Landmark encyclopedia documents environmental justice issues worldwide

The field of environmental justice has never had a single reference text of its own — until now. Researchers, advocates, and scientists have had to piece together information on cancer clusters, chemical spills, and pollution from scattered sources that rarely connected the threads. The Sage Encyclopedia of Environmental Justice, edited by Dorceta Taylor, the Wangari Maathai Professor of Environmental Sociology at the Yale School of the Environment, now brings those threads together in one place, with contributions from more than 300 authors across 26 countries.

Instead of focusing on single case studies, the authors of the three-volume work were directed to broaden their focus, connecting environmental events across time and geographic borders, Taylor said. An entry on bauxite mining in Jamaica, which has led to deforestation, soil erosion, habitat destruction, and water pollution, analyzes similar issues and impacts on communities in Australia and Guyana. Another piece on sweatshops discusses the connections between the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911 that each led to the deaths of low-paid garment workers who were mostly women and from marginalized immigrant communities. The plaza collapse killed more than 1,100 workers and the building owners dismissed warnings of structural issues. The Triangle fire killed 146 workers who were locked inside by the owners to prevent workers from taking breaks. 

“The scope of the project reflects that environmental justice is not a regional or even national issue. It’s a global phenomenon, but there was no one place where you could find information on all these events,” Taylor said. 

Entries are organized by theme and cover major events, theoretical concepts, methodologies, and topics including food systems, energy, agriculture, pesticide poisoning, water, climate change, and pandemics. The entries are cross-referenced so readers can follow one thread and trace it across movements, countries, and centuries. 

While Sage Publications initially envisioned an encyclopedia focused solely on the United States, Taylor said she pushed to reset the framing to encompass international issues, drawing on writers from across the world including Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and New Zealand. 

“Environmental justice touches on all our lives in a number of ways,” Taylor said. “But there has been a gap in knowledge. People know about individual events, such as the Union Carbide pesticide plant leak in Bhopal (in 1984), the nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979, and the petrochemical facilities that make up Cancer Alley along the Mississippi River, but not how it all connects internationally.”

The entries also trace global entanglements within environmental justice. One entry on malaria, for example, examines how pesticides produced largely in China and India — and banned for use in Western countries — are still used to combat the disease in parts of Africa, raising questions about whose health standards govern global disease prevention

“Environmental justice tends to be framed as a peripheral and novel approach to environmentalism, but it is actually a critical foundation of the broader environmental movement,” said Molly Blondell, a doctoral student at YSE who worked on the encyclopedia. “People may be surprised to find that issues that, at first glance, seem disparate from environmental justice are actually interconnected, and incorporating environmental justice principles may inform the development of inclusive and equitable solutions.”

The scope of the project reflects Taylor’s broader career and research, which has focused on environmental inequality, underrepresented voices in conservation, and funding disparities within the environmental movement. Taylor noted that she matched authors with topics that reflected their own experiences, resulting in many contributors writing about environmental justice issues directly affecting their communities.

“Those pieces made it come alive in a way that they wouldn’t have if we didn’t do our due diligence in having authors write about their lived experiences,” Taylor said.

Some of the encyclopedia’s most striking material involves connections that specialists may not have previously made, Taylor said, adding that several entries document the role of eugenics in shaping the American environmental movement.

“One piece I think is going to shock a lot of people is that eugenics wasn’t just white supremacy practiced by whites. Historically Black colleges were teaching courses in eugenics and using it in their coursework,” she said. 

Cheryl Teelucksingh, chair of the Department of Sociology at Toronto Metropolitan University, who is a contributing author, said she was drawn to the project because of the significant impact it would have on the field of study.

“Environmental justice is not just a lens for explaining problems that originated in the past, such as segregation and racial inequalities; it also unites a whole array of issues that are part of our present and future, such as climate change, food insecurity, and energy transitions. This is why the encyclopedia is essential and will have a significant impact on policy, health, ecology, and politics,” she said. 

The Sage Encyclopedia of Environmental Justice is available for preorder on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Publication is scheduled for July 2026.