Peggy Shepard

It is unforgettable.

It's in the worst possible way.

It's a 75-mile corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

It's a continuum of petrochemical and plastics manufacturing facilities on acres of former plantations.

Now, these facilities have created an intergenerational history of death from cancer, with some communities suffering cancer rates higher than the national rate.

Now, 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.

Now, I first began organizing around these issues as an elected Democratic district leader in my West Harlem neighborhood.

In 1988, I co-founded West Harlem Environmental Action, known as WE Act for Environmental Justice.

And, you know, we began organizing, educating our neighbors to understand the impact of the disproportionate siting and permitting of polluting facilities in our communities.

We started out by...