MEJAC’s statement excised from the full “No Petrochemical Storage Tanks on Our West Bank, A Compendium of Citizen Concerns“:

Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition
Demands Equity and Inclusion
in the Municipal Planning Process

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. EPA has this goal for all communities and persons across the nation. This will be achieved when everyone enjoys the same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work. In this sense, community leadership must exercise what can be described as “planning justice”.

Despite Mobile, Alabama being an apparent destination for much of the continent’s tar sands oil transport, ensuring environmental justice does not appear to be a priority. Here in our very ecologically diverse Mobile-Tensaw Delta, we are still reeling from the devastation wrought by the BP deep water drilling disaster. Yet in 2012, close on the heels of that unresolved catastrophe, we learned that there were plans to put the local drinking water reservoir in jeopardy by running an oil pipeline through its watershed. That pipeline corporation, Plains Southcap, threatened and coerced Mobile County residents out of their property with zero public participation in that planning process by using highly controversial criteria set by the Army Corp of Engineers allowing them to sidestep the Clean Water Act’s public hearing provisions. Continue reading →