An Environmental Justice Timeline
There is no specific founding point for the environmental justice movement, but it was largely created through the fusion of two other movements — the economic analysis of the anti-toxics movement and the racial critique of the civil rights movement — and the over-arching perspective of a third — faith. Other strong contributions have come from academia, from Native Americans, and the labor.
Significant milestones include the following:
1964 — The Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Title VI prohibited the use of federal funds to discriminate based on race, color, and national origin. The Act would be used in future actions both in the courts and by the executive branch to define and approach environmental justice issues.
1978 — Residents of the Love Canal area of Niagra Falls, New York led an effort, which led to the declaration of a health emergency by President Carter and the eventual relocation of the residents. In 1983 a lawsuit filed by 1328 Love Canal residents was settled for just under $20 million dollars. For more information on the Love Canal story, see the sidebar on the right.
1979 — The first attempt to use the Civil Rights Act to challenge the siting of a waste facility took place in Houston, Texas. In Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., residents filed a class action lawsuit to block construction of a sanitary landfill in their suburban middle-class neighborhood. Although after a five-year struggle the plaintiffs were defeated in court and the landfill was built, the case galvanized the African American community in Houston around environmental issues leading to a number of significant local changes in the way landfills are sited in Houston.
1982 — More than 500 people were arrested in protests over the construction and operation
of a landfill for disposing of PCBs in Warren County, North Carolina. The site had been created without local input or approval by the state of North Carolina as a way of disposing of PCB-laced oil that had been illegally dumped on North Carolina roadsides. The action was led by local church officials and the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, then head of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. In June 2001, some nineteen years later, the state finally began detoxification work on the landfill, completing the work in 2003.1983 — Prompted by the Warren County experience and a request by District of Columbia Congressional Delegate Walter Fauntroy, the United States General Accounting Office conducted a study of eight southern states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee) to determine the correlation between the location of hazardous waste landfills and the racial and economic status of the surrounding communities. The report, Siting of Hazardous Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities, showed a clear bias in landfill placement, with three out of every four landfills sited near predominantly minority communities even though such communities made up only twenty percent of the region's population.
1987 — The UCC Commission for Racial Justice (now part of UCC Justice and Witness Ministries) issued a report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, which was the first national study to correlate waste facility sites and demographic characteristics. The report supported the case that race was the most consistent factor correlated with hazardous waste facility siting. Among the CRJ report findings was that three out of every five African-Americans or Hispanics lived in a community with an unregulated toxic waste facility, communities with the highest number of hazardous waste facilities had the highest concentration of minority residents, in communities with two or more hazardous waste facilities or one of the nation's five largest landfills, the minority population was more than three times that of communities without facilities, in communities with one facility, the minority population was twice that of communities without facilities (24% v. 12%), property values and incomes were substantially lower in communities with commercial hazardous waste facilities than in surrounding communities without facilities, and three out of the five largest commercial hazardous waste landfills in the United States were located in predominately African-American or Hispanic communities. These landfills accounted for forty percent of the capacity of such landfills in the nation. A revised report that strengthened the conclusions of the 1987 report was issued in 1994.
1990 — The Indigenous Environmental Network was formed to address environmental and economic justice issues from an indigenous perspective on a national level.
1991 — With the help of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held, during which seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice were adopted. The Summit was premised largely on a challenge to the mainstream, white middle-class environmental movement and its lack of attention to the crises occurring in communities of color. The participants in the conference specifically rejected any top-down, national approach to their work because they felt such an approach would be disempowering of local leaders and communities. Instead, they brought the Principles of Environmental Justice back to their respective communities. Reauthorized in 2002, these principles have been a guiding force in the grassroots movement for environmental justice.
1992 — At the behest of the Michigan Group, a gathering of academics that had met in 1990 at the University of Michigan to discuss their collective findings of disparate treatment in environmental matters, William Reilly, Administrator of the EPA, created a Work Group on Environmental Equity. Reilly later created the EPA Office of Environmental Equity (renamed the Office of Environmental Justice in 1993).
1994 — On February 11, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, entitled Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations. Unable to compel a reluctant Congress to address the issue of environmental justice by way of legislation, President Clinton's order was directed to all federal agencies under the control of the executive branch of the American government. Executive Order 12898 mandated that federal agencies incorporate environmental justice as part of their mission by identifying and addressing disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects on minority or low-income populations in their programs, policies and activities. Specifically, each agency was required to develop an Environmental Justice Strategy that addressed these concerns. Finally, the Order created an interagency working group on environmental justice, chaired by the EPA Administrator and comprised of the heads of eleven departments, agencies and White House offices, to promote governmental collaboration.
2001 — The EPA Administrator mandated that all EPA policies and programs be compliant with environmental justice standards. Each office was to develop and deploy an Environmental Justice Action Plan for said standards in Fiscal Year 2003, making a commitment for implementation within the next five years. As part of this commitment, each EPA office was required to submit a progress report explaining how they had met their goals for that fiscal year.
2004 — Despite Executive Order 12898 and the EPA Administrator's 2001 mandate, in March 2004 the EPA's Office of the Inspector General issued a report, EPA Needs to Consistently Implement the Intent of the Executive Order on Environmental Justice, stating that the EPA had not fully implemented Executive Order 12898 nor consistently integrated environmental justice into its day-to-day operations.
2005 — In March 2005, Mossville Environmental Action Now of Mossville, Louisiana filed a petition with the Organization of American States Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to bring international attention to the issue. The petition alleges that the environmental situation in Mossville, with a major concern being dioxins produced by the vinyl manufacturing plants in the Mossville area, is a violation of the residents' basic human rights.
2006 — On September 18, 2006, the EPA's inspector general issued yet another report, EPA Needs to Conduct Environmental Justice Reviews of Its Programs, Policies, and Activities, which once again outlined the failures of the EPA in the Bush Administration to comply with the mandates of Executive Order 12898.