The 1991 Summit That Wrote the Principles of Environmental Justice

On a Sunday in late October 1991, in a meeting room at the Washington Court Hotel, a few blocks from the Capitol, delegates who had spent four days arguing, testifying and sharing stories voted to adopt a document that fit on a page or two. It had a preamble and 17 short principles. It was written by people who mostly did not work for big organizations: tenant leaders from public housing, farmworker organizers, tribal environmental officers, ministers, neighbourhood activists from places like the chemical corridor of Louisiana, the uranium country of the Southwest and the barrios of Los Angeles. The gathering was called the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The document was the Principles of Environmental Justice. Some of the leaders of the country's largest environmental groups had come to listen, and they heard, politely but firmly, that they had been leaving most of the country out. That weekend is one of the reasons the word "environment" today means a neighbourhood as well as a national park.

In short: The 1991 summit gave the environmental justice movement a shared statement of purpose written by grassroots leaders of colour. Its 17 principles linked pollution to civil rights, labour, Indigenous sovereignty and democracy, and challenged the mainstream environmental movement to change who it served and who it listened to.

A letter that set the stage

The summit has a prologue, and it is a letter.

In March 1990, a coalition of activists led by the Southwest Organizing Project, a community group in Albuquerque, sent a letter to the leaders of the largest national environmental organizations, the groups sometimes called the Group of Ten. Around a hundred grassroots leaders signed it. The letter said, in substance, that these organizations had few people of colour on their staffs and boards, rarely worked on the pollution problems hitting communities of colour, and sometimes backed policies that hurt those communities, such as land conservation deals that ignored the people living on the land.

The letter got attention. It was covered in national newspapers and forced conversations inside the big groups. It also made clear that the grassroots activists were not asking to be included in someone else's movement. They had their own.

Who organized the gathering

The United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice convened the summit. That was no accident. The commission had been at the centre of the Warren County protests in North Carolina in 1982 and had published the landmark 1987 study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which found that race was strongly associated with where hazardous waste facilities were located. Its leaders, including Benjamin Chavis and Charles Lee, wanted to bring together the scattered local fights into something national.

The planning committee included grassroots leaders from across the country. Delegates came from dozens of states and from several other countries. They included African American, Latino, Native American, Asian American and Pacific Islander leaders, many of whom had never been in a room together, and some of whose communities had their own tensions.

That diversity was a design choice and a risk. The movement could have split along ethnic lines, each group fighting its own polluters. Instead, the summit set out to build a shared language.

Four days of testimony

Much of the summit was testimony: people standing up to describe what was happening where they lived. Uranium mining and its waste on Navajo land. Pesticides in the fields of California's Central Valley. Lead in the soil of urban neighbourhoods. Chemical plants along the Mississippi. Incinerators and landfills in the rural South.

One of the most remembered speeches came from Dana Alston, a movement leader who spent her career connecting grassroots groups with each other and with funders. She argued that the movement's idea of the environment was broader than the mainstream's: not only wilderness and wildlife, but the places where people live, work and play. That framing, the environment as the conditions of daily life, has stuck. It is now so common that people forget it was ever controversial.

Some leaders of the national environmental groups addressed the summit too. They faced pointed questions about their records. The exchanges were not always comfortable, but most participants remember them as a beginning rather than a rupture.

What the 17 principles say

The principles are short and dense, and they reach far beyond pollution. In paraphrase, they cover several clusters of ideas.

The earth and the people on it. The first principle affirms the sacredness of the earth and the interdependence of all species. Several others call for public policy based on mutual respect and justice for all peoples, free from discrimination, and for the ethical and balanced use of land and renewable resources.

Stopping the harm at the source. The principles call for universal protection from nuclear testing and from the extraction, production and disposal of toxic and hazardous wastes, and for an end to the production of toxins, with past and current producers held responsible for cleanup and containment.

Democracy and consent. The principles demand the right of communities to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation and enforcement. They call for strict enforcement of informed consent and a halt to testing experimental medical and reproductive procedures on people of colour, a demand that many readers connect to the long shadow of the Tuskegee syphilis study.

Work. One principle affirms the right of all workers to a safe and healthy workplace, without being forced to choose between an unsafe livelihood and unemployment. That line mattered: it rejected the old trade-off in which polluting plants told communities that pollution was the price of jobs.

Sovereignty and history. The principles recognise the special legal and natural relationship of Native peoples to the United States government through treaties and agreements affirming their sovereignty and self-determination. They oppose military occupation and repression, and they call environmental injustice a violation of international law.

Compensation. Victims of environmental injustice, the principles say, have a right to full compensation and reparations for damages, as well as quality health care.

Ourselves. The last principle turns inward. It asks individuals to make personal and consumer choices that use as few of the earth's resources as possible and produce as little waste as possible, and to challenge and reprioritise their lifestyles to ensure the health of the natural world for present and future generations.

Read together, the principles describe something broader than an environmental program. They describe a theory of democracy in which the people who bear the costs of a decision have the right to help make it.

The fair criticisms

The principles have critics, and some criticism comes from within the movement.

Some policymakers have found them too sweeping to guide specific decisions. A principle calling for an end to the production of toxins is a moral statement, not a regulatory standard. What counts as a toxin, at what dose, replaced by what? An agency writing a rule needs more than that.

Others have pointed out that the principles leave hard trade-offs unresolved. A community may need jobs and also want a plant gone. A clean-energy project may need a transmission line through tribal land. The principles say that communities must be equal partners in such decisions, which is right, but equal partnership does not by itself tell anyone what to decide.

Those are fair points. But the principles were never meant to be a statute. They were written as a statement of values and a set of demands about process. Their most practical contribution is the idea of meaningful participation, a phrase that later appeared, in different words, in federal guidance on environmental justice. Process is not a small thing. Many of the worst siting decisions in American history were made in rooms where the affected community was not present at all.

And the critique that the principles ask too much of individual consumers, in a world where corporations make most of the decisions about waste, is worth weighing too. The final principle can be read as a call to personal virtue. It can also be read as the delegates holding themselves to the standard they were asking of others. That seems to be how most of them meant it.

From these principles to climate justice

The 1991 delegates were mostly talking about landfills, incinerators, pesticides and mines. Climate change was barely on the agenda. Yet the framework they built became the foundation for a newer idea: climate justice.

The logic carries over directly. The communities most exposed to toxic pollution are often the same ones most exposed to the effects of a warming planet: neighbourhoods with fewer trees and more pavement that bake in heat waves, low-lying areas that flood first, families with the fewest resources to rebuild after a hurricane or evacuate before one. And many of the facilities that pollute local air, refineries, petrochemical plants, gas-fired power plants, are also the ones driving climate change. Fighting a refinery's emissions on behalf of the children next door and fighting its carbon on behalf of the planet are the same fight.

Organizers who came out of the environmental justice tradition carried that argument into the climate movement in the 2000s and 2010s. The phrase frontline communities, meaning those living closest to pollution and climate harm, entered the vocabulary. When climate activists and members of Congress introduced the Green New Deal resolution in the House in 2019, it explicitly named frontline and vulnerable communities and called for their participation in planning, a direct echo of the 1991 demand for communities to be equal partners in decision-making. The Biden administration's commitment that a share of climate investment benefits reach disadvantaged communities reflected the same lineage.

Those efforts drew criticism, some of it from the right, which saw them as social programs dressed as climate policy, and some from within the movement, which saw them as promises too vague to enforce. Both critiques have something to them. But the basic idea, that a climate policy should not repeat the old pattern of loading the costs onto the least powerful, came straight from a hotel meeting room in 1991.

The principles also gave climate organizers a warning. A clean-energy project can have its own environmental justice problems: a lithium mine on tribal land, a battery factory with toxic emissions, a transmission line through a poor rural county. Applied honestly, the principles do not say clean energy is automatically just. They say every project, green or not, has to be decided with the people who will live beside it.

What came after

The summit's influence shows up across the next three decades.

In 1992, the EPA created an office of environmental equity. In 1994, President Clinton signed an executive order directing federal agencies to address environmental justice in their programs. Regional networks of grassroots groups formed or grew, in the Southwest, the Southeast, the Northeast and among Indigenous communities.

In 1996, a meeting of activists in Jemez, New Mexico, produced a shorter set of principles about how to organize: be inclusive, emphasise bottom-up organizing, let people speak for themselves, work together in solidarity and mutual respect, build just relationships among yourselves, and commit to self-transformation. Those Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing are still used by coalitions far beyond environmental work.

A second national summit was held in 2002 in Washington. By then, environmental justice offices existed in federal agencies and many states, university research centres were established, and the big national environmental groups had added environmental justice programs, staff and board members, though many activists say the change was slower and smaller than promised.

In 2025, the Trump administration revoked the 1994 executive order and closed environmental justice offices at the EPA. The principles, written by people outside government, are untouched by that. They do not need a president's signature, and many organizers say they are returning to them now.

What you can do

When the summit ended, the delegates went home to the same landfills and smokestacks they had left behind. What changed was that they no longer had to explain themselves from scratch: a tenant organizer in Chicago and a tribal leader in Arizona could point to the same page and know they were part of one movement.

The principles ask for something specific: communities at the table as equal partners. Here are ways to make that real where you live.

• Find the groups that already hold these principles. Many environmental justice organizations formed in the wake of the summit, and new ones form every year. Search by state and cause on the organizations directory, including environment, civil rights and health.
• Know the facilities your community lives beside. The polluters page lists EPA-regulated facilities in any ZIP code, with violations and penalties. Bring that information to a community meeting.
• Take part when decisions open to the public. Federal rules on pollution, chemical safety and permits are open for comment at set times. The federal comment listings show what closes soonest and how to write a comment in your own words.
• Follow the movement's ongoing work. The environmental justice topic page and the protest and resistance page collect current organizing news.

A page of principles, adopted on a Sunday in a hotel meeting room, outlasted administrations that embraced it and ones that tried to erase it. The people who wrote it understood that their real audience was the next generation of organizers.