environmental justice

As an organization dedicated to the creation and preservation of a healthy environment for all we are appalled and sickened by the recent murders of Black people by police (George Floyd and Breonna Taylor) as well as police complicity with vigilante murder (Ahmaud Arbery).

Clean Water Action joined the Moving Forward Network in holding a World Asthma Day Virtual Town Hall featuring elected officials, health professionals and grassroots leaders working on the front lines to address the root cause in “asthma hotspots” like Newark, Elizabeth, Camden, California as well as state legislators promoting environmental justice legislation. Watch here.

Today, Clean Water Action joined environmental advocates and community leaders from across the country for a rally and hearing in Washington, DC to speak out against the Trump Administration's rollbacks of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Check out the testimony of Kim Gaddy, Clean Water Action's Environmental Justice Organizer, who traveled from Newark, NJ to speak at the hearing.

Clean Water is working with our partners in the Green Justice Coalition (GJC) and a new technical team called Resilient Urban Neighborhoods (RUN) to explore and build out energy alternatives.

All Americans deserve to live in healthy environments, free from pollution and toxic waste. But people of color and low-income Americans are disproportionately affected by pollution every day. Clean Water Action was honored to attend today’s first-ever Congressional Convening on Environmental Justice to fight for Environmental Justice now.

Last week, Clean Water Action participated in the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environment Hearing at the State House.

Imagine growing up in a low-income immigrant of color neighborhood that has been subject to disinvestment and neglect. Imagine your neighborhood is also near neighborhoods with extensive wealth and resources and demographics that are nothing like yours. If you grow up in this type of neighborhood you may start thinking that you are not worth being invested in,  and that your circumstances say something about your value as a person.

My name is Jesus Alonso, and I am the Kern Environmental Justice Community Organizer for Clean Water Action. I was born and raised in Lamont, a small, low-income, Spanish-speaking migrant community in Kern County. I am passionate about our work in Kern, not only because it is where I grew up but because the hard-working people of Kern face some of the worst environment-related health impacts and poorest air quality in our state. Multiple nearby pollution sources, including agriculture and oil and gas infrastructure, continually fill our air with contaminants. 

As a self-proclaimed “social justice warrior”, I am ashamed of how late I arrived to environmentalism.  Growing up in Baltimore, I focused on police brutality, homelessness, and a faulty public education system.  I remember walking down Preston street seeing my community members throwing corner store trash in the road. I saw cigarette butts and soda cans in the alleyways, but I still didn’t make the connection.  How could I not notice the lead poisoning epidemic? Why did I consider sewage overflows and the Chesapeake Bay pollution to be a less important issue?