We work hand-in-hand with frontline communities to remove environmental hazards and secure access to environmental benefits. We act collectively with our community partners to challenge harmful social and political structures, and to improve the environmental conditions in neighborhoods.

We support community-led movements using a full range of advocacy strategies to challenge the status quo. We represent frontline communities across the country to challenge polluters that harm health, safety, and quality of life; to close dangerous regulatory loopholes; to open access to information and records; to increase transparency into environmental decision-making and polluting operations; and to enforce federal, state, and local laws meant to protect communities from environmental harms.

Highlights from recent initiatives:

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  Michael Rubenstein for Earthjustice

  Maria Lopez Nunez of the Ironbound Community Corporation speaks at a public meeting.
  Newark, New Jersey: The Ironbound is a multi-ethnic, largely working-class neighborhood of 50,000 in Newark, New Jersey. The Ironbound also has one of the most polluted ZIP codes in the Northeast. We are working with the Ironbound Community Corporation to mitigate health impacts from a municipal waste incinerator, which is the state’s largest garbage incinerator and one of the largest single sources of air pollution in the community. Our legal intervention helped ICC obtain the state’s commitment to develop a long-overdue emergency response plan for chemical disasters that could occur at the toxic industrial sites in the Ironbound neighborhood.
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  Jessica Chou for Earthjustice

  Glendale residents speak out against the gas plant proposal.
  Glendale, California: The Glendale community was deeply engaged in fighting a proposal for a 262-megawatt gas plant, which would have been built near two elementary schools, worsened Glendale’s air quality, and locked the city into fossil fuel power for decades. In April 2018, after hundreds of concerned residents packed into public hearings, the City Council voted to pause the gas-fired plant proposal, opting instead to explore renewable projects. Community members and an energy expert put forth solutions that would deliver clean energy to Glendale.
• Ventura County, California: The Wishtoyo Foundation, a Native-led nonprofit dedicated to protecting Chumash lifeways in Southern California, fought a gas-fired plant proposed by Texas-based Calpine Corporation. The plant would have been built on the banks of the Utom, the Santa Clara River. Utom and its ecosystem is within Chumash traditional territory, and Chumash people, now and since time immemorial, live in relationship with the river. In May 2019, the company withdrew its application, in the face of heavy opposition and major energy trends showing that gas plants have no future in California.