Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice

Julian Agyeman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780814707289
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ciencia medioambiental

Popularized in the movies Erin Brockovich and A Civil Action, “environmental justice” refers to any local response to a threat against community health. In this book, Julian Agyeman argues that environmental justice and the sustainable communities movement are compatible in practical ways. Yet sustainability, which focuses on meeting our needs today while not compromising the ability of our successors to meet their needs, has not always partnered with the challenges of environmental justice.

Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice explores the ideological differences between these two groups and shows how they can work together. Agyeman provides concrete examples of potential model organizations that employ the types of strategies he advocates. This book is vital to the efforts of community organizers, policymakers, and everyone interested in a better environment and community health.

1

Environmental Justice

In this chapter, I attempt to do three things that are necessary in order for the reader to understand my later arguments and case study. First, I briefly track the history of the environmental justice (EJ) concept and resulting movement. I examine its institutional setting and some of the policy tools its advocates and activists use, finally offering an EJ critique of risk assessment and expert-led research. Second, I look at the definition, framing, and discourse of environmental justice and at the EJP in order to compare and contrast it to the NEP and JSP in chapter 3. Third, I look at unequal environmental protection in Massachusetts, as this is the physical setting for my case study of ACE in Boston in chapter 5, focusing on metro Boston’s Mystic River Watershed, the development and implementation of the Commonwealth’s policy, the difficulties inherent in defining “Environmental Justice Populations,” and the lack of explicit policy linkages to the state’s sustainable development policies.

A Brief History

Environmental justice concerns have been around since the conquest of Columbus in 1492.¹ The U.S. environmental justice movement, however, is generally believed to have started around fall 1982, when a large protest took place in Warren County, North Carolina.² The state wanted to dump more than six thousand truckloads of soil contaminated with PCBs into what was euphemistically described as “a secure landfill.” The protesters came from miles around. They were black and white, ordinary (outraged) citizens, and prominent members of the civil rights movement and the National Black Caucus. Police arrested more than five hundred protestors in what Geiser and Waneck (1994:52) describe as “the first time people have gone to jail trying to stop a toxic wastes landfill.”

As a result of the events in Warren County, the General Accounting Office (GAO) examined the location of four hazardous-waste landfills in EPA Region IV (the Southeast), where racial minorities average 20 percent of the total population. However, the four facilities were found to be in communities in which minorities made up 38 percent, 52 percent, 66 percent, and 90 percent of the population. The GAO concluded that there was enough evidence to be concerned about inequities in facility siting (GAO 1983). The landmark 1987 United Church of Christ study “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States” showed that certain communities, predominantly communities of color, are at disproportionate risk from commercial toxic waste. This finding was confirmed by later research (Adeola 1994; Bryant and Mohai 1992; Bullard 1990a, 1990b; Mohai and Bryant 1992; Goldman 1993). It also led to the coining of a term, by Benjamin Chavis, that became a rallying cry: environmental racism.

The finding of environmental racism combined with the conclusion of Lavelle and Coyle (1992) in the National Law Journal that there is unequal protection and enforcement of environmental law by the EPA, has ensured that there is now a full-fledged environmental justice movement made up of tenants associations, religious groups, civil rights groups, farm workers, professional not-for-profits, university centers and academics, and labor unions, among others. The movement stretches from Alaska to Alabama and from California to Connecticut, driven by the grassroots activism of African American, Latino, Asian and Pacific American, Native American, and poor white communities. As such, according to Pulido (1996a), it is a multiracial movement which is organizing around locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) such as waste facility siting, transfer storage and disposal facilities (TSDFs), and other issues such as lead contamination, pesticides, water and air pollution, workplace safety, and transportation. More recently, issues such as sprawl and smart growth (Bullard et al. 2000), sustainability (Agyeman et al. 2003), and climate change (International Climate Justice Network 2002; Congressional Black Caucus Foundation 2004) have become targets for the environmental justice critique.

The movement’s base, like that of the sustainability movement, has many foundations. According to Cole and Foster (2001), these are the civil rights movement, the antitoxics movement, academia, Native American struggles, the labor movement, and the traditional environmental movement.³ They call the environmental justice movement “a movement based on environmental issues but situated within the history of movements for social justice” (31). Faber (1998:1) calls it “a new wave of grassroots environmentalism,” and Anthony (1998:ix) calls it “the most striking thing to emerge in the U.S. environmental movement.” Whether it developed in the environmental movement or from the civil rights movement (or both) is perhaps a moot point. Nevertheless, Cole and Foster call the civil rights movement “perhaps the most significant source feeding into today’s environmental justice movement” (2001:20).

It will be useful at this point to examine the allied and earlier concept of environmental equity. An observer of even the least critical of news reports cannot fail to realize that environmental risks and hazards do not affect everyone to the same degree, both in the United States and abroad. The geographical distribution of risk and inequity is uneven within any state (Morello-Frosch 1997; Faber and Krieg 2002; Commonwealth of Massachusetts 2002), within the United States (Boyce et al. 1999), and between one country and another (Torras and Boyce 1998). Cutter (1995:113) notes that “environmental equity is a broad term that is used to describe the disproportionate effects of environmental degradation on people and places.” Heiman (1996:114) adds that “environmental justice demands more than mere exposure equity…. it must incorporate democratic participation in the production decision itself.” Environmental justice is a more targeted concept than environmental equity. As Bullard’s (1994) “environmental justice framework” shows, it has at its heart the notion of righting a wrong, correcting an unjustly imposed burden, whereas environmental equity typically focuses on sharing burdens equally.

Environmental justice was, in its earliest and most specific sense, aimed at people of color (Bullard 1994; Epstein 1997), although, like Pulido (1996a), Epstein (1997:80) notes the “cross- or inter-racial nature of environmental injustices.” This may be the case in terms of injustices, but it has not eased activist racial tensions in specific EJ cases such as those in Louisiana, detailed by Timmons Roberts and Toffolon-Weiss (2001), nor in the wider movement as a whole, tensions that “hearken back to the 1990 letter written by environmental justice activists to the ‘Big Ten’ national environmental organizations accusing them of not truly representing the interests of communities of color” (ibid.:57). In another vein, Pulido (1994:17) notes that “a distinct but prominent sub-movement is being formed that is limited to people of color.” Based on my observations at the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, D.C., in October 2002, I would say that within the “people of color” environmental justice movement, there are several race-based factions that hinder progress on many of the pressing issues that the movement as a whole should address and that are the subject of this book.

Pulido (1996b), like Cutter (1995), has challenged the monolithic view of environmental justice and the environmental justice movement. She bravely wades into the debate on the meaning of racism inherent in environmental racism research, arguing for a more differentiated concept of race: “the racism experienced by … Asian women in corporate America and that experienced by undocumented Mexican immigrants” is different and “the discourse of racism … can simultaneously serve to silence other visions, interpretations and experiences” (152). In effect, she is arguing against environmental justice as a unitary racial project that can “block the consideration of equally liberating racial projects and discourses” (154). This valuing of difference is similar to Schlosberg’s (1999) call for an understanding of the diversity of ideas and difference in the movement and especially to his point that “rather than one particular frame or ideology, there is a coexistence of multiple political beliefs as to the causes, situation of, and possible solutions for issues of environmental justice” (111).⁴

So, because of its increasingly broad usage, especially outside the United States (Costi 1998; Agyeman 2000; Adeola 2000; Friends of the Earth Scotland 2000; Dunion and Scandrett 2003), environmental justice will be used in this book to include poor and disadvantaged white groups as well as people of color. As Cutter (1995:113) notes, “environmental justice … moves beyond racism to include others (regardless of race or ethnicity) who are deprived of their environmental rights, such as women, children and the poor.”

In October 1991, the First People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington, D.C. Attracting more than six hundred delegates from fifty states, the main outcome of the summit was the Principles of Environmental Justice. These are a set of seventeen criteria around which to develop and evaluate policies for environmental and social justice. In October 2002, at the Second National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, the focus was on ratifying the Principles of Environmental Justice, planning the future direction of the movement, developing a series of policy papers on major environmental justice topics, and, most significant from the perspective of this book, looking at ways of working with the wider environmental movement (Summit II Executive Committee 2002).

At the federal level, there is an Office of Environmental Justice in the EPA and a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC). In 1994, former president Clinton’s Executive Order 12898 on environmental justice reinforced 1964 Civil Rights Act Title VI, which prohibits discriminatory practices in programs receiving federal funds, and directed all federal agencies to develop policies to reduce environmental inequity. However, a study by a panel of the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA 2001a) concluded that the EPA needs to be more proactive in integrating environmental justice into its core mission. Although the EPA has been trying for ten years to ensure that its permitting programs achieve fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, the study found that it has yet to effectively incorporate environmental justice issues into its permits.

More recently, the United States Commission on Civil Rights (2003) reported that progress toward fully implementing Executive Order 12898 has been patchy, with EPA, HUD, DOT, and DOI failing to do so. More damning still, the Office of the Inspector General’s Evaluation Report (2004:i) notes bluntly that “EPA has not fully implemented Executive Order 12898 nor consistently integrated environmental justice into its day to day operations.” Critically, however, the report goes on to say that “EPA has not identified minority and low-income populations addressed in the Executive Order, and has neither defined nor developed criteria for determining disproportionately impacted.” This lack of identification criteria and standardization has caused problems for regional offices that want to develop policies and for states like Massachusetts that are looking to the EPA for guidance on policy development. In the end, many states had to go it alone.

However poorly implemented, Executive Order 12898 symbolically heralded the historic shift of the movement’s claims and discourse from the Bible Belt to the Beltway, or, as Goldman (1996:131) puts it, “from street-level protests to federal commissions.” Cole and Foster (2001: 161) call this “a profound institutional transformation on the widest scale.” However, and crucially, as Schlosberg (1999:108) notes, “rather than create large, Washington based, bureaucratic organizations exemplified by the Big Ten,⁵ concerned and active citizens have created a number of grassroots environmental networks” such as the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Northeast Environmental Justice Network, and the Southwest Network for Economic and Environmental Justice. Cole and Foster (2001:132) argue that “the establishment of broad-based social justice networks dispels the notion that the Environmental Justice Movement is simply another example of ‘NIMBYism.’… it is engaged in something much more transformative.”

In part as a result of the success of these networks in supporting other struggles, the 1990s saw real gains for the EJ movement including those in Chester, Pennsylvania (against Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection); South Central Los Angeles (against the LANCER mass-waste incinerator); Claibourne, Louisiana (against the Louisiana Energy Services uranium enrichment facility); St. James, Louisiana (against Shintec Inc. and their proposed chemical plant); and Kettleman City, California (against Chemical Waste Management).

While EJ issues, organizations, and networks do not necessarily follow political and administrative boundaries, some states have responded positively to the EJ agenda, often because of the election of sympathizers or the culturing of sympathizers already in office. An example of the former would be Massachusetts state senator Jarrett T. Barrios, many of whose supporters and campaign workers were EJ activists in the metro Boston towns of Chelsea and Everett. An example of the latter is Massachusetts state senator Diane Wilkerson, a longtime supporter of ACE, who has become a mainstay of the Massachusetts EJ community. Wilkerson, with the support of ACE, proposed the Environmental Justice Designation Bill (S.1060), a powerful new tool that (if successful) would have directed state officials to designate “Environmental Justice Populations” (discussed later in this chapter) as Areas of Critical Environmental Justice Concern (ACEJC), modeled on the state’s current law on Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, which protects natural resources.

In summary, as Agyeman and Evans (2004:155–156) argue, “environmental justice may be viewed as having two distinct but inter-related dimensions. It is, predominantly at the local and activist level, a vocabulary for political opportunity, mobilization and action. At the same time, at the government level, it is a policy principle that no public action will disproportionately disadvantage any particular social group.”

Some Policy Tools

In addition to Section 101 of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, Executive Order 12898, and the general discretion of an administrative agency, there are many policy tools that can be used by advocates and activists.⁶ These tools include the Clean Air Act; the Clean Water Act; the Resource Recovery and Conservation Act; Comprehensive Environmental Response; the Recovery and Liability Act (Superfund); the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act; the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act; the Safe Drinking Water Act; and the Toxic Substances Control Act.

There is also the 1986 Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA), which was designed to help local communities protect public health, safety, and the environment from chemical hazards. The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) comes under Section 313 of EPCRA. Users of chemicals including electrical utilities, metallic and coal mining operators, commercial hazardous-waste treatment facilities, chemical and allied products manufacturers, solvent recovery services, and petroleum bulk terminals are required to report to the EPA the levels of listed chemicals that are released to air, water, or land. At present, there are more than six hundred chemicals on the list, from a start of three hundred in 1987.

A more deliberative tool that is being used by the environmental justice movement is the Good Neighbor Agreement, a voluntary, legally binding agreement between an industry and the community, which is used in some states to improve accountability. The agreement includes clauses on community access to information, negotiated improvements in pollution prevention, local job guarantees, and other local economic benefits. Similarly, a Community Benefits Agreement is a legally binding contract between a developer and a community in which benefits are provided by the developer in return for community support for a project. A newer tool with abundant promise to level the pro-industry playing field in pluralistic decision-making processes is the Precautionary Principle,⁷ which is based on the German Vorsorgeprinzip, or Foresight Principle. The Precautionary Principle states that when an activity raises the threat of harm to human health or to the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.

The biggest U.S. success of the Precautionary Principle to date has been at the city level—the eight-to-two vote by the City of San Francisco Board of Supervisors to adopt it as a citywide environmental ordinance in June 2003 was the first in the nation. San Francisco’s proactive policy states, “the City sees the Precautionary Principle approach as its policy framework to develop laws for a healthier and more just San Francisco” (City of San Francisco 2003). The boost for communities, especially low-income communities and those of color that bear a disproportionate burden of environmental, health, and other risks, is that the Precautionary Principle has the ability to shift the legal burden of proof to the proponent of the risk. ...