Carlton Mark Waterhouse is a professor of law and the director of the Environment, Energy and Natural Resources program at the Indiana University McKinney School of Law.

Young people worldwide have decided to stop waiting for the “adults” to look past personal political interests and immediate financial arrangements and address climate change.

And the litigation they pursue could influence better policy. After all, in Massachusetts v. E.P.A. — the 2007 case that obligated the Environmental Protection Agency to address climate change as a legal requirement — the Supreme Court influenced policy by finding it unlawful. This move forced the E.P.A. to make a scientific determination about whether greenhouse gases caused an endangerment to human health and the environment.

We are seeing citizens take up the fight against climate change in terms of its ethical and societal ramifications.

More broadly, we are seeing citizens take up the fight of climate justice, which frames climate change and pollution as an ethical and societal issue, as opposed to purely environmental. Environmental degradation is a social injustice because it almost always falls more heavily on marginalized groups across the globe — the young, poor, racial and ethnic minorities and indigenous communities. For example, African-Americans living in "Cancer Alley," Louisiana, the Ogoni and other tribes of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, and the First Nations living in the Tar Sands region of Canada, have all suffered from health issues and economic loss because of huge fossil fuel projects.

Government-allowed pollution kills hundreds of thousands in the United States annually and millions worldwide. Terrorism-related deaths are minute by comparison, yet we allocate billions of dollars to fight terrorism while hundreds of Americans die daily from “acceptable” pollution levels that protect corporate profits. How did we let this happen?

The good news is that groups unfairly disadvantaged through environmental degradation are fighting back. In New York, for example, the city government is finally starting to account for biased land usage: A settlement over noxious emissions from a sewage plant in the South Bronx led the city to agree, for the first time ever, to require any new sewage facility, in any neighborhood, to use the best available technology and operating practices to prevent contamination.

For far too long, dominant groups have rationalized unfair advantages and excused their failure to fight for change through stories of hard work, perseverance, sacrifice and cultural superiority. These tales ignore the privileges they enjoy that others are denied, like clean air, clean water and unpolluted green spaces. They also reinforce stereotypes that attribute poverty, malnutrition and pollution exposure to “poor individual choices” rather than the political decisions that allocate financial, educational and other social advantages.

The courageous youth fighting against the government remind us of our moral and ethical responsibility to fight for equal protection for all — today and for future generations.



Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

