter. Very scientific, very detached. I’d allocated exactly three hours for interviews before catching the train back to Bristol.
That was before I met Rhian, a grandmother raising three asthmatic grandchildren in the shadow of those belching smokestacks. She invited me in for a cup of tea, and I ended up staying until nearly midnight, listening to her and a rotating cast of neighbors who dropped by when word spread that someone was actually interested in their experiences.
“We’ve been complaining about the black dust for fifteen years,” Rhian told me, running a finger along her windowsill to demonstrate the sooty residue that accumulated daily. “The council sends someone to take measurements, tells us it’s within legal limits, and nothing changes. Meanwhile, my Megan uses her inhaler four times a day.”
They showed me the data they’d collected themselves—meticulous logs of hospital visits, photos of the black smoke on heavy production days, the grime that gathered on laundry hung outside. One gentleman, a former steelworker himself, had been writing to regulators for a decade with nothing to show for it but a folder of dismissive form letters.
These weren’t anti-industry crusaders. Most had family members who depended on the steelworks for employment. They simply wanted to breathe clean air and have their concerns taken seriously. And they’d been systematically ignored because they lacked the political power and resources to force action.
I left Port Talbot with a profound sense of shame about my previous approach to environmental reporting. I’d been writing about air pollution as an abstract technical problem rather than a lived reality for communities like Rhian’s. I’d quoted official statistics without questioning whether regulatory standards were actually protecting the most vulnerable. I’d failed to notice who had a seat at the table when environmental decisions were made, and who was left outside in the rain.
That visit reshaped my understanding of what environmental work must include if it’s to have any claim to justice. In the years since, I’ve tried to center the experiences and leadership of frontline communities—those bearing the brunt of environmental harms while often having the least responsibility for causing them.
These communities exist everywhere, though they’re often hidden in plain sight. The public housing estate built next to the waste incinerator. The rural village whose groundwater is contaminated by intensive agriculture. The urban neighborhood divided by a six-lane highway. The indigenous lands threatened by extractive industries. The low-lying coastal towns already facing regular flooding from rising seas.
What these diverse communities share is their position on the frontlines of environmental harm and, too often, the margins of environmental decision-making. The pattern isn’t random. It follows existing contours of power and privilege, which is why environmental injustice disproportionately affects communities of color, low-income areas, indigenous peoples, and other groups already experiencing various forms of discrimination.
The statistics bear this out with depressing consistency. In the UK, the most deprived areas experience the worst air pollution. Studies in the US show that race is the strongest predictor of proximity to hazardous waste facilities. Globally, indigenous communities that contributed least to climate change are among those suffering its most severe impacts. But these aren’t just statistics—they’re people’s lives, their health, their children’s futures.
I remember interviewing a mother in a London borough where nitrogen dioxide levels regularly exceeded legal limits. Her daughter had been hospitalized three times that year with respiratory problems. “The doctors tell me to keep her windows closed and limit outdoor play,” she told me, visibly exhausted. “How is that a solution? Rich kids get clean air and my daughter gets an inhaler?”
Her question gets to the heart of environmental justice. It’s not just about distributing environmental harms and benefits fairly, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s about addressing the systematic exclusion of certain communities from environmental decision-making. It’s about recognizing that environmental problems don’t exist in isolation from other social inequities—they amplify them.
But environmental justice isn’t just a framework for understanding problems. It’s a movement led by affected communities fighting for their right to clean air, water, soil, and sustainable livelihoods. The solutions they propose often address multiple connected issues because they’re living the connections between environmental health, economic opportunity, housing, transportation, and political power.
Some of the most inspiring work I’ve witnessed has come from frontline communities developing their own monitoring systems, gathering health data, proposing policy solutions, and building power through coalition-building. Their approaches are frequently more holistic and innovative than anything devised by distant experts or environmental groups.
Take the community in east Manchester that created a citizen science project to monitor air quality around a local industrial facility after official channels failed them. They didn’t just gather data—they built relationships with university researchers who helped analyze it, engaged sympathetic local officials, trained residents to understand regulatory frameworks, and used their findings to negotiate directly with the company.
“We didn’t want to just complain,” explained Safia, one of the project coordinators. “We wanted solutions that worked for everyone—cleaner air for residents and a sustainable path forward for the business that employs many local people.” Their campaign eventually secured meaningful emissions reductions and a community benefit fund for environmental health projects.
This kind of community-led approach doesn’t just address immediate environmental concerns. It builds long-term civic capacity and leadership in areas often written off by outsiders. It recognizes that the same people experiencing environmental injustice hold essential knowledge about both problems and solutions.
So what does this mean for those of us who want to support environmental justice but may not be from frontline communities ourselves? How do we become effective allies rather than perpetuating the same exclusionary patterns that created these injustices?
First, we need to get better at listening. I mean really listening, not just parachuting into communities for testimonials that fit our predetermined narratives. When I look back at my early environmental reporting, I cringe at how often I did exactly that—sought out the quotes that confirmed what I already thought rather than allowing myself to be genuinely educated by different perspectives.
True listening requires humility. It means recognizing that technical expertise, while valuable, is incomplete without the expertise that comes from lived experience. It means being willing to follow rather than lead when appropriate. It means accepting that affected communities should define success on their own terms.
My friend Ruth (yes, the same one from university who had the bizarre obsession with houseplants) now works with a climate justice network connecting frontline communities across Europe. “The biggest mistake mainstream environmental groups make,” she told me recently, “is assuming they know what other communities need without bothering to ask.”
She described watching well-intentioned environmental activists arrive in a flood-prone coastal town with plans for a campaign demanding relocation funding. “They were shocked when residents firmly rejected the idea. These families had lived there for generations and wanted infrastructure to protect their homes, not money to leave. But no one had actually consulted them before designing the campaign.”
Beyond listening, we need to examine our own organizations and movements. Who makes decisions? Who sets priorities? Whose knowledge is valued? Whose convenience is centered? The answers often reveal uncomfortable truths about power dynamics within environmental spaces that supposedly value equality.
I’ve sat through too many sustainability conferences with all-white panels discussing climate solutions for “vulnerable communities” who aren’t in the room. I’ve watched environmental organizations issue equity statements while maintaining leadership structures and funding priorities that exclude the very groups they claim to champion. The cognitive dissonance would be laughable if it weren’t so harmful.
“We don’t need saviors,” Rhian from Port Talbot told me when I called her years after my initial visit. “We need allies who respect us enough to follow our lead.” She was right. The communities facing environmental injustice don’t need rescue—they need resources, platforms, and the removal of barriers to their full participation and leadership.
Practical allyship takes many forms. It might mean using whatever privilege and access you have to amplify frontline voices in spaces where they’ve been excluded. It might mean redirecting funding to community-led initiatives rather than top-down approaches. It might mean providing technical support requested by community groups rather than prescribed by outside experts.
For environmental organizations, it requires deeper structural changes. Diversifying staff and leadership is essential but insufficient without corresponding shifts in organizational culture, decision-making processes, and programmatic priorities. It means moving from transactional relationships with frontline communities to authentic partnerships built on mutual respect and shared power.
I’ve watched several large environmental groups struggle with this transition, often making the same predictable mistakes. They hire a few staff members from underrepresented backgrounds but place them in isolated “community outreach” roles without decision-making authority. They create separate environmental justice programs while continuing business as usual in their “mainstream” work. They expect new hires to educate the organization about equity issues without compensation or support.
The organizations making more successful transitions approach environmental justice not as an add-on but as a foundational principle that informs everything they do. They accept that this transformation is uncomfortable, non-linear, and never complete. They recognize that addressing internal power dynamics is inseparable from addressing external environmental inequities.
For individual allies, the path requires similar honesty and commitment. We need to interrogate our own biases, examine how we might unwittingly benefit from unjust systems, and be willing to take direction rather than always leading. We need to show up consistently, not just when an issue becomes headline news or aligns perfectly with our interests.
My own journey has been humbling and ongoing. I’ve made plenty of mistakes—speaking when I should have listened, centering my own agenda, failing to recognize manifestations of privilege. I’ve learned that being an effective ally is less about having the right answers and more about asking better questions, less about visibility and more about genuine solidarity.
One concrete step I’ve taken is to systematically track whose voices I amplify in my writing. It’s a simple practice but revealing. When I first started monitoring this, I discovered that I quoted white male academics and professionals at more than twice the rate of other sources—a pattern I’d been completely unaware of. Now I consciously seek out perspectives from frontline community members, especially women of color who are often leading environmental justice work with the least recognition.
I’ve also found it essential to direct whatever resources I can access toward frontline leadership. This might mean recommending community activists as paid speakers for events, redirecting research funding to participatory projects, or simply buying community-produced resources rather than extracting free labor in the form of “consultation.”
Last year, I was asked to participate in a government consultation on air quality standards. Instead of accepting directly, I suggested they invite the Port Talbot community monitoring group instead, offering to connect them. The resulting policy input was infinitely more valuable than anything I could have contributed alone, and it created a relationship between regulators and community experts that continues today.
These small acts of redistribution and stepping back aren’t revolutionary, but they reflect a fundamental principle of environmental justice work: those most affected by environmental harm should be leading the search for solutions.
Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned is that environmental justice isn’t optional or peripheral to “real” environmental work—it is the work. Climate solutions that don’t address existing inequities will inevitably create new ones. Conservation approaches that ignore indigenous rights and knowledge are both unjust and ineffective. Sustainability transitions that leave vulnerable communities behind aren’t truly sustainable.
The good news is that centering justice doesn’t mean abandoning other environmental goals—it means achieving them more effectively and completely. The most successful climate resilience projects I’ve studied incorporate local knowledge and leadership. The most durable conservation initiatives respect indigenous sovereignty and traditional practices. The most promising clean energy transitions include concrete benefits for disadvantaged communities.
I think about Rhian often. Last time we spoke, her grandchildren were teenagers, still using inhalers but also becoming formidable advocates themselves. The community monitoring project she helped establish has secured several concrete improvements in local air quality, though their work continues. “Sometimes I think we shouldn’t have to fight this hard just to breathe clean air,” she told me. “But since we do, I’m proud of what we’ve built together.”
Her words remind me that environmental justice isn’t abstract—it’s about fundamental rights to health, safety, and self-determination. Supporting frontline communities isn’t charity or saviorism. It’s recognizing that their fight is part of a larger struggle for a livable future that includes everyone. It’s understanding that the depth of their expertise and the strength of their leadership represent our best hope for creating environmental solutions that are both effective and just.
The next time you engage with an environmental issue—whether as an activist, professional, donor, or concerned citizen—consider asking: Whose voices are being heard here? Who defined the problem? Who designed the solution? Who benefits? Who might be harmed? The answers will tell you a great deal about whether you’re witnessing environmental protection or environmental justice. The difference matters immensely.
