California environmental justice groups slow to endorse Kamala Harris for president

Within a day of Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign announcement, she received the endorsement of four major environmental justice groups : the League of Conservation Voters Action Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, the Sierra Club, and Clean Energy for America Action. However, environmental justice groups in Harris’s home state of California have not been as quick to endorse her.

The California Environmental Justice Alliance, Communities for a Better Environment, and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network are dedicated to supporting environmental justice policy in the state of California, but none of them have come out to give Harris their endorsement.

Besides recently changing her position on fracking, Harris has a strong track record on environmental justice issues dating back to her days as California’s attorney general when she protected the Mira Loma community in Riverside County from diesel truck traffic. Also, she has helped direct billions of dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act to clean up pollution in low-income communities.

“Harris has demonstrated her commitment to environmental justice through her actions in every one of the positions she has held in her distinguished career,” Diane Takvorian, a co-founder of the Environmental Health Coalition and a California Air Resources Board member who has had a working relationship with Harris since 2011, told Politico .

However, some environmental justice groups aren’t weighing in because they say they don’t have the capacity to weigh in on federal issues, and others say they have qualms about Harris’s track record on issues outside of environmental justice.

Ana Gonzalez is a board member of CEJA and a Democratic National Committee delegate. She said she takes issue with Harris’s role in the mass incarceration of black and brown people in the 2000s.

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“Police brutality aligns with environmental justice issues, because it’s mostly our communities of color and the folks that are facing poverty that are more targeted,” Gonzalez told Politico. “And so we didn’t see her as a champion to that end.”

Because of this, Gonzalez told Politico they’re hoping to have direct conversations with Harris about how criminal justice reform is essential in seeing progress in environmental justice.