ENVIRONMENT GETTING ON BOARD : Many Hues Blend With Green : Minorities, who are more likely to live near landfills and toxic-waste dumps, are turning to ecology in increasing numbers.

Earth Week is a good time to ponder the ultimate socioeconomic irony of the ecology movement: Those who care the most about pollution also tend to be those who can most afford to avoid it.

We tend to identify Earth Day and the rest of the environmental movement with the young, white, middle-class backpackers, whale lovers and “tree huggers,” who seem to make up the bulk of the leadership and staff in ecological activism.

But it is the poor and struggling blue-collar working-class folks who tend to eat, drink and raise their children in closest proximity to lead, asbestos, toxic-waste dumps, landfills, polluting factories and polluted water runoffs. Times Beach was not Beverly Hills.

Yet minorities tend to be identified with social-justice issues more than they are identified with ecology. The pressing short-term problems of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, infant mortality and drug-related violence tend to squeeze out long-term environmental concerns.

Until now. In growing numbers, minorities are making themselves heard from East Harlem to East Los Angeles, giving the “green” movement a new rainbow of hues.

For example, historically black Howard University in Washington was recently host to the first National Minority Environmental Career Conference; and the New York-based United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, headed by the Rev. Ben Chavis, a noted black civil-rights activist in the 1960s, has a “Toxics and Minority Communities Project” that has taken a leading role in researching pollution and forming coalitions with established ecology groups.

Among countless other efforts, Greenpeace has been working with other activists to try to stop construction of waste-disposal facilities in Chicago’s heavily black south and southwestern suburbs, and the predominantly Hispanic Mothers of East Los Angeles joined white and black activists to stop construction of a large incinerator.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, never one to allow an activist train to pull out of the station without getting himself on board, recently made a national tour with Earth Day 1990 Chairman Dennis Hayes to focus attention on minority and low-income community environmental concerns.

Blacks and other people of color are going “green,” and it’s about time. Evidence of the disproportionately hazardous impact of environmental pollutants on minorities is overwhelming. A study by Chavis’ project, for example, found race to be “the single largest predictor” of who gets a toxic-waste dump in his neighborhood; and a General Accounting Office survey in the early 1980s found rural blacks in the Southeast most likely to live near the region’s waste dumps and landfills.

In fact, Chavis and several other black leaders sent letters to eight major environmental groups in January charging them with racism in their hiring and with a general failure to address the urgent environmental needs of low-income minority communities. Groups with good minority outreach records--like Greenpeace, which has established internships and active recruitment of minorities for its board--were left off their list.

But it’s not as simple as that. The environmental movement has an economic paradox that hits low-income minority communities particularly hard: Can we have a clean environment and strong economic development at the same time?

American Indians in the Southwest have protested a range of industrial infringements on their ancient homelands, while environmental groups have been trying to persuade the economically embattled leaders of all-black Robbins, Chicago’s poorest suburb, that the few jobs that would be generated by a proposed incinerator are not worth the environmental hazards that would come with it.

The debate has become divided among the “green greens,” who would halt any industry that threatens to cause even the slightest disruption of the environment; the “red greens,” who cry out for more government regulation, and the “blue greens,” who seek ways to get a clean environment and strong blue-collar economic development at the same time.

Among minority leaders, the “blue greens,” or some version of them, appear to be winning. Unfortunately, African American and other minority leaders have had so many problems in their attempts to develop a firm economic agenda since the 1960s that they have only begun to figure in an environmental agenda.

If anything, the cleanup starts at home. The popular slogan “think globally, act locally” has particular significance to minority communities, where the greatest hazards are human-made, one way or another. Neighborhood cleanup efforts can form the foundation of social and political activism that can pressure politicians and build coalitions for a range of other community programs.

Every rainbow coalition needs a touch of green.