The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 led to massive investments in highway construction, changed the nation’s physical landscape, and transformed how people traveled and where they lived. It also wreaked havoc on low-income and Black neighborhoods, imposing undeniable injustices, making no aid available to support residents displaced from their homes, and doing little to protect them from deleterious effects on air quality. This Article reviews events leading up to and repercussions flowing from the decision to build the Interstate Highway System, focusing on Black and low-income displacement and its repercussions in Baltimore, Maryland; Columbus, Ohio; and St. Paul, Minnesota. It reviews the impacts of the environmental justice movement on the federal government’s strategy and on the current regulatory policies of the Federal Highway Administration. The authors offer examples from Charleston, South Carolina, and Houston, Texas, that demonstrate the limits of federal leverage on road-building, and conclude with suggestions for moving forward.

While the environmental justice movement has gained traction in the United States, the relationship between agri-food systems and environmental injustices in rural areas has yet to come into focus. This Article explores the relationship between U.S. agricultural exceptionalism and rural environmental justice through examining right-to-farm laws. It demonstrates that the justification for these statutes, protecting farmers from nuisance suits, in practice transfers power from rural communities to industrial agriculture by safeguarding agribusiness interests and certain types of production from lawsuits and liability. It considers how the original impetus behind agricultural exceptionalism—to safeguard the food system through distributed and vibrant farms— can be reconciled with environmental justice by repealing right-to-farm laws.

Seventy phosphogypsum stacks are scattered throughout the United States, concentrated in low-wealth and Black, indigenous, and people of color communities. These radioactive waste heaps have a long history of failures, and present a substantial hazard and unreasonable risk of harm. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should swiftly move to regulate these environmental and public health hazards. This Article examines the regulatory failures that have given rise to the proliferation of phosphogypsum stacks in vulnerable communities and sensitive environments in the United States. It argues that EPA has the authority, and with President Joseph Biden’s Executive Orders, the mandate to take corrective action to remedy these environmental injustices.

One legacy of the environmental justice movement is documenting the unequal distribution of environmental harms and benefits throughout American society. These inequalities are inscribed in our urban physical spaces by laws and policies designed to exclude African Americans and other minority groups from lands and spaces constructed and preserved for whites only. This Article traces this history, identifying ways in which laws designed to address racial discrimination fail to provide remedies for structural inequalities; and suggests that Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “equal dignity” approach in Obergefell v. Hodges has the potential to be a necessary first step toward redress. The Article is excerpted from the book Environmental Law, Disrupted, to be published by ELI Press later this year.