Clinton orders end to 'environmental racism'

WASHINGTON, Feb 11 1994 (IPS) - U.S. President Bill Clinton Friday signed an order requiring federal agencies to ensure that their programmes do not inflict an unfair degree of environmental damage on the poor and on minorities.

The executive order requires 16 federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into all their decision making.

Carol Browner, head of the governmental Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), said the action seeks to ''bring justice'' to poor communities.

''For far too long, communities across this country -- low-income, minority communities -- have been asked to bear a disproportionate share of our modern industrial life,'' she said.

The order and accompanying guidelines come in response to growing complaints from civil rights leaders that pollution disproportionately affects minorities.

But John Rosenthal, Director of environmental affairs at the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), says it is not enough to deal with waste management -- the cumulative impact of disposal practices must be addressed.

''What will happen to people in communities when the dirty industries get out?'' he demanded at a press conference Wednesday.

According to a 1987 report by a non-governmental Commission on Racial Justice, there was a pattern of ''environmental racism'' in the siting of toxic waste dumps and incinerators around the United States.

The commission, headed by the NAACP's current head, Dr Benjamin Chavis, concluded that most of the largest and most dangerous landfills were located in communities with majority black or Hispanic populations.

And in 1992, the New York-based National Law Journal showed that minorities benefited unequally from federal pollution programmes, that cleanups of toxic waste dumps took longer and were less thorough, and that polluters in minority neighbourhoods paid fewer and smaller fines.

The NAACP, the oldest and largest U.S. civil rights movement, has long criticised a 13-year, multi-billion-dollar government programme designed to clean up toxic waste sites. According to Chavis, the so-called Superfund programme ''has failed the citizens and communities it was designed to serve''. The NAACP says though Superfund's primary goal was to protect human health and the environment, cleanup has been ''abysmally'' slow.

It says that legal battles over cost allocation and remedies have stalled cleanup, has generated huge costs, and diverted the programme's focus to fund-raising.

But Attorney-General Janet Reno said Friday the administration plans to ensure that ''environmental justice becomes as much a reality as the other justices that people are entitled to in this nation''.

The President ''has asked us to ensure all communities in this nation have adequate environmental protection,'' Reno told reporters.

The EPA's Browner noted that a trip to any urban inner city community in the United States would provide many examples of ''environmental injustice''.

''You can see residential communities immediately adjacent to large numbers of industrial facilities, toxic dump sites. We need to make sure that environmental laws of this country address the people most at risk,'' Browner said.

According to Reno, the administration plans to ''go after'' individuals and corporations who violate the laws. She said they will use investigative and enforcement capabilities to make sure there is no disproportionate risk to any group, minority, or neighbourhood. (END/IPS/YJC/94)

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