Environmental Map Delay Spurs Worries of Slowing Equity Effort

Some environmental justice advocates are losing patience with White House efforts to launch a new screening tool that promises to pinpoint long-neglected and polluted communities, arguing that such vulnerable neighborhoods are well known.

Many are so obvious that they have nicknames, such as Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” or the “Diesel Death Zone”—a California community home to the Port of Los Angeles, multiple oil and asphalt refineries, and surrounded by three major freeways.

“We already know these communities,” said Anthony Rogers Wright, the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest’s director of environmental justice.

“This is not metaphysics, or calculus, or cold fusion—I think we’re over-complicating it,” he said, noting environmental justice screening tools…