Where inequity shows up in Maine
A few of the inequities our advocates are working to change:
Energy costs
Lower-income Mainers spend a disproportionate share on energy, a burden renewable energy and financial assistance can ease.
Public transportation
Mainers in remote areas or without a car have few options. Seventy-two percent of older Mainers live outside a fixed or flexed transit route.
Water quality
Pollution threatens tribes who rely on healthy fish habitat and safe drinking water, farms contaminated by PFAS “forever chemicals,” and communities whose economies depend on clean water.
Landfills
Often sited near lower-income communities, they bring contaminated groundwater and soil, ecosystem damage, and falling property values.
Access to lawmaking
Distance and technology gaps keep many Mainers from reaching decision-makers.
A movement rooted in justice
The environmental justice movement took shape in the 1980s, as people exposed how pollution disproportionately harmed low-income communities and communities of color, building on decades of earlier organizing around labor, civil rights, and health equity. A 1982 sit-in against a toxic-waste landfill in a predominantly Black community in Warren County, North Carolina, became a turning point. By 1990, advocates were pressing the country’s largest environmental groups to confront their own blind spots, and many, including organizations like ours, began working on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.
Injustice in Maine
Maine carries its own difficult history, including the persecution of tribal members and the destruction of tribal lands. The 1980 Maine Indian Land Claims Settlement Act, and the water-access disputes that followed, remain central to it. Demographic patterns have also left non-white, low-income, and rural residents with less access to a healthy environment.
In 2022, Maine took a step forward: the Legislature’s Environment and Natural Resources Committee passed LD 2018, defining environmental justice as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.
Our commitment to inclusion
We hold ourselves to this work, too. We work to amplify voices left out of environmental conversations because diversity makes our work more creative and effective. In practice: fair, open hiring; a workplace that respects our employees’ varied backgrounds; partnering with minority-owned businesses; and welcoming conversations with members who disagree with us. This is continuous work, guided by NRCM’s staff and board DEIJ Committee.
We stand with the Wabanaki Nations
For decades, NRCM has been honored to work alongside the Wabanaki Nations, restoring the health of Maine’s rivers, removing dams that blocked sea-run fish, securing the strongest regulations in the country against metallic mineral mining, and helping stop the dumping of out-of-state waste in Maine.
In solidarity with the Wabanaki Alliance, we support the Nations’ efforts to secure full recognition of tribal sovereignty from the State of Maine, and we’ve backed bills such as LD 1626 and LD 2007. We’ll keep working to be better partners to the people who have stewarded this land for millennia.
We support Black Lives Matter
Maine’s land, air, and water aren’t truly held in common until everyone can safely enjoy them. Clean air and clean water can’t be a privilege, and neither can running through your neighborhood or birding in a local park. On June 3, 2020, NRCM joined other Maine environmental organizations in condemning the injustices against the Black community, and we remain committed to confronting the systemic harms, from police brutality to health disparities, bound up with environmental justice.
On Wabanaki land
NRCM recognizes the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, Mi’kmaq Nation, Penobscot Nation, and Passamaquoddy Tribe, collectively the Wabanaki Nations, whose name means “People of the Dawn.” Our Augusta office sits on the unceded territory of the Penobscot Nation, and much of our work takes place on unceded Wabanaki land. We acknowledge this history, recognize the Nations’ inherent sovereignty, and commit to using our voice and resources in support of them. An acknowledgment like this is an essential beginning, but only a beginning.
