If you can save a whale then you can save the air.

I think Amanda Little with the NY Times on Sept.2, 2007 wrote it best when she wrote, "Consider this curiosity of United States environmental policy: Countless federal laws have been written to preserve far-flung wilderness that Americans rarely visit (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for instance) and endangered species that we scarcely see (from longhorn fairy shrimp to piping plovers). Yet no legislation has been tailored to protect a landscape that is perhaps the most vulnerable: the low-income communities that shelter most of America’s polluting facilities."

She writes this because, minority and low-income populations should not be subjected to more environmental burdens than others. Yet disproportionately high pollution levels continue to plague poor communities, and race often correlates with which populations are hit the hardest: African-Americans, for instance, are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in areas where air-pollution levels pose health risks, according to a 2005 Associated Press analysis of E.P.A. data. Lead-poisoning rates among Hispanic and black children are roughly double those among white children.

Some may say that taxpayers will inevitably question why they should foot the bill for a sewage-treatment plant on the Upper East Side when it could be placed in a far less expensive neighborhood. Is it just economics?

A new bill proposed by HIllary Clinton, will require the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor and mitigate the health impacts of power plants, waste-transfer stations, truck fleets, refineries and other industrial infrastructure, which tend to be overwhelmingly concentrated in America’s poorest neighborhoods. See Clinton's profile here: http://votesmart.org/bio.php?can_id=WNY99268