Environmental justice studies begins with the assumption of a very specific kind of racism--environmental racism-- when the environments of people of color and the poor are targeted for polluting industrial practices that inevitably result in dire consequences to human health. By far the worst kind of pollution is that generated by the nuclear industry. The affects of testing and waste disposal last for tens of thousands of years, rendering an environment uninhabitable for human or other life forms. Arguably, it is indigenous peoples who have historically been the most affected by the nuclear era, not just in the US but internationally, in what we can call nuclear racism.
Entire communities were forced off their lands in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958 when United States detonated 66 nuclear test bombs. People in neighboring islands downwind from the test sites continue to suffer from extremely high rates of cancer, stillbirth and other congenital abnormalities as a result of the nuclear fallout. In later years, Marshall Islanders would be manipulated into economic dependency on the US through the Compact of Free Association, which also happened to secure the future of American military facilities on Kwajalein Island, ground zero for the Star Wars ballistic missile program testing.
In the United States the presence of large uranium deposits, approximately 70% of which are located on Indian lands, continue to have devastating effects in native communities on the Navajo Nation and other Southwest Pueblos as well as on the Pine Ridge reservation as a result of mining. Other tribal communities in the Northwest such as the Yakima and Umatilla in Washington live with contamination from plutonium enrichment at the Hanford site. There, hundreds of thousands of gallons of highly radioactive waste have seeped into the ground and the Columbia River as a result of leakage for over 20 years. For more in-depth information about nuclear contamination in Indian country, read my article Nuclear Nightmares: the Nuclear Weapons Industry in Indian Country.