Janette Wipper

April 2004

Assistant NAACP general counsel and founder, NAACP Environmental Justice Legal Program
Age: 30
Passionate about: Fighting laws that allow toxic smokestacks and other environmental hazards in the backyards of people in low-income and predominantly minority communities.
Inspired by: The lawyers who struggled for more than 30 years to overturn school segregation laws.
Hopes to change the world by: Making environmental justice—the fair and equal treatment of all communities regarding environmental laws, regulations, and policies—a congressional and civil rights priority.

Janette L. Wipper gained a new perspective when she went to college in Austin, Texas, where nearly 33 percent of the residents are Hispanic. She witnessed blatant racial discrimination and segregation that was, she says, unlike anything she had seen in her diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. There was "separateness in Texas," she says, but what really struck her was the recycling plant that churned amidst the town's Latino neighborhoods, with trash trucks rumbling through at all hours of the day and night, spewing exhaust.

After college, Wipper traveled to Ecuador and had an experience that struck a similar nerve. Next to the indigenous community she lived in sat an American oil refinery that tainted the river the people drank from, burned acrid fires of crude oil and straw, and dumped a toxic brew into sludge pits. The native people, she learned, suffered high rates of birth defects. "The injustice slaps you in the face," she recalls.

"Whether it's by establishing legal precedent, a legislative enactment, or even prioritizing environmental justice on the civil rights agenda, my goal is to develop and provide real solutions for affected communities."

In 2002, Wipper created the NAACP's Environmental Justice Legal Program to address her environmental concerns in the United States. Through the program, she challenges the kinds of laws that make some American communities more vulnerable to environmental hazards than others. In particular, she wages legal fights against zoning laws and other regulations that segregate neighborhoods from the economic and social pulse of their broader communities with man-made barriers, such as railroad tracks and highways. Those practices can isolate neighborhoods and in some cases make it easier to impose environmental hazards on them.

What do you hope the Environmental Justice Legal Program will accomplish?
Wipper: Whether it's by establishing legal precedent, a legislative enactment, or even prioritizing environmental justice on the civil rights agenda, my goal is to develop and provide real solutions for affected communities.

One of your inspirations is the legal team that put together the NAACP's case in Brown v. Board of Education. Why is that?
Wipper: In the context of environmental justice, the Brown team's legal strategy is a valuable lesson. It took over 30 years for the Brown team to implement a legal strategy aimed at bringing—and winning—a succession of landmark cases designed to lay bare the inherent inequality of "separate but equal" before securing the Brown victory in 1954. A similar legal strategy is appropriate for environmental justice when most courts today refuse to recognize environmental injustice as a viable civil rights claim.

Knowing the reality of the communities living with environmental injustice, the Brown team inspires me to believe that a well-crafted legal strategy can change this reality. Even if it takes a long succession of cases to convince courts to recognize a reality they once ignored, the possibility of securing a landmark victory that would guarantee environmental justice for every community in America makes it well worth it.