Transition Indiana

First, that individuals taking part in a particular campaign leave the campaign with more personal capacity than they had coming into it Second, that the community involved has more power vis a vis decisionmakers at the end of the campaign than at the beginning Finally, to concretely address the environmental hazard at hand

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.

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.

Toxic Waste at Kettleman Hills