Students and young people have fueled every social movement in the United States, including the civil rights, environmental, antiwar, women's movemen… - Robert D. Bullard

Waiting for government to act is recipe for disaster.

With its bottom-up approach, this movement has re-defined the term "environment" to include the places where people live, work, play, and go to school, as well as brought attention to how these things interact with the physical and natural world.

Most Americans do not live in a flood plain. Most Americans don’t live where a highway might have torn through and disrupted their lives. Most American kids don’t go to a school across from a chemical plant, but there are many communities where that is a reality.