Environmental justice vignettes, both US and international, at a U of M Natural Resources and the Environment class page

SNRE 492, a class at the U of M School of Natural Resources and the Environment, maintains a page of environmental justice cases here. It's a high level undergrad class, and cases come from all over the world. I encourage readers to browse.

Readers may remember that in 2004, Nevadan federal senators, including the allegedly populist Democrat Harry Reid, pushed a bill that expropriated land from the Western Shoshone tribe, and sold it to a Canadian gold mining company. One of the cases profiled above deals with the Western Shoshone and their resistance to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site. Personally, I think nuclear energy needs to be an option on the table. The waste does need to be stored. Although the proposed Yucca Mountain site is now in limbo, I'm not sure that it was an egregious case of environmental injustice. I think the reaction to the studies may have been exaggerated.

Of course, I am a bit of a fundamentalist on Indigenous peoples' rights, and if the Western Shoshone had said that Yucca Mountain infringed on their religious freedom, I'd say forget it. In addition, if the site had been approved but the Western Shoshone had sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, they would have had a good chance of success. The RFRA has been invalidated as to the states, but has been found binding as to the Federal government. It's a long story, which I might profile someday.