But that’s getting ahead of the story.
Twenty-nine years ago next month, activists from all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico, the Marshall Islands, Canada, and Central and South America, convened in Washington D.C. for the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. Sharing their stories of the air, land, and water contamination in their own communities, and energized by the stories of actions and advocacy that were being undertaken by their colleagues, Summit attendees developed 17 Principles of Environmental Justice that targeted both private enterprise and government as culprits. These activists asserted the right of all cultures and communities to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making on environmental issues.
Shortly after the Summit, environmental sociologist Robert Bullard, then a professor at University of California-Riverside, compiled a book of essays about the environmental efforts of activists of color. In “Unequal Protection,” Bullard included stories of real-life struggles in the aforementioned Cancer Alley, and the barrios of Los Angeles, and Chicago’s South Side. There were chapters about the fight against PCBs in Warren County, North Carolina and the discovery of DDT in Triana, Alabama. All of these cases primarily impacted communities of color. And all of these cases resulted in residents organizing to confront their own government as well as the polluters, to determine liability for the problem and to seek redress.
As a book, “Unequal Protection” served not only to showcase these environmental efforts by activists of color, but also to frame these as elements of a collective movement, rather than isolated instances.
At around the same time, Congressman John Lewis, with the support of then-Senator Al Gore, introduced the Environmental Justice Act in Congress. It was the first piece of legislation to address the racial disparities in how environmental protections were applied. Despite repeated efforts on Lewis’s part, that bill never made it over the finish line.
In 2004, however, with Gore looking on as Vice President, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which signaled that the federal government should recognize and address the impact it was making on minority and low-income populations whenever it considered permitting of factories, energy production and transportation systems, as well as conservation of natural resources.
When Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, came into the Oval Office, this effort lost steam, but it regained momentum when Lisa Jackson became the first black female chief of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama.
During this same time period, many states were jumping on the environmental justice bandwagon, passing EJ legislation of their own. Despite the growing recognition of the importance of EJ, many of these laws lacked teeth, however, and follow-up studies suggest that in many places, these laws failed to make much of an impact.