Many of us associate environmental justice (EJ) issues with “fence line” communities surrounding polluting industries or neighborhoods where interstate highways have been constructed too close to homes, or even the poorest countries around the world where we send our garbage to be sorted and salvaged by children.

It’s a sad reality that children are often at the heart of many EJ issues. One that isA particularly troublesome for me is that desperately poor children are spending their days mining for rare metals with their bare hands in crudely dug holes in the earth to meet the needs of the manufacturers of our cell phones and other tech devices.

These examples all meet the dictionary definition of environmental justice – “a social movement to address the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized communities to harms from hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses.”

The first victims of environmental injustice, of course, were the indigenous people who lived peacefully and in harmony with nature for hundreds of years before white Europeans “discovered” the new world. The areas that were set aside for the original inhabitants of our country often became the home of polluting industries. And a practice of “build it first and fight it out with the tribes later” became common, particularly with oil and gas companies whose drilling sites, compressor stations, and pipelines so often dot or traverse the landscape on tribal lands.

In 2021, indigenous peoples from across the country banded together to bring attention to the exploitation of their lands without their permission and in violation of many treaties. In a campaign called the Red Road, Native Americans from across the country transported a 25-foot totem pole from Washington State to Washington, DC, stopping for ceremonies and events in communities which are leading efforts to protect sacred places from exploitive resource extraction and industrial development. But very little has changed.

Such is the cost of our “energy independence,” so often touted by proud politicians who ignore the real cost to our nation’s first residents and others who live in proximity to oil and gas operations. But what about others who live in close proximity to the thousands of industrial sites manufacturing everything from plastic to pesticides, or the millions of people who live in communities bordering incinerators and landfills?

Incineration, of course, doesn’t really solve our solid waste problem. According to the National Institutes of Health, toxins emitted from incineration include particulate matter (PM), carbon monoxide (CO), acidic gases (i.e., NOx, SO2, HCl) and acidic particles, certain metals (cadmium, lead, mercury, chromium, arsenic, and beryllium), dioxins and furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). In other words, a laundry list of chemicals that are known to cause or exacerbate serious health problems.

As Tatiana Lujan, a lawyer for the non-profit Client Earth observed, “As the world drowns in plastics and countries like China close their doors to foreign waste, incineration will increasingly be pushed as an ‘easy’ alternative. But waste does not just disappear in a puff of smoke. The more waste and plastics are sent to be burned, the more our environment and health will suffer in parallel.”

And while incineration leads to increased level of toxins in the air, landfills can produce toxins that make their way into groundwater. Right here on Long Island, a decades-long battle over the Brookhaven landfill has united communities of color and Native Americans who live in the surrounding communities.

For years, an underground plume of PFAS and other dangerous chemicals from the Brookhaven landfill has made its way into the local water supply. After the Suffolk County Department of Health Services detected emerging contaminants PFAS, 1-4 dioxane and other chemicals in the water, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation ordered the Town of Brookhaven to clean up the pollution, but solutions are expensive, time-consuming, and not fail proof. Meanwhile, local residents have no choice but to use the contaminated water.

Electric cars may be part of the solution to our energy problems, but they too come with a hidden cost, as does the cost of our modern lifestyle. According to Amnesty International, children as young as 7 are working long days in highly dangerous conditions in the Republic of the Congo to mine the rare mineral cobalt that is needed to make our smart phones, computers, and electric vehicles operate.

So what is the solution to environmental injustice? I think we first have to recognize how each of us may be unwittingly contributing to the problem. Our continued reliance on fossil fuels to heat our homes, produce electricity, power our vehicles and manufacture all the millions of tons of plastic we consume comes at a high price, paid on our behalf not by the oil and gas companies who make billions in profit or the politicians who take their money, but by those whose lives are negatively impacted but lack the considerable resources to fight back.

And let’s reassess the practice of packaging everything in plastic – from vegetables to giant yachts – and understand that living a throwaway lifestyle is creating a completely unsustainable waste stream. Do we consider the impact of our actions when we purchase a case of bottled water or a cucumber wrapped in plastic? Do we need the latest iPhone?

Environmental injustice is a problem which only remains unsolved because of our indifference. As citizens of this fragile and damaged planet, we have to do better.