At the 2026 joint meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine and the American Association for the History of Nursing, Jeremy Greene organised a roundtable that explored the intersection between environmental justice and histories of health and medicine.
The environmental justice movement emerged from protest cultures of the late 1980s, culminating in the 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington DC, and codified within the EPA in 1994. While “environmental justice” as an actors’ term is both relatively recent and US-focused, it also serves as an analytic category, enabling an exploration of health, place, and dispossession across broader geographies and temporalities. By highlighting the intersections of toxic risks and marginalisation along economic, ethnic, and racial lines, environmental justice redefined environmentalism to address differential impacts.
Historians of health and medicine have something unique to offer and to learn from close engagement with environmental justice: as a historical moment, as a mode of historical analysis, and as a mode of engaged history.
Merlin Chowkwanyun will speak on how new methodologies and data allow us to broaden our notions of "environmental justice" and to interrogate the legal history that has largely been narrated - sometimes accurately, sometimes less so - by environmental justice activists themselves. Matt Klingle will take a broader history of environmental justice as the entwined changes to planetary, bodily and social metabolisms from the late 19th century to the present day, with particular focus on diabetes in relation to rural and indigenous health. Jason Chernesky will explore how 1980s healthcare workers, particularly paediatric nurses during the HIV-AIDS crisis, understood environmental inequalities and shaped ecologies of care in marginalised populations in American cities. Rick Mizelle and Harriet Washington use lead poisoning to situate case studies of environmental racism. In Mizelle’s story, environmental justice becomes an analyst’s category, following lead toxicity from the Civil Rights era to the Flint and Jackson Water Crises. Washington in turn examines how efforts to address environmental racism in the form of lead poisoning in communities of color, have repeatedly been undermined by the medicalization of diagnoses like pica, which putatively led children of color to ingest lead-paint flakes in heavy-metal-imbued housing. Jeremy Greene will highlight intertwined methods of history as advocacy in communities facing health harms from medical incinerators.
