Hannah Perls

It has been two weeks since the Tampa Bay area experienced what the Tampa Bay Times called its “worst hurricane in a century,” when Hurricane…

The push this week by a coalition of health, environmental, and labor groups for FEMA to use a key federal law to combat extreme heat…

Chelle Walton remembers how the water rushed into her home, the night Hurricane Ian made landfall. The 68-year-old found herself chin-deep in water, scrambling to…

Legal experts say a recent decision in a lawsuit over federal efforts to investigate environmental racism in Louisiana could stall civil rights investigations across the…

Two numbers help explain the Biden administration’s latest overhaul of federal disaster aid for individuals. One: The aid program has rejected 46 percent of the…

Civil rights law offers a tool for communities of color trying to stop unequal exposure to pollution. Over and over, people here have tried to…

Welcome back. In today’s newsletter, I have investigated the intersection of insurance and global warming where the two are increasingly in tension: in the south-eastern…

Back in 2021, President Joe Biden announced the administration’s new Justice40 Initiative through Executive Order 14008. The program’s aim is that 40 percent of the…

Back in 2021, President Joe Biden announced the administration’s new Justice40 Initiative through Executive Order 14008. The program’s aim is that 40 percent of the…

Push is coming to shove on the West’s most important river. The seven states that share water from the Colorado River are as close to…

More than 3 million adults were forced to evacuate their homes in the past year because of a natural disaster, according to a new Census…

The Environmental Protection Agency moved to block the Pebble Mine in Alaska on Tuesday, preventing mining waste discharges into the Bristol Bay watershed. It’s a…

The White House is directing federal agencies to steer billions of dollars in funding to 27,000 small, disadvantaged communities that were identified through a controversial…

Advocates have been trying for years to draw attention to the harsh conditions that people with disabilities face after natural disasters. Now federal data shows…

In one of the poorest counties in America, at the core of the Deep South’s rural “Black Belt” where sharecroppers worked cotton fields long after Emancipation, sanitation conditions sometimes seem to belong in the antebellum South. With no municipal wastewater treatment for the predominantly Black communities, most residents devise their own septic systems, which may or may not work, and which can leave raw sewage accumulating in backyards. “Nineteenth-century” diseases like hookworm have been found in many residents. Now, the Biden administration is making Alabama’s Lowndes County a test case in environmental justice, applying a never-before-used provision from the 1964 Civil Rights Act that advocates say could lay the groundwork for how the federal government addresses some of the worst problems plaguing communities of color around the country. ... Just days after taking office, the White House issued an executive order titled Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, and one week later followed with another, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, noted Hannah Perls, a fellow at the Environmental & Energy Law Program at Harvard Law. “There’s nothing different about the laws between Obama and Trump and now Biden, it’s just about having the political will to enforce them,” Perls told MarketWatch. Perls thinks the Justice Department, through its investigation, is likely to issue guidelines for how the Alabama and Lowndes agencies may come into compliance with what it determines to be necessary. It may also require measures to mitigate the harm done by the lack of adequate sewer system. That will likely take time and energy, she said.