We Denounce U.S. Government Deregulation of Environmental Protections as Ecocide, Class Warfare, and a Murderous Assault on Public Health
March 5, 2026 – The Black Alliance for Peace, and undersigned organizations, call on environmental and climate justice organizations to denounce and confront the recent and anticipated deregulatory actions against environmental protections and public health by the U.S. government. Over the last several weeks, the Trump administration has taken executive actions: to repeal scientific findings that greenhouse gases are harmful to the climate and public health (“the Endangerment Finding”); to encourage and protect the domestic production of cancer-causing glyphosate herbicides and toxic phosphorus; and to decimate environmental protections on coal production that regulated mercury and other toxic substance pollution that harm brain development and cause other debilitating health issues. Simultaneously, Congress is trying to reduce states and municipalities ability to regulate glyphosate and other toxic chemicals in food production, through the latest Farm Bill draft.
These actions represent a grave violation of the People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHRs) of residents of the United States by a ruling class that has completely unmasked itself. They make good on the EPA’s decision to value human life at zero dollars, and represent an intentional poisoning of the Earth and millions of people as a sacrifice at the altar of greater corporate profits, and as a foundation for extraction that would fuel the growing domination of the militarist state domestically and globally. The Trump administration and its Congressional and Judicial allies, in service to an increasingly bold and sadistic capitalist-imperialist ruling class, show that they are willing to wield their power to prioritize corporate profits and capital to the extreme over the health, safety, and welfare of the general public, especially poor, working class and colonized people.
These moves also ultimately drive forward deeper domestic militarization to serve the expansion of U.S. ‘full spectrum dominance’ globally and domestically. The endangerment findings’ elimination and associated rollback on regulating toxic pollution by power plants, cars, and petrochemical productions are themselves largely a move to open the pathway to expanding fossil fuel energy to service mass data center proliferation, which is a priority of the Department of War, and of Artificial Intelligence (AI) corporate tech actors. These data centers are a core physical infrastructure in the capitalist-imperialist ruling class’s economic and environmental warfare on the working classes and colonized peoples, domestically and globally, including mass surveillance, ICE terrorization and detention, and tech-enabled genocide in Gaza, Sudan, and beyond. They drive up utility costs for residents; pillage water, energy, and clean air from the public; and occupy swaths of land area that should be used for local food production and the siting of renewable energy. In addition, the deregulation and promotion of glyphosate-based herbicide, which is proven to cause cancer, and phosphorus, the mining and use of which has massive public health implications, are being actioned directly through the Defense Protection Act, to clear the way for domestic production and use. In effect, the administration justifies displacement and mass poisoning of its population domestically as a matter of “National Security”.
This should be no surprise, as the United States has never hesitated to take land or use chemical weapons like glyphosate (the main component of Agent Orange) in its military conquests or corporate ventures globally. This is not a departure from the consistent white supremacist, capitalist logic of U.S. empire, rather it is the domestic and global fronts collapsing into one another. The Trump administration has simply accelerated and deepened the neoliberal crisis of deregulation, deference to corporations, increased privatization, massive austerity, increasing the coffers and influence of the military industrial complex, and U.S. imperialism.
However, this most recent removal of any semblance of public health support, environmental protection, and social safety nets in the U.S. should serve as an alarm bell for those most vulnerable and those disproportionately exposed to and impacted by environmental pollution and associated climate change calamities – African/Black, Indigenous, colonized peoples and the working class. These actions also signal that poor and working class white people, as well as elements of the white middle to upper middle class, are also being swept into this larger surplus population, now scheduled for poisoning and disposability. This is a population that no longer serves any purpose for the ruling class and represents an impediment to unlimited growth through unlimited resource extraction that produces unlimited externalities, specifically pollution of our air, land and water.
We, the undersigned believe that our response to this era of mass poisoning, runaway militarization, imperial gangsterism, and deepening public health crisis must be a more interconnected class struggle rooted in a People(s)-Centered Human Rights (PCHR) approach — a bottom-up struggle for collective self-determination and human dignity.
In a world rendered profoundly imbalanced and unequal — conditions intensified by a white supremacist, capitalist-driven climate crisis — the pursuit of “environmental justice” or “ecological balance” within the existing order is a political illusion. Justice cannot be extracted from a system whose very logic depends on capitalist extraction, dispossession, and ecological sacrifice. What is required instead is a framework of climate and environmental liberation — one that names imperialism, racial capitalism, and colonial domination as the structural sources of ecological collapse.
As the Black Alliance for Peace North–South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights has made clear, such a framework cannot be bestowed from above, legislated into existence, or managed through technocratic fixes. It can only be achieved through concerted and collective praxis by the masses — grounded in struggle, forged through solidarity, and oriented toward liberation rather than mitigation.
This responsibility carries particular weight for peoples residing within the Global North, who occupy a contradictory position within the imperial system. Those living at the core of U.S.-led imperialism bear a specific historical and political duty: to confront empire from within, to disrupt its machinery, and to strike a decisive blow against its systemic ecocide — the organized destruction of life, livelihoods, and the planet in service of accumulation and domination.
To defend life, dignity, and the future of humanity requires nothing less than an internationalist, anti-imperialist struggle rooted in People(s)-Centered Human Rights — a struggle that recognizes that there can be no ecological survival without liberation, and no liberation without the organized power of the people.
No Compromise No Retreat!
SIGNED,
Black Alliance for Peace
Black Lives Matter South Bend
Build & Fight Coalition
CODEPINK
Community Movement Builders
Cooperation Jackson
Lowcountry Action Committee
Mississippi Workers Center for Human Rights
Pan-African Community Action (DC)
Science for the People
Youth Climate Finance Alliance
Key References
A Final Solution to The Human Surplus Problem (Or, How the End of EPA’s Endangerment Finding Also Ends the Farce of Trump “Populism”): https://www.blackagendareport.com/final-solution-human-surplus-problem-or-how-end-epas-endangerment-finding-also-ends-farce-trump
Bulletin on Domestic Militarization: Issue #3 – Black Alliance for Peace: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/bulletinonusdomesticmilitarization/issue-3
“Oppose the Normalization of Genocide and International Gangsterism!” – North/South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights: https://peoplescenteredhumanrights.com/oppose-the-normalization-of-genocide-and-international-gangsterism/
Climate, Environment, and Militarism – Black Alliance for Peace: https://blackallianceforpeace.com/environment
“Praxis from Center to…Cabral” – Ajamu Baraka (2023): https://www.academia.edu/8830885/Praxis_from_center_to_Cabral_final
“People(s)-Centered Human Rights: Decolonizing Human Rights for Human Liberation”: https://peoplescenteredhumanrights.com/