People Who Changed the Field

In 1979, a sociologist in Houston agreed to help his wife, a lawyer, with a lawsuit over a landfill planned for a Black middle-class neighborhood. The data he gathered for that case became the start of a career that helped define environmental justice. Much of the history of this field turns on moments like that, when one person decided to count something nobody had counted, or to ask who was missing from the trail. The short profiles below introduce people whose work anyone in environmental organizations should know. They are grouped loosely by the kind of work they are best known for, and many of their books appear on our resources page.

How we chose

We picked people whose influence reaches well beyond their own organization: researchers whose numbers are still cited, organizers whose methods are still copied, writers whose books changed how people see land. The list is not complete and is weighted toward the United States. We stick to the public record and do not describe anyone's current role unless it is well established.

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Environmental justice founders

Robert D. Bullard

A sociologist often called the father of environmental justice. His research for Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management (1979), a Houston lawsuit argued by his wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, documented how waste sites in the city clustered in Black neighborhoods. His book Dumping in Dixie (1990) brought those patterns to a national audience. He later founded the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, served as dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University, co-authored Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (2007), and with Beverly Wright founded the HBCU Climate Change Consortium.

Beverly Wright

A sociologist who grew up in the stretch of Louisiana's industrial corridor often called Cancer Alley, Wright founded the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans in 1992. The center's "communiversity" model pairs academic researchers with community members as equal partners, and it has trained local residents for environmental cleanup and construction work. After Hurricane Katrina she became a leading voice for a fair recovery in Black neighborhoods. She co-authored Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty (2007) and The Wrong Complexion for Protection (2012) with Robert Bullard, and in 2011 the two founded the HBCU Climate Change Consortium.

Hazel M. Johnson

Often called the mother of environmental justice. Johnson (1935-2011) lived in Altgeld Gardens, a public housing development on Chicago's far South Side, and began investigating after noticing how many of her neighbors were ill. She found the community ringed by landfills, industry and contaminated sites, and called it a "toxic doughnut." In 1979 she founded People for Community Recovery, which pushed for testing, cleanup and safe water, and which became a model for resident-led environmental organizing in public housing.

Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.

A civil rights leader and minister who, as executive director of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, oversaw the landmark 1987 study Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. He is widely credited with coining the term "environmental racism." Earlier, as one of the Wilmington Ten, he had been wrongfully convicted in North Carolina in 1972; the convictions were overturned in 1980, and the governor granted pardons of innocence in 2012. He later served as executive director of the NAACP and led the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

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Community advocates

Vernice Miller-Travis

As a researcher at the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, Miller-Travis worked on the 1987 Toxic Wastes and Race study. The following year she co-founded WE ACT for Environmental Justice in West Harlem. She went on to work on environmental justice at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Ford Foundation, and has advised government agencies on how to involve communities in environmental decisions. Her career is a good example of moving between research, grassroots organizing, philanthropy and policy without losing sight of the neighborhoods involved.

Peggy Shepard

Co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice in 1988 and its longtime executive director. Under her leadership WE ACT partnered with researchers at Columbia University on studies of air pollution and children's health, an early model of community-based participatory research. Shepard was the first woman to chair the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, serving from 2001 to 2003, and received a Heinz Award for the environment. She is known for insisting that residents of polluted neighborhoods be treated as experts on their own conditions.

Majora Carter

Carter founded Sustainable South Bronx in 2001 in Hunts Point, a neighborhood carrying a heavy share of New York City's waste-handling and truck traffic. The group pushed for new waterfront green space, including what became Hunts Point Riverside Park, and ran green-collar job training for local residents, linking environmental improvement directly to employment. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2005. Her later work on real estate and economic development in low-income neighborhoods has argued that people should not have to leave their communities to live well.

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Scholars and writers

Dorceta E. Taylor

A sociologist and environmental historian who has done more than anyone to document who has worked in American environmental organizations. She earned her doctorate at Yale and taught for many years at the University of Michigan before returning to Yale in 2020. Her books include The Environment and the People in American Cities (2009), Toxic Communities (2014) and The Rise of the American Conservation Movement (2016). Her 2014 report for Green 2.0, which found people of color held no more than about 16 percent of positions in the institutions studied, gave the field the phrase "green ceiling."

Carolyn Finney

A cultural geographer and writer whose book Black Faces, White Spaces (2014) examines why African Americans have been so often left out of the picture of the American outdoors, in images as well as in policy. She served for several years on the National Park System Advisory Board, bringing questions about representation into federal park planning. Finney is also a widely sought speaker, known for mixing scholarship, personal history and performance.

Julian Agyeman

A professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University, Agyeman developed the idea of "just sustainabilities," the argument that sustainability and social justice cannot be pursued separately. Before moving to the United States he co-founded the Black Environment Network in Britain in 1988. He co-founded the journal Local Environment in 1996, and his books include Introducing Just Sustainabilities (2013) and Sharing Cities (2015, with Duncan McLaren).

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Naturalists and storytellers

J. Drew Lanham

A wildlife ecologist and ornithologist on the faculty of Clemson University, a poet, and a native of Edgefield, South Carolina. His essay "9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher" (Orion, 2013) and his memoir The Home Place (2016) made him one of the best-known voices on race and nature. Sparrow Envy (2021) is a collection of his poetry. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022. Lanham writes about birds and land with a scientist's precision and a deep sense of family history.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Kimmerer has taught for many years at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry, where she founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her first book, Gathering Moss (2003), won the John Burroughs Medal. Braiding Sweetgrass (2013) became a word-of-mouth bestseller years after publication, and The Serviceberry followed in 2024. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2022.

Rue Mapp

Founder of Outdoor Afro, which she started in 2009 as a blog and built into a national network of volunteer leaders who guide Black people on hikes, bird walks, camping trips and other outings. Based in Oakland, California, Mapp has become a leading voice for the idea that Black people belong in the outdoors and on public lands, and has spoken widely on outdoor access and safety. Her book Nature Swagger (2022) celebrates Black joy outside. See our organizations page for more on Outdoor Afro.

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Conservation leaders

Charles Jordan

Jordan (1937-2014) was the first African American member of the Portland City Council and went on to direct Portland Parks and Recreation for fourteen years. He served on the board of The Conservation Fund from 1988 and chaired it from 2003 to 2008. Nationally, he was one of the most persistent voices urging conservation groups to include people of color, arguing that the movement's future depended on it.

Jerome Ringo

Ringo spent more than 20 years working in Louisiana's petrochemical industry before turning to conservation and environmental justice. In 2005 he became chair of the board of the National Wildlife Federation, making him the first African American to lead a major mainstream conservation organization. He later led the Apollo Alliance, a coalition of labor, business and environmental groups promoting clean-energy jobs. His path from refinery worker to conservation leader made him an unusually credible voice on jobs and pollution.

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Our contributors

The people who write for Environmental Diversity are introduced on our About page. In brief:

• Imani Hollis covers environmental justice, drawing on a background in public health.
• Tomás Alvarado writes about outdoor access and recreation as a former outdoor educator.
• Grace Nakamura covers conservation, land trusts and stewardship partnerships.
• Darnell Pruitt writes about green careers, workforce and leadership.
• Celia Martín covers sustainable communities from an urban planning perspective.