What is environmental justice? 

Environmental Justice is the right of all people and communities to equal protection, a healthy work environment, and equal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations. It recognizes that, due to racism and class discrimination, communities of color, low-income neighborhoods, and Indigenous nations communities are the most likely to be disproportionately harmed by toxic chemicals, exposures, economic injustices, and negative land uses, and the least likely to benefit from efforts to improve the environment.

● Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on lower-income people and people of color.  

● Environmental justice affirms the sacredness of the earth, ecological unity, the interdependence of all species, and the right to be free from environmental contamination and destruction. It is the movement's response to environmental racism.

Creating and supporting industry workplaces that perpetuate health and eradicate the flow of air, land, and water toxicities to communities downstream, into crop and tap, from animal bodies to human bodies, is crucial.

How does environmental justice impact the wine industry?

● The application of common synthetic and systemic chemicals (like the glyphosate in Roundup) harm vineyard workers and downstream communities, often disproportionately Latinx and BIPOC. Those ubiquitous challenges to health outcomes and life expectancy, combined with the public health danger of traceable quantities of systemic herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, are ending up in the customer’s wine glass.

● Monoculture, which drains watersheds and boosts fire threats across millions of acres of land under vine, is widely acknowledged to be destructive to healthy ecosystem function.

● Acknowledging alcohol’s use as an ongoing tool of genocide and oppression against Indigenous Peoples and that it remains an active challenge in many Indigenous communities is key to our industry’s social address of environmental justice.

● Gentrification of encroaching vineyards and wineries deprives local populations of a safe environment and robust watershed, building tension and legal disputes.

● Waste and pollution from retail and on-premise businesses can disproportionately

affect lower income and BIPOC neighborhoods in urban areas, perpetuating tension.

● Water use at the expense of marginalized communities coupled with wine industry-lobbied agricultural legislation renders limited recourse to such inequities.

● Engagement of Ecological Farming that sequesters carbon and reducing the wine industry’s carbon and water footprints are significant steps with multiple benefits to environmental justice.