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About the Center on Race, Poverty & the
Environment
The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment is an environmental
justice litigation organization dedicated to helping grassroots
groups across the United States attack head on the disproportionate
burden of pollution borne by poor people and people of color. We
provide organizing, technical and legal assistance to help community
groups stop immediate environmental threats. In the 16 years that
CRPE has been helping the poor and people of color resist toxic
intrusions and protect their environmental health, among our many
victories we have beaten toxic waste incinerators, forced oil refineries
to use cleaner technology, beaten a 55,000-cow mega-dairy, stopped
numerous tire burning proposals, helped bring safe drinking water
to various rural communities, stopped a garbage dump on the Los
Coyotes reservation in southern California, and empowered hundreds
of local residents along the way. Our ongoing campaigns fall into
three broad areas:
Air Quality. Since 1999, CRPE has achieved the following reductions
in pollution that would have fouled the air in California’s
San Joaquin Valley: 7,237 tons/year of volatile organic compounds,
10,220 tons/year of primary particulate matter, 29,600 tons/year
of ammonia, and 46,368 tons/year of methane, a green-house gas.
These are actual, quantifiable results of CRPE’s work, air
pollution that would have been emitted by dairy projects that CRPE
blocked, thus sparing Valley residents, particularly in our low-income
client communities, further health impacts. Thousands breathe cleaner
air today as a direct result of CRPE’s work. The cases are
part of our campaign to force the state to regulate agricultural
air pollution under the Clean Air Act. We are also partners in
the statewide Latino Community Energy Project, representing several
communities facing proposed power plants.
Clean Water. CRPE’s Rural Poverty Water Project assists local communities in having a larger
voice in creating local water policy for their areas. CRPE has
been active on water quality issues in many communities over the
past 15 years. We helped residents of the barrio of Smith’s
Corners in Shafter connect to city water after they had been forced
to drink contaminated well water for years. We challenged dairy
farms near Corcoran which would have contaminated local water supplies.
CRPE is currently working with individual local communities in
Alpaugh, Ducor, and Tuleville around water quality and water quantity
issues. CRPE represents residents in the Inupiat Eskimo Village
of Kivalina in northwest Alaska in their struggle against the world’s
largest zinc and lead mine. CRPE has documented more than 3,200
violations by the Red Dog mine, which discharges millions of tons
of waste into the Village’s drinking water source.
Civil Rights. CRPE has coordinated the national response to U.S.
EPA’s fitful attempts to define its civil rights policy;
CRPE wrote comments signed on to by over 100 community groups on
EPA’s civil rights guidance in 2000. CRPE represents groups
from New York to Alabama to California in administrative civil
rights complaints, challenging the disparate impact of siting decisions
in dozens of communities. CRPE is also co-counsel in the historic
South Camden Citizens in Action v. New Jersey Department of Environmental
Protection litigation.
Toxic Waste at Kettleman Hills |
Historically, CRPE has also focused on toxics. CRPE represented Kettleman City’s El Pueblo para el Aire y Agua Limpio in their successful campaign against Chemical Waste Management’s toxic waste incinerator in the early 1990s, and have continued to represent communities fighting toxic waste facilities since then. Representing Padres Hacia una Vida Mejor, CRPE recently forced a toxic waste dumping company to stop accepting radioactive waste at its dump near Buttonwillow. CRPE also helped secure the relocation of a Mixteco farmworker community that was living on top of a Superfund site near Fresno; this entire community of 80 families has now moved to brand new housing.
Beyond these campaigns, CRPE also focuses on organizing and provides training to scores
of activists each year, in California’s San Joaquin Valley
and across the country. CRPE has also produced a number of publications of
use to grassroots environmental justice activists, and for many
years co-published the journal
Race, Poverty & the Environment with the Urban Habitat Program.
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