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Executive Order 12898

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The prevalence of environmental issues in the public awareness reached a point where government was forced to take action in 1979. When Henry Love abandoned construction of a canal in New York in 1920, the site was bought by Hooker Chemical and used as a toxic chemical waste dumping site for the next 33 years (Schons 2011). Then in 1953 Hooker Chemical sold the Love Canal to the school board, and construction of a school began. In the mid to late 1970s, when children’s shoes began melting to the ground and children got sick the residents organized and protested. Media coverage increased and showed toxic black sludge oozing into people’s basements (Schons 2011). The lack of awareness of environmental and health consequences of chemical dumping …show more content…

It was the first environmental justice action taken on a federal level, and it ordered that all federal agencies, programs, and activities be equal in their benefit or protection (Clinton 1994). It further requires the mission all federal agencies include addressing environmental justice (Clinton 1994). The order also established an Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice (Bernier, C. J. 2013). Executive Order 12898 was intended to ensure the full implementation and to supplement the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 promoting environmental justice awareness in all US environmental policy. It was also designed to supplement already existing law prohibiting discrimination of any kind in programs receiving funding from the federal government, and extends the same protections from discrimination established in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to one’s health and community being afforded the same protection from pollution and effects of exposure to toxic material (Clinton

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