EPA has opened its new museum, celebrating 53 years of the agency’s history as well as environmental justice champions and efforts to combat climate change.
The National Environmental Museum and Education Center opened this month at EPA’s Washington headquarters. The space, accessible from Pennsylvania Avenue, has artifacts on display, video screens to scroll, and exhibits designed for touch that detail the country’s worst environmental disasters and spotlight the agency’s successes in protecting the planet and public health.
The museum also gives prominent real estate to environmental justice — the cause to aid communities, often of color and low income, that have been burdened with pollution — as well as the fight against climate change, both top priorities for EPA that have been elevated under President Joe Biden.
“It’s a way for people to really get a sense of what this country has been through in terms of our environmental awareness,” Deputy Administrator Janet McCabe said in an interview with E&E News. “Some of the amazing discoveries and steps that people have taken and how important an agency like EPA is to making sure that there’s clean air, clean water, clean land in the country.”
