Peggy Shepard

It should be no surprise that every community should have a right to a clean environment, yet some are sacrifice zones, sacrifice zones, communities living on the front lines of pollution and environmental hazards.

Now, this is a story about communities in crisis.

Mostly, these are communities of black and brown and indigenous peoples.

It's often a story of low-income communities, but race,

Race is the decisive factor.

Now, studies show that an average middle-income black family with an $87,500 income is likely to live with more pollution than a white family making $22,500 a year.

Now, my organization, We Act for Environmental Justice, works within a movement of hundreds of environmental justice groups here and abroad to address the disproportionate impact of pollution borne by our communities.

So I'm talking about environmental justice, which is a civil rights and a human rights analysis of environmental decision-making with a focus on the permitting, the permitting process that gives polluters permission to pollute within a regulatory standard for air, water and soil.

Now, these permits, they're an allowance that sacrifices the health of community residents.

Communities experience environmental hazards and pollution exposure in diverse ways.

In urban areas, mobile sources, contaminated sites, they're really the challenge.

And local governments generally manage the infrastructure of pollution.

But in smaller cities and rural areas, industrial and oil refineries, landfills and incinerators, they're usually the problem.

And in places like Texas and California, there may be no zoning laws that separate industrial facilities from residential backyards.

So environmental racism and injustice results from a complex legacy of housing segregation, land use and zoning discrimination, and from unequal enforcement and policies.

Now, decades ago,

Policies such as redlining denied home loans to people of color and to certain communities.

And this government policy reinforced racial segregation in cities and diverted investments away from those communities, creating large disparities in home ownership as well as urban heat environments of few trees and no open space.

So today, we're still living out the legacy

of those racist policies.