The term "sacrifice zone" originated in early 1970s North American livestock farming to describe degraded pastureland, but was later adopted by a National Academy of Sciences report in 1973 to discuss coal-mined areas, and then broadened by the environmental justice movement to represent any area harmed by toxic industrial activity for the benefit of other regions. The term shifted from a technical term in resource management to a rallying cry against the social and spatial expendability of marginalized communities and their environments.
The term “sacrifice zone” emerged in the 1970s within U.S. land management debates, originally describing the overgrazed, degraded patches around water sources in livestock farming. It gained broader visibility in 1973 when a National Academy of Sciences report applied it to the lasting ecological and social damage of coal strip-mining in the American West. The concept soon entered wider environmental and political discourse, especially during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when policymakers used it to justify local environmental destruction in the name of national energy security. Journalists and activists amplified the term to reveal how certain places—and by extension, their inhabitants—were deemed disposable for the “greater good.” By the 1980s and 1990s, the environmental justice movement embraced “sacrifice zone” to highlight the disproportionate burden borne by communities of color and low-income groups, who faced toxic contamination and pollution from industries. Today, the term is applied more broadly to areas subjected to harmful extractive activities, from fossil fuel production and chemical industries to large-scale renewable energy projects, underscoring the ongoing trade-offs and injustices in the pursuit of economic growth and energy transitions.