Environmental justice emerged from the 1982 protests against a toxic-waste landfill sited in mostly Black Warren County, North Carolina, and was codified when delegates adopted the seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington in 1991. Activists and researchers documented how polluting facilities, waste sites and industrial hazards were disproportionately located in poor and minority neighbourhoods. The movement reframed pollution not as an even burden but as a question of who lives next to harm. It linked civil-rights organising to land use, zoning and facility siting.
It made the unequal spatial distribution of environmental harm an explicit planning, zoning and siting concern. The framing now informs cumulative-impact assessment, equity mapping and the location decisions that determine which communities bear industrial risk.