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As an environmental justice worker, I’ve developed a deep appreciation for Juneteenth as an opportunity to celebrate Black freedom struggles and their connection to diverse ecologies. Today, I can’t help but reflect on the often overlooked yet rich and complex relationships enslaved people had with their local environments as landscapes that both enforced captivity and provided opportunities for liberation. The harrowing realities of enslaved people cultivating cash crops in brutal plantations were also filled with spaces where enslaved people developed intimate knowledge of local ecologies to survive, assert their humanity, and establish cultural practices. Enslaved people did this every day: from foraging for food and gardening to fortify their meager diets, to developing herbal medicinal knowledge, and creating spiritualities tied to their local ecologies. Thousands of enslaved people used this critical knowledge of the environment to brave the wilderness, run away, and self-emancipate.

This complex relationship to the environment did not stop after emancipation. Descendants of enslaved people continue to face challenges from the legacy of slavery and the Jim Crow laws that followed, and this has lasting impacts on their relationship to the environment. Persistent inequality in access to safe and healthy environments, gaps in environmental services such as access to clean, treated water, and the disproportionate effects of environmental disasters and climate change continue to impact Black communities in the U.S. However, Black communities also continue to assert their connection to the environment through the movement of environmental justice, which has made substantial breakthroughs in the past few decades in its quest for a just and sustainable world.

Now, the vibrant environmental justice movement is facing mounting attacks as Republicans gut federal funding, weaken enforcement of environmental policies, and empower corporations to deepen existing environmental inequality. It has been devastating to experience such swift government repression from the Trump administration. But this Juneteenth, I’m remembering that our relationship with the environment has always been complex, enduring, and profound, and caring for the Earth is a Black tradition that can’t be easily erased.

Environmental Justice Has Historical Roots

Juneteenth has its roots in Galveston, Texas, where some of the last enslaved people were emancipated with the arrival of Union troops on June 19, 1865. Though some African American communities in Texas and across the South celebrated Juneteenth for centuries, it became a federal holiday in 2021 under President Joe Biden, in response to demands for racial justice following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I myself only began celebrating this holiday recently, and like millions of Americans, I take the day to commemorate the liberation of enslaved people and their legacy of resistance and resilience. It serves as a reminder of the long history of Black environmental culture that my work in environmental justice hopes to protect and uplift.

We can’t fully understand the devastating impact of settler colonialism on the environment without also understanding its interconnectedness with the enslavement of Black people.

Enslaved people had very complicated relationships with the diverse American environments they were forcibly relocated to. This aspect of enslavement is often overlooked because it is painfully obvious, yet hard to pinpoint how these new environments fundamentally shaped enslaved people’s lives. Europeans violently displaced Native Americans from their traditional homelands beginning in the 16th century, and sought to extract the resources of their new colonies. Africans forced into slavery came from across central and western Africa, hailing from diverse ecologies, from bustling coasts and lush rainforests, to sprawling deserts and arid regions. Enslaved Africans were then shipped across the Americas to work mainly on plantations where they cultivated cash crops like cotton, indigo, sugar cane, coffee, and rice under brutal work regimes, stripped of their dignity and humanity. These agricultural practices and labor regimes imposed by European settlers degraded Southern ecologies and reduced biodiversity while also murdering and maiming enslaved people and denying them their humanity. We can’t fully understand the devastating impact of settler colonialism on the environment without also understanding its interconnectedness with the enslavement of Black people. This painful history of forced labor, exploitation, and violence to people and planet fundamentally shapes contemporary Black communities’ relationship with their American ecologies.

Joshua Jenkins, a fellow Black environmentalist working in the environmental justice space, highlights the deep interconnected links between environmental injustice and U.S. slavery in his work. Jenkins is the Alabama and Mississippi field representative, and former civil rights fellow, at the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), where he advocates for national park protection in the Deep South while also highlighting the region’s rich environmental and cultural history. When asked about the links between Juneteenth and environmental justice, he reflects on the fact that the enslaved people who were forced to work the land generated an incredible amount of wealth that became the bedrock for the American economy. He concluded that “this country itself was built on environmental injustice.”

This legacy of environmental racism would go on to shape generations of African Americans. After emancipation, millions of enslaved people were forced to “pay off debts” to former enslavers, and many elements of slavery’s exploitative labor continued under a new system of sharecropping. In the few cases where African Americans were able to purchase land as farmers and businesspeople, the fear of racial violence loomed over these new opportunities. Threats of retaliation, lynching, and capricious white officials who would extort and steal land robbed Black communities of land stewardship, environmental knowledge, wealth, and their very homes for generations throughout the post-Reconstruction South. During the early 20th century, millions of African Americans migrated from the South to the North, West, and Midwest as refugees from racial violence, political repression, and economic disparity, leaving behind their rural backgrounds for cities. But racism continued to shape their relationship with the environment in these bustling cities. Black communities were zoned through housing discrimination into neighborhoods surrounded by higher levels of pollution from factories, sewage systems, and landfills, as well as undesirable lands that were vulnerable to natural disasters.

Recognizing these persistent disparities in environmental access, exposure to pollution, and loss of land on the heels of the civil rights movement, Black communities across the country worked initially independently to address local and statewide inequalities. An early environmental justice action took place in Warren County, North Carolina, between 1978 and 1982, when locals in a majority-Black community organized for over four years against the creation of a toxic landfill with cancer-causing PCBs. As these efforts gained national traction, environmental justice organizing sprang up in Chicago, led by Hazel M. Johnson with the People for Community Recovery; in New York City, with WE ACT for Environmental Justice; and in Houston, Texas, with Robert Bullard and Linda McKeever Bullard of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. These efforts highlighted the disproportionate number of toxic landfills, polluting factories and industries, and the numerous health impacts on predominantly Black and Brown communities.

In 1991, these once-fragmented campaigns, organizing efforts, legal efforts, and the advocates behind them would come together in the National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The summit connected the hundreds of groups and communities across the nation working on environmental justice, as they found common ground. Peggy Shepard, one of the co-founders of New York-based environmental justice organization WE ACT, recalled that the summit “was the first time I really understood that there were hundreds of groups like mine working on similar issues around the country.” This summit transformed the path of the environmental justice movement as the term itself was formalized, and the attendees established the 17 guiding principles of the movement. “[I]f you look at those principles, you’ll see that all of them are just totally relevant today,” Shepard said on the 30th anniversary of the summit in 2021. “They’re important values that we all hold dear and an important roadmap for the future.”

The principles that shape environmental justice were developed through a coalition of diverse stakeholders with a vision of collective liberation. Unlike the mainstream environmental movement of its time (and oftentimes still today), intersectional environmental justice connected the dots across multiple forms of oppression. The crafters of the movement’s principles understood that a just and healthy planet was also one with reproductive rights, Native sovereignty, workers’ rights, and community participation as central facets of policy. A radical movement with a commitment towards justice, sustainability, and liberation was born.

Environmental Justice Victories Are Under Attack

Now, more than three decades later, that movement has grown and seen numerous victories. In 2022, Congress passed Joe Biden’s climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which funneled billions to clean energy, green jobs, and environmental justice efforts. With federal programs like the Justice40 Initiative — which ensured that 40 percent of new climate funding, jobs, and investments would go to historically marginalized communities — things were looking up. Hundreds of organizations, local community groups, state and municipal governments, and advocates applied for grants, loans, and investments for new and exciting projects and to build climate-resilient infrastructure, create green jobs, invest in clean energy, and address persistent issues of pollution and ecological degradation. I was energized in my work as exciting opportunities for funding, collaboration, and advancing environmental justice principles quickly grew. As the country charted a path to address climate change, I was optimistic that Black, Brown, poor, and rural communities wouldn’t be left behind this time.

However, this billion-dollar beacon of hope was quickly derailed as the Trump administration ascended and targeted funding for the environment by pausing the government funding disbursement. This recent shift has devastated the environmental justice movement. Trump’s executive order targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been used to discredit programs, funding, and opportunities that addressed inequality, and has also hit the movement hard. The administration took particular issue with the few environmental justice guardrails in government that safeguarded against persistent inequality, with polluting industries disproportionately placed in communities of color and low-income communities. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was central to enforcing environmental justice policies, saw significant staff cuts as well, which will undoubtedly hamper — and in some cases, halt — environmental justice work. Routes for remedying environmental injustices through programs like the EPA Superfund, for example, are at risk for cuts.

New funding allocated through the IRA, passed by Congress, has also been a hotbed issue. Organizations, states, local governments, and companies with government contracts were shocked to see contracts quickly revoked, funds frozen, and programs terminated, with threats of legal action from the government. Though a recent court ruling demands that the government resume funding, it is unclear when and how this will happen — if it happens at all. The impact of such hostile policies is devastating. We can “no longer rely on the federal government to support EJ [environmental justice] work. It’s now a divisive topic,” Jenkins says. “So, funding has dried up and larger organizations are less willing to take EJ stances for fear of reprisal from the federal government.”

This harsh reality has had a chilling impact on my own work supporting young climate leaders from historically marginalized backgrounds. I’ve seen firsthand the bleak and uncertain reality of reluctant funders and companies laying off or firing employees. This year alone, I’ve witnessed a number of the partner organizations that I’ve worked with on youth programming and environmental justice issues tighten their belts because of smaller budgets, hiring freezes, or just anxiety around environmental justice being framed as a “partisan issue.” In my programs that link young people to green jobs, I’ve had to email dozens of applicants to let them know the positions that were advertised just last November are no longer available. And this is only the tip of the iceberg; organizations that were dependent on federal funding are preparing to furlough employees as they scurry to secure new funding sources or close down. Even as I work in an organization that doesn’t rely on federal funding, the influx of organizations with new funding gaps makes the limited private funding available even more competitive as we all struggle to stay afloat.

Despite Attacks, the Movement Is Not Dead

However, even with these bleak circumstances, hope is certainly not lost. The environmental justice movement has managed to avoid being totally defanged. Although some diluted elements of environmental justice have only recently penetrated the mainstream environmental movement, for the most part, the movement retains much of its core radical vision for justice.

“This is a really good time for us to put our heads together and think really hard about the world we want to live in. Really hard, like the most aspirational reality we can think of. Afrofuturism levels of imagination,” says Jenkins. “And then we should organize and build coalitions that will help us realize that dream. If we’re the forest, it feels like these times are a massive wildfire. It is destructive and it’s hard to breathe right now, but we know some seeds can’t even germinate unless they’re subjected to the heat.”

As some major environmental organizations back away from their commitments and scrub their websites of environmental justice language, others stand firm and push forward. In this moment of adversity, I’m witnessing many environmental justice advocates, organizations, and communities clarify their vision and deepen their intersectional liberatory aspirations. Amid the U.S.’s descent into fascism, the interconnectedness of reproductive rights, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and Black and Brown communities is clearer now than ever as right-wingers mount attacks on us all.

Juneteenth is an opportunity to contemplate and learn from the resilience and ingenuity of enslaved people who formed rich environmental relations. As this current Trump administration rolls back critical policies, climate funding, and enforcement of environmental protection, the environmental justice movement has our work cut out for us. This is the time for us to strengthen coalitions, build upon ambitious visions for liberation, and continue demanding a just and sustainable future.

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