When the environmental movement began in the 1970s, it reflected the priorities of its prosperous, mostly white leadership.
In the 1990s, however, a growing environmental justice movement is calling for special efforts to clean up minority communities, saying that inner-city black and Hispanic residents, as well as American Indians on remote reservations, are more likely than whites to be exposed to toxic wastes and other pollutants.The movement's approach toward environmental problems differs from that of the superfund program, which identifies specific waste sites and cleans them up.
"We look at the hazards in a community as a whole, rather than each being site-specific," says Charles Lee, director of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, who has advised the Environmental Protection Agency on environmental justice issues.
"If you were to take a bunch of sites, all of which may comply with standards, it doesn't mean that cumulatively there is no risk in that community. Moreover, there may be other sites that are completely undocumented."
Lee says the high incidence of asthma in many minority communities underscores the multiple aspects of environmental problems.
"Asthma is a controllable disease that is caused by several different sources and is exacerbated by many others," Lee says. "The incidence is so high in minority communities because of greater exposure to allergens, greater susceptibility to those allergens because of inferior living conditions and the inability to address it because many residents lack adequate health care."
On Feb. 11, 1994, President Clinton lent support to the environmental justice movement by issuing an executive order requiring that all federal agencies include the achievement of environmental equity among their goals.
The same year, the EPA created an Office of Environmental Justice and set up the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to study the impact of environmental policies on different income and racial groups. The council also will provide grants to help communities around the country identify and address local environmental problems.
Some activists say the environmental justice movement is getting a vital boost from efforts to encourage redevelopment of contaminated industrial wastelands in cities across the country. These "brownfields" usually are empty lots that once contained factories, oil-tank farms or smelters.
Because the level of contamination is too high to permit redevelopment but too low to merit priority treatment under the federal superfund program, brownfields often are left to languish as urban eyesores. Potential buyers are frightened away by fears that they will be held liable for past pollution in future lawsuits, while others give up because bankers and insurers refuse to provide financing and liability coverage for such risky investments.
The Clinton administration has introduced a two-year "brownfields initiative" aimed at luring businesses to locate in these lightly polluted areas. The program, announced last year by EPA Administrator Carol Browner, provides federal grants of $200,000 to industrial developers of polluted sites.
The agency has launched about 60 brownfields pilot projects around the country, many of them former superfund sites that have been partially cleaned up and removed from the program.
This year, Clinton expanded the initiative by proposing to grant tax breaks to companies that buy brownfield sites, clean them up and build new businesses on them. Under the proposal, included in the president's fiscal 1997 budget, businesses could deduct the full cost of cleaning up brownfield sites.
Environmental justice activists praise the brownfields initiative as a ray of hope, especially to inner-city minority neighborhoods that have few job opportunities for area residents.
"The heart of the issue is to bring back to life communities which are distressed," Lee says. "There is no point to brownfields if it's not going to be part of an overall strategy toward revitalization of the area as a whole."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)