Environmental defense scorecard: environmental justice. (Forum).

The struggle for environmental justice in the United States began to grow in the 1980s when activists started fighting to end the inequities faced by residents of low-income communities, often minorities, many of whom bear a disproportionate burden of environmental health hazards. In February 1994 the environmental justice movement came to national prominence when President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which focuses federal agency attention on this area of concern.

Environmental justice continues to grow in public awareness; today, news reports routinely focus on lawsuits and other efforts aimed at making neighborhoods safe from health hazards created by nearby chemical plants, factory farms, and waste disposal facilities. With public awareness has come public advocacy. In April 2001 the advocacy group Environmental Defense added an environmental justice section to its Environmental Defense Scorecard Web site. The new section is located online at http://www.scorecard.org/community/ej-index.tcl.

On the main Environmental Justice page, entering a zip code generates a report of the varying degrees of environmental burden within that area for different racial, ethnic, and income groups. The burdens include releases of toxic chemicals, cancer risk from hazardous air pollutants, and facilities emitting criteria air pollutants. These data are available for areas as small as a census tract, which can, depending on population density, be as small as a few city blocks. This is the first time that local-level environmental data have been analyzed for the entire United States to determine the environmental disparities experienced by different demographic groups.

Under the subhead Find Unequal Burdens is a link to a listing of all U.S. counties with possible environmental justice issues. Clicking on any name on the list brings up a summary report for that county with links to details about the distribution of environmental burden by demographic group. This report also includes locations of Superfund sites as part of the distribution of burden. Visitors can narrow down the master list by selecting a particular state, one or more environmental burdens, and one of seven demographic groups, including children in poverty, renters, working class people, families below poverty level, people of color, people without a high school diploma, and low-income families.

Each county report includes a link to the Environmental Justice Mapper feature, which generates an interactive map of the county showing the location of hazardous sites along with graphs of demographic data for various points on the map. Clicking on the symbol for a facility allows visitors to access an environmental release report for the site. The report details the facility's chemical releases and waste generation, ranks releases by the severity of their potential human health risks, sorts the releases into various health effect categories, advises on how to take action against toxic releases, and provides contact information for the facility.

Clicking on the Environmental Justice link back on the opening page takes visitors to an information page that provides a general background on the subject of environmental justice, a directory of pertinent community organizations, and links to federal programs that have been developed as a result of Executive Order 12898. These include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Justice, Office of Civil Rights, and National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Under the Research heading on this page is a link to a list of studies conducted on health disparities, the various effects of living in close proximity to hazardous facilities, and regulatory enforcement and implementation activities.