Meta, formerly Facebook, gifted $1.75 million to the University of Maryland’s Center for Community Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health to support the center’s effort to advance environmental justice.
The gift will fund a new paid internship program, new staff hires, and the annual University of Maryland Symposium on Environmental Justice and Health Disparities.
Researchers and community organizers at the center work with communities who are impacted by exposures to toxic waste, industrial facilities, and other sources of pollution that lower quality of life and lead to health problems.
“Our regulatory scheme has not protected every American when it comes to environmental hazards,” said Sacoby Wilson, an associate professor who leads the center, in a statement.
“Take for example the recent coal dust explosion in Baltimore’s Curtis Bay,” Wilson said, “That explosion shook homes and blew out people’s windows. It is shocking that we have industry right beside a community!”
In the United States, approximately 21 million people live within one mile of a Superfund site – a place where hazardous waste is dumped, including landfills, mining sites, and manufacturing facilities – according to the EPA.
Exposure to air pollution and proximity to toxic waste vary across racial lines.
A 2017 study by the N.A.A.C.P and the Clean Air Task Force showed that Black communities are disproportionately impacted by the nation’s pollution.
Black Americans are exposed to 38 percent more polluted air than white Americans, the study found.
And Black Americans are 75 percent more likely than other Americans to live in fence-line communities – areas that are next to an industrial or service facility that produces hazardous waste – the study says.
“With the threats to voting rights, civil rights and our democracy that we are witnessing, there is the potential of more pollution, more environmental injustice, more environmental health disparities,” Wilson said in a statement.
“We need more people to step up,” he said, “What affects people who have been invisible affects us all.”
