Environmental Champion,

During this time of reckoning with our country’s racist history, it’s important for all of us to look at our own history and understand what role each of us have played in creating and upholding systems of oppression and institutional racism.

Here at Washington Conservation Voters, we are no exception. As a historically white-led environmental organization, we have contributed to the problem through the creation of some of our landmark environmental laws that have led to unintended disparities for communities of color and low-income communities. Today we want to take the opportunity to tell our story of one environmental law that did not consider environmental justice when it was created, how that law exposed racial disparities, and what we are now doing to address those inequities.

Read the full blog post on the Model Toxics Control Act >>

The Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) is responsible for cleaning up sites contaminated with toxic hazardous waste and preventing pollution that poisons our water, land, and communities. MTCA has successfully cleaned up over 7,000 hazardous waste sites throughout the state including toxic waste leakage to underground tanks at gas stations. 

Today MTCA is a cornerstone of our state’s environmental legacy. However, when MTCA was written, no one could have predicted how important this law would become. The original authors thought they were writing a law to tackle a few hundred leaking landfills and wood treatment facilities in rural communities, and that all of the sites would be cleaned up in a few years. But soon it became clear that the number of hazardous sites was grossly underestimated. As of today, more than 13,000 MTCA sites have been identified in our state located in both rural and urban areas.

MTCA is an example of how a historically white-led organization created environmental protections for some, but not all. MTCA has been successful in cleaning up toxic sites, but these sites are still disproportionately located in communities of color and low-income communities. These communities are not the ones responsible for the contamination, yet they bear the burden of the health, social, and economic impacts.

WCV is committed to centering those most impacted by environmental harms and in this case, that means recognizing the role our organization played in not recognizing / overlooking the disparities and doing everything we can to fix it.

Keep reading the full blog post on the Model Toxics Control Act >>

Onward,

Mindy Roberts
Puget Sound Program Director