Environmental Racism is the exclusion of people of color in the decision-making process and the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards, including pollution, resource depletion, and waste disposal, on the health and wealth of people of color.  Rising from the grassroots, the environmental justice movement has responded by demanding that low-income and politically powerless communities not be subject to this unequal distribution of risks and burdens.  The Coalition Against Environmental Racism is, by its name, necessarily a diverse coalition.  CAER is a student-based group dedicated to providing a forum for education and organization to promote environmental justice.  CAER brings together the community and students from the Survival Center, Multicultural Center, ethnic student unions, and the Law Schoolóorganizations that have not all traditionally worked together.


    We believe that neither social inequities nor environmental problems will be solved unless we begin to understand them as fundamentally linked.  The goal is to educate people at the University and in the community about the connections between environmental, health, and social inequities, and to build community capacity to achieve justice.  The primary vehicle towards this goal is the annual environmental justice conference, which is held on the University of Oregon campus.  The conference is an opportunity for students, professors, activists, churches, government, and anyone else to learn about environmental justice and form new coalitions and networks.


    The conference is free and open to the public, in order to allow as many people to come as possible.