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Boomer Consumer
Slowdown of toxic waste cleanup endangering American’s health, consumer groups say By Rita R. Robison on February 20, 2021 at 6:53 PM
One in six Americans lives within three miles of a toxic waste site so dangerous that it has been approved or proposed for cleanup under the federal government’s Superfund program.
However, there’s not enough money to pay for the work, according to Environmental Protection Agency data analyzed in a report from the U.S. PIRG Education Fund and Environment America Research & Policy Center.
The report, “Superfund Underfunded: How Taxpayers Have Been Left With a Toxic Financial Burden,” finds that almost every U.S. state and territory has at least one Superfund toxic waste site, and cleanup efforts are lagging because of budget shortfalls.
This month s bookshelf highlights writings illustrating the inconvenient truth that communities of color suffer most, and most severely, when disaster strikes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has confirmed again a fundamental truth about the Anthropocene: When disaster strikes, the vulnerable take the hardest punches. Communities of color have suffered much higher rates of infection, hospitalization, and mortality, both because they are disproportionately represented in frontline service positions and because their access to routine healthcare is more limited.
This pattern has long been observed in studies of environmental and climate justice, as the titles in this month’s bookshelf show. Vulnerable communities of color face more and more serious exposure to environmental hazards and have more limited access to economic, social, and political remedies.