Letter from the Chair
Pollution’s Chief Victims
Fifteen years ago labor leader Dennis Rivera and I jointly published an op-ed in The New York Times titled Pollution’s Chief Victims. We cited cases around the nation where toxic waste, sewage plants and other hazardous facilities were foisted on minority and low-income communities. In 1994 President Clinton signed an Executive Order requiring the federal government to take race into account in environmental decision-making. But in 2007 things have only gotten worse.
What we wrote in 1992 is just as true today: Inexorably, society’s wastes flow toward communities debilitated by social unrest, high illiteracy, unemployment and low voter registration. Those communities have become toxic dumping grounds while receiving few of the safeguards that prudence and decency demand but only political power can obtain.
In 1992 EPA acknowledged that low-income and minority populations shouldered the greatest environmental risks and that the application of environmental controls and enforcement follows racial lines. In the past 15 years, researchers have piled up evidence of unequal protection from the law, of shoddy cleanups of toxic sites and of minority and low-income communities being stuck with our worst polluting facilities. And these communities and all Americans are paying an unacceptable price.
Dr. Robert Bullard, an author of Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States the seminal 1987 report on environmental justice, recently testified at the first ever Senate hearing on Environment Justice (he’s interviewed on page 46). The evidence of environmental racism that Dr. Bullard cited reads like a trail of tears:
A 1999 Institute of Medicine study concluded that low-income and people of color communities are exposed to higher levels of pollution than the rest of the nation and that these same populations experience certain diseases in greater numbers than more affluent white communities.
In 2000 The Dallas Morning News and University of Texas-Dallas reported that nearly half (870,000 of the 1.9 million) of the nation’s housing units for the poor, mostly minorities, sit within a mile of factories that reported toxic emissions to U.S. EPA.
In 2001 the Center for Health, Environment and Justice reported that more than 1,200 schools — serving 600,000 low-income and minority students in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Michigan and California — are located within half a mile of federal Superfund or state-identified contaminated sites.
In 2003 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that “Minority and low-income communities are most often exposed to multiple pollutants and from multiple sources.”
In 2005 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) criticized EPA for its handling of environmental justice issues when drafting new clean air rules.
In 2004 and again in 2006 EPA’s Inspector General chastised the agency for failing to consider environmental justice in important decisions.
And finally, in 2007, the GAO criticized EPA’s handling of contamination from the nation’s worst ever spill of oil, industrial chemicals and other hazardous materials in post-Katrina New Orleans and Gulf Coast communities.
Dr. Bullard was also a principal author of the 2007 Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty 1987-2007 report, which concluded that “environmental injustice in people of color communities is as much or more prevalent today than 20 years ago.”
Hazardous facilities are pushed into minority communities by industry because they receive less scrutiny from government regulators and environmental groups. Environmental injustice is morally equivalent to any other form of racism — it has immediate health impacts and in the longer-term destroys the cultures and vitality of our highest risk communities. Above all else, pollution is a human rights violation. We need to make sure that our laws, our enforcement and all of our institutions recognize, understand and eliminate environmental racism.
The solution to environmental racism remains the same: Better, stronger, environmental enforcement that protects every community and every citizen from pollution. Waterkeepers — fighting to clean up toxic waste sites, fighting to stop coal mining, fighting to protect wetlands, fisheries and communities — are on the frontlines in this battle. But like others throughout the environmental movement we need to do more to diversify our staff and directors racially and culturally, and support the environmental justice movement.
We must pressure Congress to ban the production of toxic materials that cannot be reused or recycled. We must push Congress to reinstate the Superfund tax to ensure that polluters are held responsible for cleaning up their toxic waste. We must fight to restore federal environmental protections that have been systematically stripped from the public by the Bush Administration, to rebuild sewage plants and water delivery systems, revitalize city parks and expand public transportation. Finally, Congress must pass the Environmental Justice Act of 2007 to give the weakly implemented 1994 Executive Order the force of federal law.
Society must recognize that economic and social injustice are a virulent form of pollution. As we endeavor to heal the wounds that afflict our planet, we must also heal the inequities that divide our nation. w
“Above all else, pollution is a human rights violation.”