Community Responses to Environmental Injustice

This "timeline" essay serves as a jumping-off point for more grounded documentation and analysis of the ways in which members of Environmental Injustice communities in Eastern North Carolina have responded to and countered pollution in their communities that is caused by biomass operations. These responses can include open letters, petitions, public hearings, protests or marches, appeals to to the government in the form of essays, phone calls, emails or other formal complaints, lawsuits, and general ways of calling attention to the issues by reporting on them in local newspapers, pamphlets, or online resources. Across the eight material examples I have assembled here, action seems to be primarily intiated by concerned members of a community who then organize meetings or awareness campaigns by working toegther with regional organizations such as the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the Dogwood Alliance, and the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network (NCEJN). In the annotations to this essay I provide links to these organizations as part of the examples of organized direct action I observed in reporting on biomass issues in relation to how communities organize their responses. The ultimate goal would be to continue to expand these examples in the PECE archive alongside field notes and primary sources such as interviews and their transcripts to find meaningful ways to engage with community-led anti-biomass efforts. 

Timeline is part of the greater Biomass, Eastern NC EJ essay from the Eastern North Carolina Research group.