"Environmental justice" means many things to many people. To local communities feeling overburdened by environmental hazards and left out of the decisionmaking process, it captures their sense of the unfairness of the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws and policies. To regulated entities facing allegations that they have created or contributed to injustices, environmental justice is an amorphous term that wrongly suggests racial-based or class-based animus or, at the very least, indifference to the public health and welfare of distressed communities. The company may believe it did not even create, or at most only plays a small role in causing or solving, the community's problems. To government officials often the target of environmental justice activists' ire, the term may imply that they are executing their responsibilities in a biased or callous manner. Caught in the middle between local residents and industry, the call for environmental justice may pressure agency officials to move from a well-established, technocratic decisionmaking approach to a largely undefined, populist approach that encompasses issues beyond the comfortable domain of the agency.

Efforts to understand environmental justice are further complicated by the term's international, national, and local scope; by its broad definition of the environment—where one lives, works, plays, and goes to school; and by its broad range of concerns—such as public health, natural resource conservation, and worker safety in both urban and rural environs. Disputes at the international level include allegations that governments and multinational corporations are exploiting indigenous peoples and the impoverished conditions of developing nations. At the national level, although an overwhelming number of studies show differences by race and income in exposures to environmental hazards, debate continues about the strength of that evidence and the appropriate political and legal response to such disparities. At the local level, many people of color and lower income communities believe that they have not been treated fairly regarding the distribution of the environmental benefits and burdens.