A family lives in a Jersey City apartment that has lead paint on the walls.

A child in Newark drinks water from a tap that might have lead contamination.

A teen with asthma attends a Camden school not far from an incinerator spewing pollution into the air.

These realities are coupled with the fact that the same communities also have fewer of the good things in life, such as high-quality parks, open spaces, tree cover and green infrastructure.

This is the challenge of environmental injustice: Overburdened communities are bearing a disproportionate amount of pollution and contamination. They lack access to environmental benefits. And real people’s lives are affected.

The effort to create environmental change and to strengthen the public’s opportunity to participate in decisions about issues that may affect their environment and/or health is at the heart of New Jersey’s Environmental Justice program.

Just last week, the New Jersey Legislature passed an environmental justice bill that empowers the DEP to evaluate the environmental and public health impacts of certain pollution-causing facilities when they are proposed for an overburdened community or when the expansion of an existing facility is sought. The bill also will give residents of such communities greater notice about plans for these facilities, as well as opportunities to be heard.

And now, a look at 2003 …

In 2003, the Environmental Justice program was formalized at the DEP. Previously located in the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, the program was moved to the Office of Policy, Planning and Science in the Commissioner’s Office to enable it to engage all levels of staff in implementing environmental justice initiatives.

The principles of environmental justice came out of a recognition that low-income populations and communities of color often disproportionately bear the brunt of negative impacts from facilities such as waste dumps, incinerators and other potentially high-polluting activities – which tended to cluster in communities that had little economic or political power to resist them.

DEP’s first official attempts to address these disparities came in 1998, when then-Governor Christie Whitman directed Commissioner Bob Shinn to create the Environmental Equity Task Force to help formulate a pollution permit process that expanded public participation for identified EJ communities. Though the resulting regulations were withdrawn a few years later, efforts to address EJ issues ramped up considerably under Shinn’s successor, Bradley Campbell.

In 2003, the newly reorganized Environmental Justice program, headed by Director Michelle DePass, identified key EJ advocates throughout the state and co-sponsored two roundtables in Newark and Camden with the Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions. Staff from the EJ program also was also instrumental in drafting the landmark 2004 Environmental Justice Executive Order.

Executive Order No. 96, signed by former Governor James McGreevey on Feb. 18, 2004, was the first statewide executive order to address environmental justice in New Jersey. The executive order compelled all state agencies to consider the health and environmental impacts of their decisions on overburdened communities and provide meaningful opportunities for community involvement in decision-making, regardless of race, color, ethnicity, religion, income or education. The order also directed the DEP to convene a multiagency Environmental Justice Task Force and to formally reconstitute the agency’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council.