NEWSBYPHAEDRA ELLIS-LAMKINS

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All, is part of Change.org's Changemakers program, a network comprised of leading voices for social change. Under her leadership, Green For All has become one of the country's leading advocates for a clean-energy economy.

Forty years ago today, the Environmental Protection Agency was created. It’s fitting that the anniversary falls just one week after Thanksgiving, because every American from every state should be grateful for the Agency’s work.

Consider that by 1990, the EPA’s actions had prevented 205,000 premature American deaths, 189,000 cardiovascular hospitalizations and 18 million child respiratory illnesses. The EPA has reduced 60% of dangerous air pollutants in the air we breathe. They have transformed 67% of contaminated Superfund Brownfield sites nationwide into livable neighborhoods and active business centers. In the four decades of its existence, millions of lives have been impacted by the EPA.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change.  Her contribution today is part of Blog Action Day 2010, a day for bloggers around the world to raise awareness about a single topic—"water."

I don’t remember how old I was when I learned that water is not supposed to have a taste. I grew up in a town that was surrounded by oil refineries and heavy industry, basically learning that water that tasted like chemicals and metals was normal. This was my reality, and unfortunately the reality for many young people growing up in low income communities and communities of color. The EPA estimates that more than 870,000 of the 1.9 million housing units for the poor, occupied mostly by Latino and African Americans, sit within approximately a mile of factories that report toxic emissions to the U.S.

Turning on your faucet shouldn't be a high-risk venture.  Parents shouldn’t have to worry whether or not the water in their homes is safe for their children to drink.  Cities and towns shouldn't have to worry that the water lost in leaky pipes will mean ongoing shortages or usage restrictions.  But these concerns are already cropping up in communities throughout the country — and they will only become more common as decades of neglect to our water infrastructure begin to catch up with us.

We have a choice: We can either be a country that continues to take shortcuts for the benefit of polluters, or we could be a country that sees opportunity in water.  With the proper investment in our infrastructure, we can conserve water, decrease greenhouse gas emissions, upgrade its integrity, generate revenue for cities, create green jobs and new green spaces in low income communities and communities of color.

We’ve seen some of the sorts of innovation that illustrate what’s possible.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Under her leadership, Green For All has become one of the country's leading advocates for a clean-energy economy and is redefining the face of environmentalism.

In our moments of hope, we look to and count on our elected officials to make the right decision. In our moments of cynicism, we fear that they will instead make wrong decisions in order to make nebulously defined “special interests” happy. So when our elected officials take bold action on critical issues, it’s important to stand behind them. And when that bold leadership comes under threat from actual, powerful, wealthy interests, it is imperative that we come to our representatives’ defense.

On November 2, Californians will have a chance to do just that. Proposition 23 is a ballot measure designed to kill green jobs and bolster oil and dirty energy by effectively repealing AB32, the Global Warming Solutions Act. It’s an important statewide and national issue.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Under her leadership, Green For All has become one of the country's leading advocates for a clean energy economy and is redefining the face of environmentalism.

As August draws to a close, we face a somber, sobering anniversary. Five years ago, on August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The storm -- and the horrifying ineptitude of the relief efforts before, during, and after -- left the region devastated. Most of those who died or were abandoned to "sink or swim" were poor people, people of color, or both.

Since that day, the Gulf Region has spent five years showing us where America is falling short. Starting with Katrina -- and continuing with Hurricanes Rita, Ike, and Gustav -- we have seen that we are simply not prepared to deal with the kind of extreme weather that will only become more common as climate change worsens. We have also seen that we are ill prepared to bounce back from such disasters. Many homes remain uninhabitable; many claims for support, whether from five years ago or five months ago, remain unanswered.

Starting with Katrina, the Gulf has also shown us that assertions that we have arrived in a post-racial era, where the color of her skin no longer factors into the quality of a person's life or the prospects of her children, are woefully premature. People of color have taken the worst of these disasters, and have gotten the least support in their aftermath. Indeed, a U.S. District Court recently ruled that the funding formula used to provide grants to New Orleans residents whose homes were damaged or destroyed by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita very likely disadvantaged black homeowners.

These storms may have given us a preview of the devastating weather events that climate change will likely bring down the line, but this year the Gulf also taught us, to tragic effect, about the immediate and devastating impacts of our addiction to dirty energy. In April, BP's oilrig exploded and poured more than 200 million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest oil spill in history laid the price of oil out bare before us: human death, the contamination of communities, the destruction of wildlife and ecosystems, and the disruption to the economy.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Under her leadership, Green For All has become one of the country's leading advocates for a clean-energy economy and is redefining the face of environmentalism.

When oil was steadily gushing out of BP's broken oil pipeline into the Gulf of Mexico, we were all desperate to stop the flow and get the oil that had already spilled out of the water. Sadly, we paid too little attention to where that oil would go once clean-up workers removed it from the Gulf. Now we know: far too much of it is being dumped in communities of color.

Robert D. Bullard, Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, wrote last week that 61 percent the waste from the BP clean-up (more than 24,000 tons) has been dumped at landfills in communities of color — despite the fact that people of color make up only 26 percent of the population in the coastal counties in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana.  The landfill that has received the most waste from the spill sits in a Florida community where three-quarters of the residents are people of color.

Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, CEO of Green For All, is part of Change.org's Changemakers network, comprised of leading voices for social change. Change.org asked Ms. Ellis-Lamkins to write about what motivates her work.

1. What cause or causes would you most like to promote as a Changemaker and why?

Building a clean-energy economy. The recession continues to plague working families throughout the country. And the costs of our dependence on dirty energy are getting more extreme every day, with the most heartbreaking example being BP's disastrous, ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The only way to restore strength to our economy and protect our country from the environmental devastation of fossil fuels is to build a strong, prosperous clean-energy economy.