Advocacy and Environmental Justice

Many groups have sprung up in recent years in order to speak out against environmental injustice and racism. One of the most notable groups to have taken on this fight has been the NRDC, or national resource defense council. The group credits the beginnings of this movement to an event that occurred in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina when the state dumped 9,000 truckloads of toxic dirt into the majority African American community's city dump. This incident set off a firestorm of research which  found that the major producing projects within the United States are almost exclusively located in minority communities, and that somebody had to take up the fight against this environmental racism that is being practiced across the nation. The fight was finally nationally recognized by Bill Clinton in 1992 with his signing of executive order number 12898 which required all federal agencies to "identify and address disproportionately high adverse health or environmental effects of their policies or programs on low-income people and people of color."