The Influence of Mass Media Coverage and Representation on Environmental Justice Advocacy

The Influence of Mass Media Coverage and Representation on Environmental Justice Advocacy

Hannah Yang Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University COMM_ST 394: A History of Mass Media Influence Professor John Brooks June 6, 2022

1 Environmentalism has attracted mass media attention in recent years. Most recently, climate activist Wynn Bruce burned himself to death outside of the Supreme Court on Earth Day, and over 1,000 scientists from 25 countries staged protests following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report, which featured “grossly inadequate” plans made more worrisome by the fact that “even these obligations are not being met” (Silverman & Shapira, 2022; Osborne, 2022). At the same time, environmental activism has existed for centuries, long before widespread public concern about climate change. Conservation groups such as the Sierra Club, which historically fought for Indigenous rights to land and wilderness conservation, were founded as early as 1892 (Weyler, 2021).

These issues remain present in environmental advocacy, but starting in the late 1970s, some activists began to describe the “disproportionate burdens imposed on working-class and people of color communities by environmentally harmful conditions,” establishing a vocabulary of environmental justice and in particular, environmental racism (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 280).

Mass media is deeply entwined with the history of environmental justice advocacy, as communities protesting their harmful conditions have often only been able to make progress in their demands for justice once they receive national media attention. Yet, even in highly reported environmental justice cases such as the water crisis of Flint, Michigan, advocates’ demands are frequently not met for years after the initial incident, and in the meantime, the problems are “sensationalized by the mainstream news media and the people suffering from environmental inequality are often stereotyped or marginalized” (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 231).

An examination of various environmental justice case studies suggests that historically, mass media has brought attention to immediate issues and developed a shared narrative which then generates public outrage and protest that pressures local governments into resolving the

2 issue, making mass media a key source of momentum for environmental justice movements.

However, current coverage of environmental injustice is unrepresentative of the issue’s prevalence and excludes the perspective of the affected communities. To better support future environmental justice advocacy, mass media organizations must increase the amount of news about environmental injustices to elevate the issue’s importance in the public eye, frame these stories as injustices to provoke audience action, and increase newsroom and source diversity to avoid counterproductive portrayals of the victims of environmental injustice.

Advocacy Prior to the Conceptualization of Environmental Justice One of the forms that environmental injustice has most frequently taken throughout American history is placement of health-threatening structures such as landfills and factories in areas with predominantly poor or minority residents (Heinz, 2005). Early advocates’ arguments against toxic waste facilities tended to focus on economics rather than social injustices. For example, between 1890 and 1919, Salt Lake City, Utah attempted several plans to reduce the increasingly smoky air in their city, “the direct result of a locally owned coal-processing plant” (Moore, 2007, p. 84). While ideas about ‘justice’ were not invoked to bring about change, in fact, Salt Lake City’s pollution did disproportionately impact marginalized groups, particularly women and the poor. Women had to clean the family clothing, scrub soot-encrusted walls, and were seen as responsible for taking care of their families’ health, while poorer residents tended to live in “low-income dwellings located between what was described as a transition area between the central business district, the railroads, and the industrial sector” and could not afford to visit the doctor or move to areas of the city less affected by smoke (Moore, 2007, p. 90).

The Salt Lake’s Women’s Chamber of Commerce became “the primary voice and engine for change […] as it took the lead in pushing the issue of air pollution to the forefront of city

3 politics” in the 1930s (Moore, 2007, p. 86). They focused on promoting a vision of a city that was smokeless, prosperous, and beautiful, conforming to the city officials’ rhetoric of “environmental reforms in the name of efficiency and economic prosperity,” as the Women’s Chamber recognized that they needed to emphasize the economy to be taken seriously (Moore, 2007, p. 91). They proposed a national advertising campaign that would position Salt Lake City as the ideal place to live and work, and in 1930, the Chamber of Commerce invested in the publication of 103 feature articles, news stories, and photographs in other cities’ newspapers and in national publications (Moore, 2007). Interestingly, their approach mobilized mass media not to publicize their problem, but as part of a solution to incentivize the city to reduce pollution for the sake of tourism and economic development in the region. The Chamber “claimed that as a result of its publicity efforts the number of visitors to the state’s national parks increased by 63 percent,” demonstrating the feasibility of their plan to highlight the city’s superior natural environment, thus appealing to familiar, corporate-friendly motives to demand improvements in the environment for all residents (Moore, 2007, p. 86).

The Women’s Chamber of Commerce’s campaigns also involved publicly challenging the municipal government, petitioning the city for public hearings, and making use of radio addresses, newspapers, and local magazines, primarily to ask the city to build a low-temperature coal processing plant that would “produce a relatively inexpensive smokeless fuel that people from all economic levels could afford” (Moore, 2007, p. 91). Such a processing plant was never built, however, over the course of several years, the Chamber’s public reform efforts did force the city to enact programs that ultimately improved the city’s air quality while emphasizing the need to “equalize burdens of pollution and pollution reform by forcing those who were responsible for the majority of the pollution, but represented a minority of the population—

4 railroads, heavy industry, and manufacturing—to shoulder their fair share of the costs” (Moore, 2007, p. 100). Thus, the Women’s Chamber of Commerce case employed one of the primary principles of environmental justice: demanding that polluters be responsible for cleaning their own wastes or emissions safely. Further, their dissatisfaction with increasing corporate control over the state and desire to “return some political and economic control to the citizens of Salt Lake” resonates with the environmental justice principle of involving those who will be affected by environmental decisions in the discussion process (Moore, 2007, p. 90). However, at the time, there was no vocabulary for ‘environmental justice,’ which reflects how “naming the problems associated with environmental injustices” is important for allowing communities to effectively articulate and protest their experience (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 282). This case reveals the existence of environmental injustice United States long before the social movement was formalized and demonstrates activists’ use of increased publicity through mass media to ameliorate an environmental problem.

The ‘First’ Environmental Injustice Case: Warren County In the summer of 1978, employees of the Ward Transformer Company in Raleigh, North Carolina, illegally discharged liquid contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—a highly toxic manmade chemical whose production has since been banned—onto the soil along the rural roads of thirteen North Carolina counties. Once the contamination was detected, the state planned to construct a landfill in the most affected county, Warren County (McGurty, 1997). The residents of Warren County were alarmed by the potential of further contamination of their groundwater and the hindrance that a hazardous waste facility would pose to local economic development, launching three years of legal battles that ultimately failed to prevent the construction of the landfill in 1982. Protesters argued that Warren County had been chosen for

5 the site because “the community was politically and economically unempowered” as a rural area with “a majority of poor, African-American residents,” launching the ideas of environmental racism and injustice to the environmental policy agenda (McGurty, 1997, p. 302).

The Warren County incident coincided with another hazardous waste catastrophe in Love Canal, New York, where a housing subdivision was built adjacent to a site used to dispose of over forty-three million pounds of industrial wastes including PCBs, creating “significant health problems for residents, including asthma, lethargy, cancer, miscarriages, and birth defects” (McGurty, 1997, p. 307). Just days after the first coverage of the Love Canal incident, the illegal dumping of chemicals on North Carolina roads was discovered on August 9th, 1978, and both NBC and CBS television news linked updates of the PCB spill to Love Canal coverage (Exchange Project, 2006). News coverage linking the two situations increased citizens’ fear of contamination and distrust of the government, such that when the Warren County permit application was publicized in the newspapers in 1978, residents were poised to resist the plan. A New York Times article published on January 6th, 1979, “700 Protest Proposed North Carolina Chemical Dump,” recounts protests of citizens who felt that the decision to place the chemical site in Warren County would turn their community into “another Love Canal,” demonstrating how media coverage of similar environmental injustices enabled citizens to recognize patterns in what they were experiencing, as speakers at the protests asked “Is it right to pour a dangerous chemical on a county because it is small and poor?” (“700 Protest Chemical Dump”, 1979, p. 6).

While Warren County is widely recognized as the original case wherein it was recognized that “the high percentage of minority residents was one factor influencing the decision to site the landfill in Warren County,” one of the most prominent groups opposed to the construction of the landfill, Warren County Citizens Concerned about PCBs (Concerned

6 Citizens), was composed primarily of white landowners who were angered by the threat of potential groundwater contamination, hindrance to economic development, and loss of local control over land decisions (McGurty, 1997, p. 311). The Concerned Citizens reached out to black protest leaders for help and advice for building momentum for their movement, an astonishing case of cooperation between white and black activists at the time that demonstrated how mass media, which had historically served as a “conduit for research by government and environmental organizations,” increasingly “has the potential to unite people […] by presenting the environment as a pressing issue for all citizens” (Soll, 2007, p. 262).

Despite the mobilization of residents and activists from many different backgrounds, the Warren County case did not lead to a legal victory: the landfill was still built, with slight design improvements meant to make the site safer. However, the case ignited protests leading to over 500 arrests, marking the first time Americans had been arrested protesting the location of a waste facility (Bullard, 2001). The protests also led to the Commission for Racial Justice (1987) to produce Toxic Wastes and Race, which was the first national study to confirm the correlation between siting of toxic waste facilities with racial demographics of selected sites (Bullard, 2001).

The publishing of Toxic Wastes and Race was groundbreaking not only for its study findings, which “catapulted the concern of environmental racism to national prominence,” but also the empowering effect it had on readers, as it “documented and validated the experiences that low-income communities of color were facing all over the country” and made various organizing groups feel like they were contributing to a wider movement (Bullard et al., 2007).

Visibility of Environmental Justice Advocacy in Mass Media Environmentalism in Mainstream News

7 As mass media organizations publish more environmental news and information, activists become more unified around the facts of the climate crisis, increasing the efficacy of environmental justice advocacy by supporting their policy demands with scientific evidence.

This is supported by the increased quality of environmental news: a study by the University of Colorado Boulder and Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) found that over the last 15 years, “scientifically accurate coverage of climate change is improving over time” in major print media (McAllister et al., 2021). However, environmentalism is vulnerable not only to biased reporting, but also lack of coverage, because the “‘invisible’ nature of many environmental problems makes it hard for reporters to fit these stories into conventional news formats” and most reporters do not have scientific training and knowledge to adequately discuss complex environmental issues (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 127).

Interest in environmental news has typically spiked only when dramatic environmental events occur. For example, environmental crises began to appear more frequently in American news media in the 1960s, most notably with the televising of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and Time magazine’s coverage of the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017). Solid Waste Sites and the Houston Black Community (1983), the first study of environmental racism in the United States, led by Dr. Robert Bullard, documented placement of municipal waste sites in Houston and found that they were typically located in African American-dominant neighborhoods (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017). Toxic Wastes and Race, which confirmed this pattern across the United States, was published in 1987, followed by the first book documenting environmental injustice cases in the United States, Bullard’s Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (1990). Coverage of the environment “erupted across all media— newspapers, TV, online news sites, film, and news magazines” in 2006 with the release of Al

8 Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) documentary and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s early 2007 report, both of which confirmed and increased international awareness of the phenomenon of global warming (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p. 117).

Environmentalism once again faded to the background of mass media until 2017, at the start of the Trump administration in the U.S., when climate news returned to the forefront of reporting, likely in part fueled by Trump’s drastic decision in 2017 to withdraw the U.S. from The Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017).

Environmental news has become more mainstream over time, but environmental justice remains under-covered, receiving only sporadic mainstream news media attention (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017). When environmental injustices are not recognized by large media organizations, cases “receive very little public attention, which in turn means that these cases will continue unaddressed and unmitigated” (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 230). The lack of news stories does not reflect a lack of environmental injustices to report on. One study of news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC from January 2017 through December 2020 found that even in segments that discussed environmental hazards, only 11.4%, or 30 of 264 segments adequately discussed the disproportionate harms inflicted on marginalized communities (Cooper, 2021).

Further, the majority (63%) of environmental justice news segments in the study aired in 2017, meaning that environmental justice coverage declined over time across major broadcast networks despite “plenty of opportunities to apply an environmental justice lens to myriad stories about disaster recovery, industrial accidents and contamination, and the Trump administration’s aggressive regulatory rollbacks” (Cooper, 2021). Failure to contextualize environmental news as cases of injustice and excluding information about the detailed solutions that have been proposed

9 to address environmental injustice is dangerous because “human-made disasters are presented as rote, inevitable facts of life when evidence suggests they don’t have to be” (Cooper, 2021).

Framing of Environmental Injustice in Mass Media Even in recent years, when environmental justice has been fully articulated and has become a key issue in the public eye, environmental justice advocacy has not necessarily been more successful in securing tangible victories. For example, the Flint, Michigan water crisis from April 2014 to June 2016—often dubbed the most egregious example of environmental injustice in the United States—has seen ongoing “extensive media coverage” nationally and generated massive public outrage, but its impacts and related legal battles have continued even to the time of writing, over eight years later (Cohen, 2020, p. 1).

The water crisis began when Flint government officials decided to switch from the Detroit water system to the Flint River to cut costs (Cohen, 2020). The water from the Flint River had been used as a repository for industrial waste and was contaminated with lead as well as “hazardous and illegal levels of E. coli, total coliform bacteria, and total trihalomethanes” (Cohen, 2020, p. 2). Soon after the water supply was switched, officials “outright disregarded” when Flint residents began reporting health effects such as rashes and illness but began to use bottled water for themselves and for government office visitors, an implicit acknowledgement that the water was unsafe to drink (Cohen, 2020, p. 2). Only after a 2015 study on blood lead levels in Flint’s children, which found that blood lead levels had doubled from the period prior to the switch in water sources, did the office of Flint’s governor decide to switch back to the Detroit water system—over a year too late (Cohen, 2020). By the ‘end’ of the crisis, nearly 100,000 people had been poisoned and will suffer from lifelong damage to their health, as lead is a cumulative toxin that cannot be removed from the human body (Cohen, 2020). Further, due to

10 the corrosion of Flint’s water pipes, lead is still poisoning the new water supply, meaning that the issue remains unresolved (Congdon Jr. et al, 2020).

Flint is one of the most impoverished metropolitan areas in the United States, and most of its residents are black or African American. Yet, the crisis was not always contextualized as a case of environmental racism. Many mainstream media outlets “heavily covered the Flint crisis [but] most failed to discuss or even mention the racial inequities fueling the disaster,” notably the Washington Post, which published an article regarding the report but was “completely devoid of any mention of the word race or the topic of race” (Cohen, 2020, p. 4-5). Audience members rely on news outlets for narrative framing, as media “organize[s] the facts in ways that provide a narrative structure—what the problem is, who is responsible, what the solution is, and so on” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, 129). Without the crucial context of racism embedded in the Flint water crisis, most readers do not have complete information about the issue. While the crisis would have been a public health emergency regardless, the victims of environmental injustice and racism suffer from historical, cumulative harms. In 2017, the Michigan Civil Rights Commission reported on “evidence of ‘systemic racism’ leading to the Flint water crisis [that mapped] a history of racist attitudes and policies of segregation since the 1900s” (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017, p.

288). When cases of environmental racism and classism are not reported as ‘injustices,’ the damage is minimized and underrepresented, reducing advocates’ potential claims to reparations.

The New York Times was the only nationally prestigious newspaper to report on the crisis extensively and frame the crisis as an environmental injustice issue (Congdon Jr. et al., 2020). A study found that the New York Times employed four frames in their 29 articles about the Flint water crisis, most of which were published in the five months after it was declared a federal health emergency: 1) causes and effects, which identified the state’s cost-cutting motives and

11 failure to treat the new water source to make it safe for drinking; 2) responsibility, which identified Michigan Governor Rick Snyder as a key ‘villain’ due to his mishandling of the crisis; 3) remedial efforts, which discussed how justice might be served by fixing the water supply and pressing charges against responsible parties; and 4) health crisis, which particularly emphasized the health consequences to Flint’s children (Congdon Jr. et al., 2020).

These four frames are critical to the types of action that have been taken since the crisis.

The health and potential reparations frames shaped the immediate response: in 2016, a federal judge ordered the implementation of door-to-door bottled water deliveries to Flint homes and the city was provided funding to replace its lead pipes (Denchak, 2018). The responsibility frame has also been significant. Starting in 2016, key players who enabled the crisis faced criminal charges—and in 2021, a new investigation led to charges ranging from willful neglect of duty to involuntary manslaughter against nine government officials, including Snyder (Eggert et al., 2021). The response to Flint directly corresponded to the New York Times’ and subsequent media coverage’s framing of the crisis, illustrating the importance of accurate and actionable framing of environmental justice issues in mass media.

Framing of Environmental Justice in Minority-Centered Media Analysis of the coverage of environmental justice cases is already limited, but even more underexplored is how victims of environmental injustice discuss and frame their crises (Rieper, 2018). Black newspapers have historically included more coverage of environmental injustice compared to mainstream media. Predominantly Black newspapers such as The Los Angeles Sentinel, The Chicago Defender, and Michigan Chronicle, based in cities where prominent environmental justice cases occurred, have publicized environmental racism since the 1970s (Heinz, 2005). A study on coverage of Flint found not only that “mainstream media and black

12 media cover issues of race much differently,” but attempts at objectivity still create implicit bias “due to existing racist frameworks in the mainstream media,” as widespread concern of black citizens is not taken seriously until harm has been verified by doctors and scientists or deemed important by politicians (Rieper, 2018, p. 34). Mainstream media tended to position affected black communities against white authoritarians and experts, using quotes from white sources but generalizing black communities without giving them a voice (Rieper, 2018). Residents were portrayed as “hopeless and downtrodden despite months of action,” and narratives of ‘heroes’ “excluded African American activists” (Jackson, 2017). In contrast, while black newspapers depict minorities as being on the receiving end of environmental racism, coverage does not portray them as helpless victims but as an actively resistant community (Heinz, 2005).

The study on Flint coverage looked at the Defender and the Chronicle, as well as mainstream newspapers the Detroit Free Press and the Chicago Tribune. While there were common frames used across the four newspapers—specifically, the four used by the New York Times appeared in all four papers—the largest difference between mainstream and black news was the theme of race, which appeared as a theme “more than five times as often in black news than it did in mainstream news” (Rieper, 2018, p. 42). The lack of mention of race in mainstream papers also meant that there was little discussion of how environmental racism was tied to the water crisis; in contrast, the Chronicle directly discussed structural racism in politics in relation to Flint (Rieper, 2018). Further, the framing of race in black newspapers tended to be paired with a frame of community, focusing on unity as well as ties to church in faith, while mainstream newspapers were more likely to tie racial demographics to poverty or crime, “reminiscent of covert racist language in frames from other mainstream news coverage of race and […] tragedy involving black victims” (Rieper, 2018, p. 46). The continual pairing of blackness and poverty

13 without discussion of how structural racism contributed to Flint’s high poverty rate “creates a link between being black and being poor in the mind of the reader, perpetuating problem definitions” that portrays communities such as Flint as “somehow deserving to be poisoned” (Rieper, 2018, p. 50). In contrast, the focus on community and humanity in black newspapers generated a sympathetic response from readers. Black-owned newspapers’ framing of the Flint crisis suggests the importance of highlighting the affected community’s voices in cases of environmental injustice, as these portrayals are more empathetic and empowering—which may better support advocacy than the blame-centric, colorblind rhetoric in mainstream media.

Mass Media Representation of Issues and Advocates Portrayals of Native American Environmental Justice Another minority group of particular importance to the environmental justice movement is Native Americans, who represent the most impoverished racial group in the United States, suffer disproportionately from pollution from mining operations and nuclear testing, and have faced “more than 500 years of repression, ongoing conflicts over sovereignty, and battles to retain treaty rights” (Clark, 2002, p. 410). Despite being uniquely burdened by environmental injustice, Native Americans are also seen as leaders in the fight against climate change, as Indigenous leadership and knowledge has been critical to protecting wildlife, countering destructive environmental rollbacks, and protecting some of the most naturally resource-rich places on earth through land stewardship (Stefani et al., 2021). Indigenous peoples globally make up less than five percent of the world’s population, but manage “roughly 80 percent of the ecosystems necessary to maintain and protect balance on our planet” (Toney, 2021).

Yet, a study on framing of indigenous peoples in newspapers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand found that indigenous suffering has been used by the media

14 to ‘sell’ climate mitigation efforts to the public but coverage fails to emphasize the importance of including indigenous peoples in mitigation decision-making—and generally does not identify the causes of indigenous suffering as rooted in colonization and marginalization (Belfer et al., 2017).

Discussion of indigenous knowledge has primarily been limited to “a means of corroborating scientific knowledge, or in accordance with romanticized portrayals of Indigenous peoples” (Belfer et al., 2017, p. 57). Without considering legacies of colonization and the contributions that indigenous peoples have made to alleviating environmental issues, articles that “merely note that communities have built permanent settlements in remote, fragile locations […] promote interpretations that place blame on Indigenous communities,” delegitimizing indigenous activists when Native Americans were often forced to sign unfair land treaties that placed them in vulnerable locations (Belfer et al., 2017, p. 66).

For example, the Quileute Tribe “were coerced into ceding their land under false pretenses,” trapping them in a tsunami zone since 1855 (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 235). They have since fought for decades to claim land farther inland. The Tribe gained public attention when it was featured in the wildly popular Twilight (2008-2012) film franchise, with one of the protagonists of the series, Jacob Black portrayed by Taylor Lautner, described as a werewolf of the Quileute Tribe. A study analyzing news coverage of the Quileute before and after its feature in Twilight found that “there was no news media coverage of the Quileute Tribe’s efforts to get out of the tsunami zone prior to 2006,” and that articles tended to use language that “suggests that the Tribe is primitive, violent, or simply anachronistic” (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 241).

Quileute attempts to draw attention to their plight, such as blocking public access to a popular beach, were described by the New York Times as a “modern-day assault,” and Tribe members’ perspectives were not included (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 241). From 2010 to 2014, however,

15 there were more articles about the Quileute’s attempt to relocate, and the newly popular Lautner also lobbied on the Tribe’s behalf (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017). When a tsunami did indeed hit the coast in 2011, news coverage of the disaster created urgency to protect the Tribe’s safety, and positive ‘public safety’ frames were reinforced by more frequent direct quoting of Tribe members (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017). In 2012, President Barack Obama signed the Quileute Tribe Tsunami and Flood Protection Act, which enabled the Tribe to move out of the danger zone—leading to celebratory articles with headlines such as “Twilight Tribe Wins Land Transfer” (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 242).

The long overdue victory of the Quileute demonstrates problems with existing coverage of Native American environmental injustice issues as well as directions for future coverage. The danger that the Quileute were placed into for hundreds of years was minimized until they became relevant in popular culture, reflecting how “for various environmental justice issues experienced

by Indigenous groups to gain sufficient attention (and therefore, perhaps, resolution), they first need to be acknowledged” (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 243). Mass media generates visibility, determining which issues the public deems important. Additionally, as was the case with Flint, positive framing of the affected community that moved beyond stereotypes such as that of the ‘mystical Indian’ was crucial for developing audience empathy. This positive framing was achieved through another form of mass media: entertainment. While the Twilight franchise did not depict the Quileute’s land struggles, audience members and fans felt empathy and warmth towards them because of their positive portrayal in the beloved films. Centering Native Americans and other people of color in more narratives related to environmental justice, whether fictional or real, could increase the efficacy of future advocacy.

Environmental Justice Heroism in Mass Media

16 In the case studies examined thus far, environmental justice has historically been pushed forward by the minorities who are most affected by these issues, from the women of Salt Lake City to the black newspapers of Flint to indigenous populations across the nation. Yet, an overwhelming number of mass media portrayals of environmental justice advocates are white. A recent film about environmental justice, Dark Waters (2019), portrayed Mark Ruffalo as a tireless corporate defense lawyer who uncovered illegal chemical dumping by Dupont and “bring[s] justice to a community dangerously exposed for decades to deadly chemicals” (Haynes, 2019). Even earlier, Erin Brockovich (2000) stars Julia Roberts as a lawyer fighting against energy corporation Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E)’s groundwater contamination, and Fire Down Below (1997) stars Steven Seagal, a government agent attempting to stop a local coal mogul from irresponsible hazardous waste disposal threatening the community’s health.

These films portray white, educated people as heroes of environmental justice—and while Dark Waters and Erin Brockovich are both based on true stories, there are far more environmental injustice cases spearheaded by people of color that have not been featured in major films.

The elevation of white environmental justice heroism and erasure of black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) activists extends beyond entertainment media into news media, where there is “a popular narrative of Black people as victims whose rescue comes from white environmental activists and officials” (Prince, 2021). An examination into environmental issues in the New York Times found that a fluff story about white, affluent ‘Eco-Moms’ made the front page, suggesting that “the upper-middle-class people she depicts in the article are the demographic that cares most about the future of the earth,” while an article about inner-city minority activists cleaning up blighted neighborhoods was buried in the City section (Soll, 2007, p. 270). In 2020, with the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, opinion pieces

17 addressing the erasure of BIPOC environmental advocates from popular environmental history emerged. The Action for the Climate Emergency (ACE) organization noted that most people recall Sierra Club founder John Muir, author Henry David Thoreau, and politicians such as Al Gore when thinking about environmentalists through history, yet an understanding of environmentalism that features only white men “dangerously [limits] our view of what environmentalism has and can look like” (Howeth, 2020). Vice’s “It's Time for Environmental Studies to Own Up to Erasing Black People” discusses how “mainstream environmental scholarship reflects the interests of the mostly white and wealthy” but excludes the real, lived experiences of people of color (Gatheru, 2020).

An example of blatant exclusion occurred when the news agency Associated Press cropped Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate out of a photograph taken at the World Economic Forum, leaving four white European climate activists in the image (Malowa et al., 2020). Many viewed the decision to edit Nakate out of the photograph as part of “a long history of undercoverage of African voices by Western media in climate justice debates,” wherein African collaborators have often been relegated to the periphery of published research and mainstream media coverage (Malowa et al., 2020). Some even interpreted the erasure as evidence of ‘white savior complex,’ as people of color are denied a voice in discussions of climate change, leaving only white people to ‘save’ these burdened communities (Malowa et al., 2020). Whether in entertainment and news media or history textbooks, there exists a pattern of erasure of BIPOC environmental advocates and failure to incorporate their voices in discussions and decisions pertaining to their communities—despite a history of BIPOC citizens powerfully fighting for their rights to cleaner, safer environments.

Analysis and Conclusion

18 Environmental advocacy—including advocacy around issues that disproportionately affect citizens of a lower socioeconomic status—has existed for decades prior to the articulation of environmental justice, and activists have always utilized mass media publicity to argue for desired outcomes (Moore, 2007). Mass media has a complex relationship with environmental justice advocacy in that it has historically failed to contextualize the disproportionate harms suffered by relatively poor, BIPOC communities, perpetuated harmful stereotypes about communities affected by environmental injustice, or outright excluded them from conversations about environmental decisions. At the same time, responses to environmental injustice throughout United States history from the Warren County case to the Flint water crisis indicate that news media coverage is necessary for the public to place pressure on governments or corporations, though not necessarily sufficient for achieving a just outcome, particularly when the consequences of environmental injustice are already felt.

In the future, mass media coverage of environmental justice issues will need to address four key problems in its current approach: 1) the lack of stories about environmental injustice and groups that are likely to be subjected to environmental injustice; 2) the failure to use an ‘injustice’ lens even when environmental stories are told; 3) stereotypical framing of issues and their affected communities; and 4) erasure of BIPOC environmental advocates or failure to incorporate affected communities’ perspective in reporting, whether as quoted sources or journalists. These are not the only problems with the way that mass media handles environmental injustice, but represent a foundation for mass media organizations, particularly news organizations, to better support environmental justice advocacy in the future.

Lack of coverage is the result of a combination of factors. Environmental news in general is underreported due to lack of reporter expertise, and until recently, there was limited economic

19 incentive to report about the environment (Pezzullo & Cox, 2017). The journalism industry is heavily reliant on advertising sponsorship, meaning that stories must appeal to advertisers’ target audience—affluent, mostly white consumers (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017). As a result, most mainstream media stories about the environment depict advocacy as “a part-time hobby for white people” that takes the form of sustainable consumption rather than a pressing issue affecting all citizens, and certainly not as an issue that concerns minorities (Soll, 2007, p. 262). Because communities of color tend to fall outside the advertising demographic, they “encounter significant challenges to get adequate coverage that provides in-depth consideration, context, and accurate representation of their environmental problems,” and without media coverage and public attention, their problems remain unheard of and unresolved (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p.

245). To maintain appeal to a broader audience and decouple from the elitism that currently drives environmental news coverage, mainstream media could construct narratives that emphasize “how environmental concerns reinforce rather than undermine the desires, interests, and values of a broad cross section of Americans” (Soll, 2007, p. 273). Soll (2007) discusses the parallel trends of increased interest in environmentalism and popularization of nonwhite cultures; increased reporting about either of these two topics would benefit environmental justice advocacy by either directly supporting cases or generating audience familiarity and empathy with underrepresented minority groups.

Fortunately, the number of news stories and other forms of mass media—including recent popular films and documentaries such as Don’t Look Up (2021), David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (2020), and Before the Flood (2016)—is increasing. More important than mere coverage, however, is framing: building a common public understanding of who is responsible, contextualizing the issue, and suggesting how cases of environmental injustice should be

20 handled, thus providing people with the information and rhetoric to recognize and advocate against injustices. Framing by mass media “influence[s] which phenomena are contested as EJ issues and condition[s] possibilities for redressing environmentally unjust arrangements” (Chakraborty et al., 2016). When environmental injustice stories are not framed as cases of injustice, they are not connected to broader histories of structural racism and colonialism, leading to broader audience interpretations that are unfavorable to the communities impacted by environmental injustice—their poverty and vulnerability is seen as the result of individual poor choices or flawed character, making them ‘imperfect victims’ less deserving of the health and safety they request. The lack of an ‘injustice’ frame is often made further counterproductive when mainstream media frames the affected communities unsympathetically, drawing on stereotypes of outdated and angry indigenous peoples or lazy and crime-prone black people (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017; Heinz, 2005). Future environmental justice reporting must appropriately frame events, highlighting how certain communities are disproportionately harmed by environmental decision-making and connecting these harms to historical oppression, and frame the affected community in ways that garner audience sympathy to promote action.

One of the ways that mainstream media may more thoughtfully frame environmental justice stories is by bringing in more people of color as direct sources or journalists. Moore and Lanthorn’s (2017) analysis of two cases of Native American environmental injustice found that when the news media quoted Tribal members, this provided additional context for the issues and “with a few exceptions—avoided facile stereotypes, sensationalism, or misrepresentations” (Moore & Lanthorn, 2017, p. 244). Requesting input from the affected community is the bare minimum that reporters can do to ensure that the environmental problem is being represented in a way that speaks to the community’s experience; more impactful would be for mass media

21 organizations to hire more BIPOC journalists and leadership in order to sustain these voices not only when reporting specific cases of environmental injustice, but to ensure that a diversity of folk are consulted across all stories concerning environmental problems and solutions. Mass media has the potential to bring years of invisible environmental injustices to light and to push environmental justice advocacy forward by informing and empowering both the affected community and the broader public, utilizing its mass audience to place pressure on governments and corporations to bring neglected communities out of conditions that, undeterred, would cause permanent health and economic burden for generations.

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