Three Ways Dr. King’s Legacy Influences the Environmental Movement

Kayla Benjamin Climate & Environment Writer

Two years after Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, America’s environmental movement began in earnest with the first ever Earth Day. That initial movement would go on to fail at fighting for King’s values. White environmentalists focused their energy on beloved natural spaces, while ignoring the needs of minority communities and the voices of poor people. For decades, environmentalism seemed synonymous with mostly white activists pushing to clean up their mostly white neighborhoods, hometowns and parks.

Today, that has begun to change. Environmental justice has moved to the forefront of the conversation in many of the most important environmental policymaking spaces, in the U.S. and internationally. Major funding has flowed to the movement, and the green workforce has become far more diverse in recent years. The change is slow, inadequate and long overdue—but it is happening.

And that change is part of King’s legacy. Even in its tactics—disrupting traffic, staging sit-ins—today’s climate and environmental movements owe a debt to the fight for civil rights. Today’s increasingly powerful environmental justice movement has its roots in much of King’s philosophy.

More than fifty years after his death, the reverend’s teachings continue to wind their way through the modern-day fights for equal access to clean air, water and soil.

UNDERSTANDING POLLUTION’S HARMS

In a November 1967 lecture, three years before the mainstream environmental movement fully emerged in the U.S., King warned that “the cities are gasping in polluted air and enduring contaminated water.”

As early as the 1950s, King expressed worries about “the survival of the world,” particularly in regard to the environmental impacts of nuclear testing and nuclear weapons. “It is very nice to drink milk at an unsegregated lunch counter — but not when there’s strontium 90 in it,” he said in the spring of 1960.

Many of today’s prominent environmental justice advocates see faith as central to their activism work, just as King understood that the fight for civil rights was a divine cause.

“I was raised in the Black church in the South,” said Heather McTeer Toney, vice president of community engagement for the Environmental Defense Fund. “There is a responsibility that I have to not only care for creation in the environment and humanity in the same way that Christ cares for me.”

King only rarely spoke about the environment directly. But Dr. Drew Dellinger, an award-winning author and former scholar-in-residence at Stanford University’s King Institute, argues that the reverend’s words offer “hints and glimpses” that show “King’s vision was ahead of its time in linking cosmology, social justice, and ecological consciousness.”

Emphasizing Interconnections

Decades in advance, King articulated one of the central principles of the environmental justice movement: that many seemingly disparate issues—like poverty, racism and pollution—are inextricably linked to one another, and that recognizing that interconnectedness is vital in the fight for justice everywhere. He saw the anti-war, labor and civil rights movements as interlocking pieces of a global struggle.

In his 1967 Christmas sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, King focused on global interdependence, arguing that world peace required “a world perspective.” He went on to broaden that idea even further: “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated.” Both the early environmental movement of the 1970s and today’s environmental justice movement have stood on that same principle.

Seeing Nature As Divine

In a handwritten sermon draft from the early 1950s (digitally archived in the King Center), King discussed the connections he saw between the natural and the spiritual.

Reminiscing about his time in seminary, he wrote, “everyday I would sit [on] the edge of the campus by the side of the river and watch the beauties of nature. My friends in this experience I saw G-d.”

*The author writes the word G-d with a dash as part of a custom practiced by some Jewish people that aims to prevent the erasure or destruction of G-d’s name. Because erasing G-d’s name is prohibited, she tries not to write it in places where it could be erased or thrown out. WI