COLUMN LEFT/ TOM SOTO : Clean Air a Right, Not an Amenity : The environmental movement won’t succeed without the urban poor and people of color.

This Earth Day, as on the first, the roster of the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites is also a canticle of places that house the nation’s poorest people of color: Warren County, N.C.; Talequah, Okla.; West Harlem, N.Y.; Brownsville, Tex.; Southeast Chicago, Ill.; East Los Angeles. Only the names change; the residents’ faces stay the same.

Until 1987, when the Commission for Racial Justice issued its seminal report delineating these truths, the knowledge that ethnic neighborhoods were officially zoned dumps was simply another bit of folk wisdom, an aphorism like “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.” And cancer. And birth defects.

The deteriorating health of the inner cities and their inhabitants is the result of racist land-use planning, a process that honored profits over health, that ignored the need in poor neighborhoods for litter abatement, for healthy parks, for trees, for well-designed transit corridors, for aesthetics, for clean air. These “amenities” to well-off neighborhoods should be the basic rights of all urban residents. They are essential not only to health and well-being, but also to economic development.

Since 1987, bolstered by the CRJ statistics and a growing realization in the predominantly white environmental movement that the Earth cannot be saved without the cooperation of all its people, the fight for environmental justice has accelerated in America’s ethnic communities. The CRJ report’s author, the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, was appointed head of the NAACP this month, which promises to further strengthen the movement.

The movement aims to empower communities of color by involving them in land-use planning. The basic premise is that people who live in an environment have the right to determine their own landscape and to expect from government adequate support and resources to help them do so. This concept, obviously, has never been the cornerstone of academic municipal planning.

As the director of Los Angeles’ 1990 Earth Day celebration, which drew more than 30,000 people of all colors to Central Los Angeles, and as the president of the Coalition for Clean Air, which recently won a Supreme Court ruling ordering the federal Environmental Protection Agency to enforce its own Clean Air Act standards in the Los Angeles Basin, I have participated in the urban environmental justice movement with growing elation and a renewal of hope.

The movement’s roots in Los Angeles include the successful fight by Mothers of East L.A. and by Concerned Citizens of South-Central to stop construction of a state prison and a waste incinerator in their respective communities. The message in both cases was the same: Our communities are no longer to be exploited as a repository for waste, human or human-generated. These types of facilities don’t provide the kinds of jobs that enhance the quality of life in our communities; indeed, such facilities drive investment away.

One of the movement’s most hopeful accomplishments is the Los Angeles Compact for Environmental Justice, released April 5 after five months of crafting by members of the city’s ethnic, business and environmental communities, underwritten by a public utility, the Southern California Gas Co.

The preamble to the 14-paragraph compact honors the “ethnic and cultural diversity of this society and recognize(s) that such diversity is a source of strength.” The compact then states:

* Human health and quality of life are interdependent with a healthy environment and a civil, peaceful and just society.

* All people in Los Angeles are entitled to equal access to public open space and recreation, clean water and uncontaminated neighborhoods.

* A clean, healthy environment is a basic right of all people and not a luxury accessible only to those who can afford it.

The compact calls for continued cooperation between ethnic and environmental communities. It says the education and development of youth are central concerns. It asserts that there is no dichotomy between a healthy economy and a healthy environment, and that communities and businesses must be accountable for the environmental consequences of their policies and practices.

The compact’s authors believe its words are applicable across urban America. Environmental justice must sit at the table alongside corporate interests. Eighty percent of our country’s population lives in urban and metropolitan areas, and a major portion of this population is low-income and ethnic. The environmental movement must put urban quality of life at the top of its agenda or risk being marginalized by the majority of urban Americans.