Environmental justice is vitally important to the mission of Our

In the hush between thunder and rain, a voice like a bell rings out: “Environmental justice is vitally important to the mission of Our Revolution.” In this saying, Nina Turner binds the fate of rivers to the fate of people, the breath of forests to the breath of children. She teaches that the earth is not a backdrop but a kinsperson, and that a society cannot call itself just while some neighborhoods drink from cracked pipes, breathe the soot of distant profits, or stand unshielded before the storms of a changing climate. Thus, environmental justice is not a fashion of policy; it is the ancient duty of a community to protect the weakest first, for the measure of a people is taken at the margins.

To speak of Our Revolution is to remember that revolutions worthy of the name begin not with violence, but with solidarity—neighbors turning toward one another to repair what is broken. The mission here is not conquest, but covenant: to secure clean air and water, safe soil, shade, and shelter as common birthrights. In this covenant, the smokestack’s shadow counts as much as the penthouse’s view, the asthma of the child as much as the dividend of the shareholder. Justice, in this telling, is not an abstraction; it is a map of who bears the burden of pollution and who enjoys the fruits of prosperity, redrawn until the burdens and fruits are shared.

Consider, as a lamp for the way, the story of Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982. There, a rural Black community stood against trucks hauling poisoned soil, laying their bodies down upon the road. Though power seemed to tower over them, their witness helped give name and shape to a movement—environmental justice—that insisted toxins have a zip code and that those zip codes, too often, are chosen by power. From such courage flowed studies, hearings, and, slowly, remedies. Their act was small by the scale of empires, but vast by the measure of the human spirit. This is how change begins: with people who refuse to be made invisible.

Or look to Flint, Michigan, where families opened their taps to water that betrayed them. Mothers lifted jars the color of pennies and sounded the alarm for the nation to hear. The crisis was not an accident alone; it was the predictable harvest of neglect, austerity, and the old arithmetic of whose pain “costs less.” The people of Flint—organizers, pastors, doctors, and children with clipboards—became teachers to the republic, reminding us that equity is not charity but design. Their persistence moved resources, policy, and conscience. In their struggle, we see Our Revolution’s mission incarnate: organize, tell the truth, and do not look away.

Thus the saying’s origin is twofold: it rises from the tongue of Nina Turner, but it is nourished by the long river of movements that joined civil rights with climate duty, labor with land, health with habitat. It gathers wisdom from elders who knew that a poisoned well poisons trust, and from youth who know that a scorched summer without shade is a verdict upon our priorities. It remembers that policy is the architecture of love or indifference; and it insists that our architecture be sturdy enough for every household, not only the hilltop few.

What, then, is asked of us? First, to see clearly. To read the heat map and the cancer map alongside the redlined map, and to understand that the same hand often drew them. Second, to act locally with the patience of farmers and the fire of prophets: plant trees where the pavement burns, test water where silence has reigned, build community solar where bills devour wages, demand transit where tailpipes choke streets. Third, to legislate with the tenderness of a parent and the rigor of a builder: strong standards, honest monitoring, swift enforcement—because rights without remedies are rumors.

The lesson to carry like bread in your satchel is this: environmental justice is simply dignity extended to land and neighbor at once. It says the wind should not carry sorrow more to one door than another. It says the future is not a luxury item. And it says that Our Revolution—any true revolution—must be measured not by the roar of speeches but by the quiet, durable changes in the daily air a child breathes. Let no one tell you this is too grand a task. The grandeur is already in us.

So go with a maker’s mind and a marcher’s stride. Join a local organizing circle; map the hazards of your block; show up at the zoning meeting; press for policy that puts health before haste; support energy democracy co-ops; vote as if your lungs were on the ballot—because they are. Teach these things to your children as you would teach them to cross the street: look both ways—at people and planet—and then move, together. For in the end, the earth will remember what we did for one another, and that remembrance will be our truest mission fulfilled.