ABSTRACT
Environmental justice addresses the differential exposure of disadvantaged populations to ecological health hazards resulting from inequitable land use policies and administrative decisions.
In the early 1990s, the Congressional Black Caucus, a bipartisan coalition of academicians, social scientists, and political activists, met with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials to discuss their findings of the EPA’s unfairly implementing its enforcement inspections, and that environmental risks were higher in low-income populations with a high concentration of people of color. The EPA administrator, in response, created a work group on “environmental equity.” The work group produced a final report titled “Reducing Risk in All Communities” in June 1992, which supported the risk allegations and made ten recommendations for addressing the problem. One of the recommendations was to create an office to deal with these inequities. The office was established in November 1992, and it was formally named the Office of Environmental Justice in 1994.
