Twenty years ago the ponds of Izaak Walton Forest Preserve in southern Cook County looked very different. Clean and clear, they attracted birdwatchers, recreational fishers and nature enthusiasts. In 2025, however, the signature of pollution is unmistakable in the sheen of oil over the preserve’s orange-gray waters.
“Now the entire pond is contaminated and it flows up to an area where people fish,” said environmental consultant David Zaber, who also serves on the Izaak Walton Preserve board. “Then it flows north and floods low-income people’s properties. That’s real environmental injustice.”
A 2024 water quality report confirmed the presence of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a class of chemicals that are produced by fossil fuels. Long-term exposure to these contaminants can lead to cancer and cardiovascular disease.
They are far from the only environmental hazards faced by those living in Cook County; air pollution, lead piping, brownfields, lack of access to green spaces and climate related disasters also threaten communities around the area–particularly Chicago’s South and West Sides.
To address these issues head-on, the Department of Environment and Sustainability (DES) has developed Cook County’s first Environmental Justice Policy to inform policymaking for all Offices Under the President (OUPs). The 2025 policy draft aims to “foster environmental justice through strategies that address, mitigate and amend past injustices while enabling proactive, community-led solutions for the future.”
The 2025 policy draft states:
“Low-income communities of color have historically borne the brunt of disproportionate environmental harms and lived in the areas with the greatest pollution, noise and traffic burden. These environmental injustices have a direct correlation to these communities being redlined or excluded through racially restricted covenants, having lower property values, having fewer connections to decision-makers and not having a seat at decision-making tables.”
Between Jan. 21 and Feb. 3, DES hosted a series of town halls around Cook County to garner input from residents from communities around the county, including North Lawndale, Skokie, Cicero and South Holland before moving to the first stages of implementation.
This policy will serve as a living document that provides a framework to inform OUP policy and program design. It takes a wide view of Environmental Justice issues, proposing immediate steps and future considerations across focus areas of air pollution, water access and flooding, climate resiliency, healthy food access, community engagement, transportation, green spaces and economic development.
The policy’s initial stage is focused on communication and public outreach regarding existing OUP programs and resources. With these first steps, policymakers hope to strengthen the impact of ongoing efforts like daily air monitoring, lead pipeline replacement programs and climate resiliency planning. Looking into 2026, future considerations look to secure funding and explore infrastructure updates and programs that act on public feedback.
For those facing the barrel’s end of environmental injustice in Cook County, awareness and action from the government are long overdue.
“This area [Cook County] has been ripe for environmental injustice and communities fighting for equity and recognition,” said Debra Kutska, Interim Deputy Director of Sustainability for Cook County. “There has been a long history of pushing to make that happen.”
That history goes back to the very beginnings of environmental justice advocacy in the 1970s, and is deeply intertwined with the fight for social justice in the Chicago area. One of the movement’s founding figures, Hazel Johnson, began her activism in Altgeld Gardens after her husband became one of many cancer victims due to toxic fumes from nearby industrial sites. Johnson founded the People for Community Recovery to crusade against the polluters behind her community’s poor health outcomes.
In recent months, locals and activist organizations have advocated for the Illinois Pollution Control Board to impose stronger regulations against air polluters, whose exhausts have left some living in industrial corridors with debilitating respiratory illness. Elsewhere, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is raising arms against the expansion of a waste site full of mercury, arsenic and other toxic chemicals in the majority Black and Latino South Works neighborhood.
“It impacts everything,” said Quincy Crump, a Homewood, Illinois resident who attended an Environmental Justice Policy town hall on Jan. 27. “If we don’t have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink, people’s health suffers and they die.”
These consequences became chillingly apparent in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. A 2021 study of Cook County found that, compared to the white population, Black residents had a 1.6 times higher death rate from COVID-19 while Hispanic residents were roughly twice as likely to die. The study identifies air pollution and lack of financial resources among likely contributing factors.
This is confirmed by data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Environmental Justice Index, which identifies risk factors across social, health, and environmental domains to highlight the most affected areas nationwide. Compared to the rest of the county, census areas in Cook County average in the top 10% affected by air quality issues like ambient diesel particulate matter and ozone days above regulatory standard, while they average in the top 25% for negatively impacted water quality. A 2022 report from the non-profit Respiratory Health Association also listed Cook County as number one on a list of “dirty dozen” counties in Illinois affected by diesel engine pollution.
CDC Environmental Justice Indicators By Cook County Cities
These risks are particularly prevalent among Black and brown residents. Areas with a higher-than-average Environmental Justice Index, meaning those most negatively affected, have over a 70% Black and Hispanic population. Healthier areas with a lower-than-average index are only 25% Black and Hispanic.
CDC Environmental Justice Index values across Cook County
While many of those attending town halls were glad to see OUP attention on issues of environmental justice, some approached the policy with skepticism.
“They have very important and worthy goals, and I get a sense of willingness to act on those goals,” Crump said. “I also am slightly cynical and I wonder about how they’re going to continue to reach the individuals in the communities that are going to be impacted.”
“It’s not about sitting and having meetings. That doesn’t solve the issue,” said Zaber. He went on to criticize the lack of hard data used to inform the policy, which largely stands on input from focus groups, stakeholder interviews, collaboration with a Community Advisory Committee and a public survey that was fielded in the summer of 2024.
Instead, Zaber stressed the importance of on-the-ground action to find and target sources of pollution. “Environmental justice is more about a place than a theory,” he said. “It’s always worth knowing where the pollution is. It’s about a place that pollutes.”
The policy proposal includes action items to explore community-led data collection and ways to better educate impacted communities with information and resources. Still, public literacy on the very concept of environmental justice can be a bottleneck on their ability to participate.
Kisha McCaskill, 5th District Commissioner for Cook County who spoke at a January town hall, remembers her early introduction to environmentalist concepts through childhood coloring books. She says focus on this type of education has eroded over time.
“We need to educate people about what environmental justice actually is, not just recycling,” McCaskill said. “It’s so much more than that.” Instead, she stressed the need for a “back to basics” approach to inform Cook County residents, across all ages, on how the environment impacts the health of their communities.
Equipped with this knowledge, the public is better positioned to ring alarms when they see smog clouding their air, the erasure of green spaces or, like Zaber, discoloration of a once clean body of water.
The Environmental Justice Policy remains open to public feedback through Feb. 28, which Cook County residents can access via their public input form.