Capital Scene: Green Monster

IMAGINE a world where the Environmental Protection Agency can shut down a decades-old automobile plant because neighbors decide they don’t like the way it looks. It’s called “environmental justice”—and thanks to an executive order signed by President Clinton in 1994, it’s already here.

The concept of “environmental justice” was dreamed up in 1987 by the Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., who was then the head of the Commission for Racial Justice. It assumes that, as Chavis put it, our country is rife with “environmental racism,” defined as “racial discrimnation in environmental policymaking, . . . the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, [and] the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities.”

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David Mastio

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IMAGINE a world where the Environmental Protection Agency can shut down a decades-old automobile plant because neighbors decide they don’t like the way it looks. It’s called “environmental justice”—and thanks to an executive order signed by President Clinton in 1994, it’s already here.

The concept of “environmental justice” was dreamed up in 1987 by the Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., who was then the head of the Commission for Racial Justice. It assumes that, as Chavis put it, our country is rife with “environmental racism,” defined as “racial discrimnation in environmental policymaking, . . . the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities, [and] the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in our communities.”