The Environmental Justice Resource Center (EJRC) is a comprehensive university-based center dedicated to education, research, and service. Founded in 1994 at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia-the "capital" of the South-the EJRC has built a solid national and international reputation in a number of fields, including environmental and economic justice, environmental racism, land use and industrial facility permitting, brownfields redevelopment, community health, transportation equity, suburban sprawl, and smart growth, energy, and climate justice. Through its community-driven research, policy analysis, training initiatives, and forums, the center is reaching a wide range of students, faculty members, and community constituents. Our work is also impacting the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as governmental agencies and officials.

The EJRC does not claim to be everything to everyone. For example, we do not organize. We leave that task to community organizers. However, we do provide research, technical, scientific, legal and other support to community based organizations (CBOs) and environmentally-impacted communities. Our center has a small, dedicated staff whose motto is "get the job done." As an historically black college and university (HBCU), Clark Atlanta University's primary constituents are black people and black communities. However, the university and the EJRC both have a proven track record in service to people of color and disenfranchised people in the United States and abroad.

The EJRC is just one of a handful of university-based environmental justice centers located across the nation. Much of our work supports the efforts of individuals and groups who are struggling to build healthy, livable, and sustainable communities. Having worked in this field for over two decades, I have seen environmental justice move from an obscure concept to now become a household word. Out of the small and seemingly isolated environmental struggles has emerged a potent national grassroots movement. The environmental justice movement has become a major unifying theme across race, class, gender, age, and geographic lines.

The decade of the 1990s was a different era from the 1970s when I first began this work. Some progress has been made in mainstreaming environmental protection as a civil rights and social justice issue. When I started in 1970s, few environmentalists, civil rights advocates or policy makers understood or were willing to challenge the regressive and disparate impact of this country's environmental and industrial policies---policies that resulted in benefits being dispersed while burdens were localized.

Today, we see some civil rights and environmental groups beginning to tackle the hard issues of race, class, and environmental decision making. Groups like the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment, National Lawyers Guild Sugar Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union, and other legal groups are teaming up on environmental justice and health issues that differentially affect poor people and people of color. Environmental racism and environmental justice panels have become "hot" topics at conferences sponsored by law schools, bar associations, public health groups, scientific societies, and social science meetings. Millions of Americans, ranging from constitutional scholars to lay grassroots activists, recognize that environmental injustice is unfair, unethical, immoral, and illegal.

The EJRC has made a deliberate effort to disseminate its work through books, scientific journals, articles, newsletters, videos, and the Internet. We want to reach a general audience while at the same time capture the interest to other environmental and economic justice activists and academics, students, environmentalists, civil rights advocates, community activists, political officials, planners and policy analysts, and government policy makers. As a people of color organization, we subscribe to the "Principles of Environmental Justice." We strongly believe that people of color must speak for themselves and do for themselves. Many of the issues addressed by our center can be subsumed under the broad umbrella of equity, fairness, and the struggle for justice. We often get calls from communities who need help. We do not "parachute" into any community uninvited. However, when called upon, we will do our best to serve those most in need of our assistance.

After more than a decade of intense study, targeted research, public hearings, grassroots organizing, and leadership summits, environmental justice struggles have taken center stage. Environmental racism is out of the closet. Still, all communities are not created equal. Some neighborhoods, communities, and regions have become the dumping grounds for all kinds of toxins. From West Dallas to West Harlem and from Southside Chicago to South-Central Los Angeles, people of color are demanding and in some cases winning solutions to their environmental dilemmas.

Environmental justice leaders have also had an impact on public policy, industry practices, national conferences, private foundation funding, and academic research. Environmental justice courses and curricula can be found at nearly every university in the country. It is now possible to build an academic career-and get tenure, promotion, and merit raises---studying environmental justice issues. A half dozen environmental justice centers and legal clinics have sprung up across the country. Four of these centers are located at historically black colleges and universities or HBCUs: Environmental Justice Resource Center (Clark Atlanta University-Atlanta, GA), Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (Dillard University of Louisiana-New Orleans, LA), Thurgood Marshall Environmental Justice Legal Clinic (Texas Southern University-Houston, TX), and Environmental Justice and Equity Institute (Florida A&M University-Tallahassee, FL).

Environmental justice groups are beginning to sway administrative decisions their way. They even have a few important court victories. Groups have been successful in blocking numerous permits for new polluting facilities and even forced the federal EPA to permanently relocate an African American community in Pensacola, Florida from a toxic waste dump. This dump was nicknamed "Mount Dioxin".

Environmental justice has trickled up to the federal government and the White House. Environmental justice activists and academicians were key actors who convinced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (under the Bush Administrations) to create an Office on Environmental Equity. These leaders quickly got the Clinton Administration to establish a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council or NEJAC to advise EPA. On February 11, 1994, President Clinton signed the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898. Yet, we are a long way from achieving a fair and just society in the environmental and other arenas.

In part because of this success, the environmental justice movement has received a backlash and its members attacked politically through frivolous lawsuits known as SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuit against a Public Person), investigations, and other forms of intimidation. However, these tactics have not worked. We are seeing an increase in the number of grassroots people of color environmental and economic justice groups emerge across the U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico. This is also the case in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Transboundary and international collaborations are forming among nongovernmental organizations to address global human rights, environmental, and economic justice issues.

Our center lead a team of scholars who wrote the 2007 United Church of Christ’s Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty report that found race to be the most potent predictor of where commercial hazardous waste facilities are located. Environmental injustice in people of color communities is as much or more prevalent today than 20 years ago. People of color make up the majority (56%) of the residents living in neighborhoods within two miles of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities and more than two-thirds (69%) of the residents in neighborhoods with clustered facilities

The twenty-first century offers some old and new challenges that will need to be addressed if we are to achieve a just and sustainable society. Global climate change looms as a major environmental justice issue of this young century. Climate change poses special environmental justice challenges for communities of color and poor communities that are already overburdened with pollution and environmentally-related illnesses. As seen in Hurricane Katrina that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, the environmental effects of climate change are real. We all witnessed the adverse impacts fall heaviest on the poor. We also see people of color and the poor being left behind in post-Katrina clean-up, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery.

Changing climates are expected to raise sea levels, alter precipitation and other weather conditions, harm fish and many types of ecosystems, and threaten human health with a broad set of problems, including heat stress and heart failure, increased injuries and deaths from severe weather such as hurricanes; more respiratory problems from drought-driven air pollution; an increase in waterborne diseases including cholera, and increases vector-borne diseases including malaria and hantavirus; and mental health problems such as depression and post-traumatic stress. Those most affected must have a voice at the table in shaping the solutions. Working together, we can achieve the goals we have set for ourselves and impact the future.