The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment is an environmental justice 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 over 20 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 243,750 tons/year of methane, a green-house gas that is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming potential. 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.

Land Use

CRPE works with local grassroots community groups in the San Joaquin Valley to ensure that rural low-income communities and communities of color benefit from healthy, equitable land use decisions with an emphasis not only on changing the decisions, but how and by whom decisions are made.  It is CRPE’s contention that in the San Joaquin Valley, Kern, Kings, and Tulare Counties have consciously and systematically excluded community voices from past and present land use decisions, thus contributing it chronic poverty and poor public health conditions. Our overall approach  uses substantive capacity building, and leadership development trainings to increase community power vis-à-vis local, state  and national decisions-makers and to hold those decision-makers accountable through participation in public hearings, commenting on proposed projects, advocating before local, regional, state and national agencies - and when necessary litigation.

National

CRPE represents low-income communities and communities of color throughout the Country in their environmental justice struggles.  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.   Now CRPE is co-counsel representing Kivalina in a groundbreaking case, Native Village of Kivalina et al. v. ExxonMobil, Corporation.  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 and filed an amicus brief in Rosemere Neighborhood Association v. United States Environmental Protection Agency. CRPE is also co-counsel in the historic South Camden Citizens in Action v. New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection litigation.

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.