The pursuit of social justice in the American South has a rich history and a vibrant present. A recent emphasis in social justice struggle in the region has been on environmental justice, a concept which is used to argue that people have a right to nonhazardous environments in which to live, work and play. Significantly, the concept of environmental justice (EJ) originated in the social relations of the southeastern United States. Emerging from a convergence of environmental and civil rights activists in the∞ Ω∫≠ s, the EJ movement claims that people have a civil right to an environment that is not harmful to health and well-being. The civil rights-based critique of environmental conditions focused at the outset on a tendency in the American South for hazardous waste facilities to be located in communities of color and of low income. This problem identification was bolstered by a government study that found that three of nation’s four largest hazardous waste landfills were located in the Southeast, in predominantly African American census tracts (GAO∞ Ω∫≥). The notion that people of color in particular have borne a disproportionate burden of industrial development and pollution resonated well beyond the southeastern United States, and the concept has found broad purchase across the country and indeed globally. Since EJ was first articulated as a social goal in the∞ Ω∫≠ s, US-based environmental justice activism has grown to encompass concerns about cultural imperialism, globalization, and the environmental consequences of militarism, nuclear power, and unchecked consumerism, among others. Globally, environmental justice has been incorporated into indigenous rights activism, and a commitment to environmental justice has even been written into the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (ratified in∞ ΩΩ∏). Indeed, the environmental justice movement currently forms a broad umbrella for a host of inter-related social concerns centered on the effects of human exploitation of the environment. The ideal of a civil right to a non-harmful environment provides a powerful lens for thinking through implications of industrial capitalism for socially, economically and politically vulnerable populations. While earlier environmental justice activism and scholarship seemed to focus more on the past, parsing out the myriad sources or causes of environmental injustice, a higher proportion of recent EJ activity seems to focus on the present and the future, in particular, on fostering citizen participation in environmental justice-related government and corporate decision-making. In the southeastern US as elsewhere, the concept is being influ-