ABSTRACT
Beginning in 1990, two events served to define the problem of inequitable distribution of environmental hazards in broader terms of environmental justice. The first of these events occurred as a result of a 1990 conference— the Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards sponsored by the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources— wherein scholarly involvement in the environmental justice movement took a political turn. The second event occurred in October 1991, when several of the entrepreneurs from the Michigan Coalition extended their efforts toward assisting proto–environmental justice grassroots organizations by serving as advisers to the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. Despite the fact that national and grassroots activists began to split in their approaches to solving environmental inequities, they have remained cohesive in their criticism of the federal government's efforts to address the issue. During 1990s, the only institutionalized federal environmental justice policy initiative has been within the executive office.
