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 minimum cost to itself, despite the potential effects to others, thereby shifting its production costs to the general public, that is, to the commonsö (Brook 613). Because those portions of the ôcommonsö most cost-effective for corporations are those in the poorest communities, and because the poorest communities in America are populated with high concentrations of ethnic minorities, the ôburden of industrial wasteö will ultimately fall ômore heavily o...