Mustafa Santiago Ali remembers, as a young Black man at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, attending a meeting about environmental justice in Michigan with older white colleagues during the early days of the movement. “I remember them saying, ‘I don’t know why we’re going to this. You know these folks are making this stuff up,’ and those were people who had a responsibility for protecting people’s health,” he says,

The push for environmental justice has come a long way since those early days in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a point where the Biden administration now proposes to spend billions of dollars to ensure that low-income and minority populations have equitable access to reliable infrastructure, healthy environments and economic opportunity.

1月27日乔·拜登总统发布的行政命令设立了司法司法倡议，旨在为欠缺社区提供与气候相关联邦投资的40％的利益。它使基础设施，招聘和环境司法之间的联系明确，其中包括清洁过境，经济实惠和可持续住房，遗产污染清理和劳动力培训。

'Not Just a Goal'

“This is not just a goal,” said Diana Mendes, HNTB corporate president for infrastructure and mobility and equity,to a recent ENR conference audience.“The government will track it ... with impacts on funding, project priority and decision making.” The intention is to have environmental justice as part of every federal decision, from contracting to procurement, adds Matthew Tejada, director of EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice.

总统拜登的2022财年discreti请求onary funding proposes a $1.4 billion investment in marginalized and overburdened communities that includes $936 million for the administration's new Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice Initiative that the EPA will manage, with Administrator Michael Regan telling a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on June 9 that the effort “underpins all of our work.” It is set to include about $100 million for a new community air quality monitoring and notification program that "would provide real-time data in the places with the highest levels of exposure to pollution," said EPA.

酌情要求还寻求65亿美元的贷款，以支持农村社区的清洁能源，储能和传输项目，包括颜色的社区。新利18备用网址此外，它还提出了4.5亿美元，用于部落的气候缓解，弹性，适应和环境司法项目和美国司法部500万美元的环境和自然资源部门执法。新利18备用网址

Built in Racism?

While inequities exist in all infrastructure sectors—from highway alignments to wastewater treatment plant locations—finding solutions won’t be easy or without controversy. U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was praised and panned this spring when he stated there is “racism physically built into some of our highways.”

Some inequities still happen as lower income communities and those of color cope with not only disproportionately high pollution and climate change impacts and risks that can worsen when mitigation and adaptation measures are unevenly applied. Levees to prevent flooding from extreme weather events save some communities—often at the expense of nearby ones where flooding is exacerbated as a result.

In a new report in June 2021, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group and advocacy group Environment America say that 70% of federal Superfund cleanup sites are within one mile of public housing, in disproportionately low-income communities of color, with the U.S. Government Accountability Office noting in 2019 that 60% of those sites are in areas at risk of being impacted by flooding, storm surge, wildfires and sea-level rise.

新泽西州德国队的温室气体排放量减少账单。弗兰克帕莱尔，房屋能源和委员会主席，有一个array of new environmental justice provisions，以及一些资金概述。

对于依托公共资金的公立学校，环境正义不平衡比比皆是。通常，更高收入的社区有创造和维护更健康的学校的手段。大流行有“只致力于进一步巩固种族和社会经济线路的学校的不公平，”美国绿色建筑委员会最近的一份报告说。

States and cities, long on the front lines of the disparity, are already moving ahead to give more enforcement bite to environmental justice mandates.

Overburdened Communities

New Jersey's environmental justice law passed in September 2020 is seen as the most progressive in the U.S., focused on how or whether certain pollution-emitting facilities are built in “overburdened communities,’’ based on cumulative impact assessments and stricter permit reviews. The state now “is empowered to deny new sources of pollution in these communities, or require added pollution reduction measures from existing sources,” says Jonathan Smith, Earthjustice senior attorney.

NJ initially identified 310 target communities in municipalities, including those with higher rates of asthma and cancer illnesses and deaths..

Shawn LaTourette, deputy commissioner of the state Dept. of Environmental Protection, said in an issue-focused panel discussion last year that “our environmental laws, as they exist, do not look at the very finite condition of a host community. This law asks us to zoom out and take a look at the broader picture.”

实施条例尚未发行的amid still ongoing stakeholder interactions, but business interests are concerned about impacts to future urban investment and economic recovery. Ray Cantor, government affairs vice president of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, says that if the law “is not implemented in the right way, it could kill off certain businesses right away.”

'Country is Watching'

即便如此，包括华盛顿，伊利诺伊州，纽约和加利福尼亚州在内的更多国家正在通过新的和待定法律和行政单创造或增强环境正义保护。

Ali，现在在EPA 24年后为国家野生动物基金会工作，注意到各国政府的问责制得到责任，以确保环境司法资金进入正确的地方。他说他希望看到各级教育水平训练，以获得“下一组工程师和科学家，以处理环境不公正”。

"The timing is critical because the whole country is watching," says Maria Lopez-Nuñez, deputy director for organizing and advocacy of that Newark, N.J.;s Ironbound Community Corp. “This is about justice for Black, brown, indigenous folks, low-income folks in Appalachia, and others elsewhere.”