About Us

What Is Environmental Justice? | Advisory Board | Staff | History

Vision Statement
The California Environmental Rights Alliance envisions a clean and healthy environment for all Californians.

Mission Statement
The California Environmental Rights Alliance is dedicated to achieving environmental justice and improving community health in California.

 

California Environmental Justice Advocates at the Cumulative Impacts and EJ Summit in Los Angeles, February 2008. Photo courtesy of Jesse Marquez.

 

 

Goals
The California Environmental Rights Alliance has four primary goals:

1. Prevent, reduce, and eliminate the release of toxic substances into our air, land, and water.
2. Raise awareness about environmental health and justice issues among California residents.
3. Build a broad-based and engaged community of environmental health and justice advocates empowered to influence environmental decisions.
4. Hold government officials accountable for their actions.

Guiding Principles
In working to achieve our mission and goals, we follow nine guiding principles:

1. All people have the right to live, work, learn, and play in a safe and healthy environment.
2. All people have a right to speak for themselves in decision-making processes that may impact their health, safety, or quality of life.
3. All people have the right to know about potential, actual, past, existing, and future releases of environmental contaminants.
4. It is better to prevent pollution than to try to manage it.
5. Polluters must bear the burden of proof in demonstrating the safety and value of their practices.
6. Those responsible for causing environmental harm must pay for the problems they cause.
7. Government officials must fulfill their legal and moral obligations to protect the public from the adverse public health and ecological impacts of pollution.
8. When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.
9. The achievement of environmental health and justice in California will be hard-won and require long-term commitments of time, energy, and resources.

Supporters
The work of the California Environmental Rights Alliance is made possible through the support of many generous individuals and organizations, including the California Endowment, the Energy Foundation, Environment Now, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Liberty Hill Foundation.  Funded in part by a grant from The California Wellness Foundation.

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The California Environmental Rights Alliance relies upon your generosity to make our work possible.  Please see our Donate section to learn how you can support our efforts.