Their assignment: Translate DOJ’s federal environmental justice strategy into action that is appropriate for their states, cities and neighborhoods. Advertisement“I like to call them a small army, spread across the country,” said Cynthia Ferguson, director of DOJ’s Office of Environmental Justice, which is housed within ENRD. “They’ve set up a system so the communities realize that, yes, your local DOJ does environmental work, and you can raise environmental justice issues with them,” said Ferguson. “That was really to try to focus resources on environmental justice, to have prosecutors who were spending more of their time on environmental justice cases and so that we were ready to step up on any issue,” he said. “An environmental justice evaluation is complicated and nuanced,” he said, “and there is no individual equation that you can use and pop in some demographics and say, boom, there’s an environmental justice community.”

Source: New York Times October 17, 2023 16:17 UTC