CHICAGO-- Ever since factories began belching pollution at the dawn of the industrial age, activists have pressed for protection of the environment. But it wasn’t until about 30 years ago that a strong link was made from poverty to pollution, and pollution to health — merging the environmental and civil rights movements.
Hazel Johnson, whom you meet in the following audio slideshow, was a single mother who raised seven children in Chicago’s public housing while calling on academics, piecing together the effects of pollution on her community, and doing something about it. She first fought alone; then her work attracted others, including Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, who organized in Chicago as a young man.
While Johnson and hundreds of other activists nationwide struggled on local fronts to protect their communities, over the last few decades there’s been only moderate progress on the federal level. The government has struggled to find a compromise between business interests and environmentalists. Congress hasn’t passed laws to keep polluting industries from concentrating in poor areas. Courts threw out attempts to sue for such protections. So the fight was left to grassroots activists.
Johnson is hoping this election might change that.
As early as 1970, the United States Public Health Services acknowledged that poisoning from peeling lead-based paint disproportionately impacted African-American and Latino children. Still, the first coordinated action by activists targeting the unequal impact of pollutants on a minority community didn’t come until 1982. It was then that a rural black community in Warren County, N.C., organized a resistance when officials wanted to create a landfill for PCB-contaminated soil from 14 counties near their homes.
Indeed, it wasn't until 1987 that data correlating race and pollution was comprehensively collected for the first time, showing that race was the most significant factor in determining the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities, like landfills. The report, released by The United Church of Christ and called “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” found race was a more significant factor than poverty, land values, and home ownership.
As industries continued to concentrate in African American, Hispanic, and Native American communities, grassroots groups attempted to sue for protection in federal court under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled repeatedly that citizens couldn’t sue polluting industries without proving that the companies had intentionally targeted minority communities, and alternative sites were available. Intent was a must, and without being able to prove it, most groups saw their cases get tossed from the docket while others simply never filed.
The federal government doesn’t have to prove intent, however. In theory, it can take action simply based on evidence that a community is being disproportionately impacted by pollution.
In 1994 President Bill Clinton attempted to take advantage of this loophole. He signed an executive order reinforcing the 1964 Act's provision that federal funds would not be used to support discrimination. Clinton directed government agencies to leverage federal funding to both empower and force states to suspend industrial projects that subjected minority populations to a disproportionately high level of risk.
It was a huge step, giving activists a bargaining chip against polluting industries, as most businesses didn’t want a complaint filed against them with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Such a complaint meant the possibility of investigation, while the business’ projects were held up. But it lacked teeth, and activists say that in reality, the EPA didn’t pursue all complaints with equal force.
The pursuit of environmental justice complaints further faltered under the administration of President George W. Bush. In 2004, a decade after Clinton inked the executive order, the EPA Inspector General’s Office and the General Accounting Office criticized the EPA for not implementing it. Those bodies found that EPA leadership had not made environmental justice a priority; the EPA disputed their conclusions.
Meanwhile, throughout Bush’s first term, a Republican Congress signed off on reduced funds for the EPA’s environmental justice program. After the Democrats took power in 2004, former presidential candidate U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, the New York Democrat, held the first-ever Senate hearings on environmental justice. Clinton also co-sponsored legislation that would allow citizens to sue for protection from polluting industries without proving their communities were intentionally targeted. The bill is being reviewed in Senate committees.
Activists say such legislation is needed to codify the government’s support of environmental justice; President Clinton’s executive order doesn’t carry the force or penalties of an actual law. Earlier this year, two decades after the first United Church of Christ study, the church commissioned an anniversary report showing that 56 percent of people living near commercial hazardous waste sites are minorities.
Despite such evidence, aides for Republican presidential candidate
John McCain said he didn’t have proposals that specifically addressed the link between pollution and poverty. In response to environmental groups, McCain said that, as chief executive, he would appoint officials who equally enforced environmental law.
Repeated calls to the Obama camp weren’t returned, and the candidate hasn’t talked much about environmental justice on the campaign trail. But Obama has proposed a national task force on the health effects of pollution and increased grants to groups like the People for Community Recovery.
That's seemingly more protection than any other presidential candidate of a major party has offered before. And that’s good enough for Johnson — she plans to vote for Obama in November.
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