EPA

EPA

Should the EPA be doing more to fight environmental injustice?

Environmental justice is broader than environmental equity (equal treatment and protection under the laws, regulations and practices), emphasizing the right to a safe and healthy environment for all persons, and incorporating physical, social, political and economic under the environment. There is also a fierier than the term "racism" of the environment that can, intentionally or not, and suggests discrimination in policy development, law enforcement, and targeting communities of color for disposal sites and polluting industries.

Issues central to environmental justice revolve around the location of municipal landfills, hazardous waste facilities, landfills and nuclear waste, the manufacture and sale of unsafe products, international distribution of toxic waste, emissions in chemical plants, exposure to lead paint and other hazards to public health in urban residences, and occupational hazards, including pesticides on farmland. In addition, environmental racism is not confined to African-Americans but also Native Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color worldwide.

The emerging environmental justice movement in the 1980s has stimulated debate about the extent to which race, class, and political power is or should be a central concern of modern ecology and environmental management. Movement leaders charged that the major environmental organizations and environmental policy has shown more concern for the preservation of habitats and wildlife to protect homes and workplace rights. Some defenders to withdraw from ecology altogether, rather than identifying with a heritage of the whole social justice rooted in the civil rights acts of 1950 and 1960.

Some observers date the Movement for Environmental Justice in Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp. (1979), where African-American residents of Northwood Manor subdivision in Houston, Texas, filed the lawsuit class action at first (later, not successfully) to challenge the establishment a waste facility in their region as civil rights violations. The main event is an event related to Warren County, North Carolina, in 1982. Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., director general of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ), is credited with coining the term "environmental racism". He became interested in the relationship between race and pollution when residents of predominantly African-American Warren County RTA sought assistance in preventing the implantation of a discharge of PCBs in their community. The event did not reverse the plans of the disposal site, and it leads to the arrest of more than 500 people, including Chavis. However, the event has galvanized environmental justice advocates and a large-scale movement developed as a result.

His October 1991, a multiracial group of over 600 lawyers gathered in Washington, DC, the first people of color National Environmental Leadership Summit. In their principles of environmental justice, conference participants said the hope "to begin to develop a national and international movement of all people of color to fight against the destruction and taking of our lands and our community's .Dramatic charge of environmental racism, and calls for a new program of environmental justice has taken a central place. Among the objectives of the principles is to "protect our ...