Environmental Justice, Childhood Deprivation and Urban Regeneration.

Abstract

The notion of environmental justice is connected to the ways in which the goods (and conversely the 'bads') of society are distributed, both socially and spatially. The concept has been most strongly developed in the US, where a distinctive environmental justice movement grew in the early 1980s out of protests against the large dump for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the predominantly poor, black, and powerless community of Afton, in Waren County, North Carolina. As it developed, the protest movement identified inequalities in the exposure of individuals and communities to environmental risks and hazards as fundamentally. and profoundly, a justice issue, wherein already well-documented inequalities in the consumption of societies goods were being exacerbated by the concomitant inequalities in the distribution of the negative externalities arising from the production of those goods.