Mustafa Santiago Ali remembers, as a young Black man at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, attending a meeting about environmental justice in Michigan with older white colleagues during the early days of the movement. “I remember them saying, ‘I don’t know why we’re going to this. You know these folks are making this stuff up,’ and those were people who had a responsibility for protecting people’s health,” he says,
The push for environmental justice has come a long way since those early days in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a point where the Biden administration now proposes to spend billions of dollars to ensure that low-income and minority populations have equitable access to reliable infrastructure, healthy environments and economic opportunity.