Environmental Justice
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Advocates for environmental justice endeavor to stem a tide of environmental inequities that appear to disproportionately burden minority populations by exposing them to harmful pollution. According to conventional wisdom, the culprits in these cases of environmental racism are invariably major U.S. corporations, the victims primarily racial minorities and the poor. Since the 1980s, warriors for environmental justice have sought to codify laws and statutes prohibiting large corporations from exploiting the already meager social resources of minorities and the neighborhoods they inhabit. Such measures have included invoking the provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, tailoring equal protection rights explicit in the U.S. Constitution to suit environmental concerns, and a 1994 Executive Order (12898) guaranteeing that Federal Agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency make environmental justice part of their permanent mission (Huebner 58). Do major U.S. corporations target minority groups and the poor? Many proponents of environmental justice would argue in the affirmative. Consider the following scenario offered by The Social Science Journal, which presents a fictionalù but not atypicalù American corporation, ôMegaBucksö, which produces commodities that, through the manufacturing process, emit contaminants into the air and discharge toxic waste into the waterways. ôCorporation Megabucks,ö it is argued, will choose to ôdispose of its waste product at the min
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rnal does, that corporations are motivated by cost, not race. Racism, then, may be regarded as a consequence of environmental injustice, not a cause of it.
Indeed, as proponents of environmental justice have rallied for support in the halls of legislature, it has been difficult to prove that corporations have a discriminatory intent when making their selections for potentially harmful facilities (Huebner 60). This has hampered efforts made by environmental activists to use the U.S. Constitution to buoy their cause. In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court officially required that litigants must prove, when citing the equal protection clause of the Constitution, that decisions to build industrial facilities were racially motivated (Huebner 61).
Some recourse, however, has come in the form of a 1997 finding by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which allows individuals a private right of action to raise Title VI (of the 1964 Civil Rights Act) claims based on ôdisparate impactö, or discriminatory effect, against perpetrators of environmental injustice (Huebner 60). Title VI of the Civil Rights Act insists that no one be subjected to discrimination ôunder any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistanceö on the grounds of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1207
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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