Environmental justice has emerged as a major environmental law issue with almost no corresponding attention to the role that land use law can play in addressing environmental injustice or to the role that environmental justice will play in shaping land use law.¹ This Article explores the relationship between environmental justice and land use regulation and planning—a relationship that lawyers, scholars, judges, and policymakers must increasingly understand.

Environmental justice is about the growing awareness of, and response to, the distributional inequities of environmental hazards and locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) by race and class.² In the 1980s and 1990s, grass-roots community organizers and civil rights activists, civil rights lawyers, government agencies, legal scholars, and other academics began to study and demonstrate that low-income people and people of color bear a disproportionately high burden of exposure to environmental hazards or LULUs, particularly in the neighborhoods in which they live and the environments in which they work.³ There have been five primary responses to this phenomenon, each with corresponding conceptions of, or ways of thinking about, the environmental justice problem⁴: (1) to study the evidence and causes of the distribution of environmental hazards and LULUs (evidentiary conceptions)⁵; (2) to organize politically against proposed [30 ELR 10396] or existing LULUs (power conceptions)⁶; (3) to vindicate the constitutional, statutory, or common-law rights of those affected disproportionately by environmental hazards or LULUs (legal conceptions)⁷; (4) to heighten enforcement of environmental laws (environmental conceptions)⁸; and (5) to seek or rely on market mechanisms to address the distribution problem (economic conceptions).⁹