The Past, Present, and Future of Environmental Justice

A celebration

This year marks a milestone for Environmental Justice in the U.S. It's been 20 years since the establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ). The OEJ has been celebrating this anniversary with a series of 20th Anniversary Videos featuring stories and interviews with Environmental Justice leaders from communities, non-governmental organizations, and public institutions. Locally, we've also been celebrating the 20th anniversary of a Boston-based Environmental Justice organization - Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE). Since 1993, ACE has been both a local and a national leader for Environmental Justice, defending and promoting disadvantaged communities through a mix of legal and technical support, policy advocacy, and community organizing. Last week, ACE held a celebratory event entitled "An Evening for ACE" at the SEIU Local 615 headquarters in downtown Boston. The event brought together a panel of ACE's leaders: the original founders of ACE, Charlie Lord and Bill Shutkin, as well as the current Executive Director Kalila Barnett, former ED Penn Loh, and REEP alumnus and ACE board member Carlos Moreno. The event was moderated by Julian Agyeman. The event was well attended by longtime friends and supporters, as well as new friends and allies. A 20th anniversary is a good time to reminisce, take stock, and look to the future.

What EJ has wrought

The fundamental insight that the Environmental Justice movement has brought to environmental debates is simply this: not everyone is affected by environmental issues in the same way. This is the case for at least two reasons. Environmental burdens (and amenities) are almost never equally distributed. Since the late 1980s, a voluminous body of research has repeatedly shown that waste sites, noxious industry, and various other forms of environmentally degrading activity are often located in lower income communities and communities of color. The converse is often true too, such that the distribution of "good" things, like parks and trees, are often not in these same communities. Second, even when it appears that some environmental issues are equally distributed (at least geographically), there can still be inequity. We're all exposed to climate change, but we're not all equally vulnerable, and we're not all equally responsible.

A second big idea that EJ has drawn attention to (a public health perspective) is that "the environment" is "where we live, work and play." The environment is not just wilderness or the oceans or scenic landscapes. It is the day-to-day places occupied and used and built by people, and for most of humanity, this means urban environments. The result of this insight is "the environment" includes the environmental quality of homes, schools, workplaces, neighborhoods - and the infrastructure that makes human-environments function and liveable. And as the EJ movement has shown repeatedly, the environmental quality of "where we live, work and play" can vary enormously from community to community, whether we're talking about air pollution, solid waste management, access to quality schools or access to transportation. When we bring these two EJ insights together, what we have is a fundamentally social perspective on the environment - one that sees environmental quality as a reflection and a consequence of the relationships between people. Degraded environments and marginalized communities go hand in hand. Improving the environment does not just mean fixing environmental problems; it means changing the relationships between people. Improved public participation, more transparency by government and the private sector, fair and realistic opportunities for well being and economic security, and honest dialogues about social challenges, goals and needs - and of course, quality science.

Where we're going and what we need

At the ACE event, Professor Agyeman asked the panelists to talk about where they saw the EJ movement heading. What kinds of topics are drawing the EJ movement's interest now and into the foreseeable future? The panelists identified a number of topics and campaigns of growing interest: food justice, transportation justice, just sustainability, green justice, and economic justice. What's striking to me is how much more attention the EJ movement has placed on solutions-based or productive initiatives - programs to develop and promote positive or constructive change in marginalized communities and for the society at large. This is a significant change from the early EJ movement which was so focused (necessarily) on identifying problems and reacting to threats. But ACE's current ED, Kalila Barnett, struck a note of caution. She acknowledged the importance of the topics identified by the others, but she reminded us that the battles of the past are still with us. ACE and other EJ activists are still dealing with problems of localized air pollution, siting of noxious industry, waste siting, and discriminatory treatment. And while the Environmental Justice movement celebrates the anniversary of the founding of important institutions and organizations, its campaigns are still woefully under-funded. Environmental Justice has changed this country's environmental conversation, but it remains marginalized in support and funding in comparison to "mainstream" and environmental causes and organizations.

There is a lot to celebrate in the Environmental Justice movement, and there is a lot yet to be done. Leaders in the movement, like those highlighted by the EPA and by ACE, deserve our thanks and praise. For the movement to make positive change, we still need more people and organizations to step up. Thanks to those who have supported this cause and to those yet to do so. This is how we improve our environment and strengthen a movement and our society.

New England Environmental Justice Summit

On Saturday, June 9 I attended the first New England Environmental Justice Summit, which was convened at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This was a day-long event to connect community activists and residents, environmental justice advocates, lawyers, and policymakers from all six New England States who are interested in the environment and public health in low income communities and communities of color. This was a significant event to create a regional consciousness and network around environmental justice in New England. This event was two years in the making and credit goes to the core partners who pulled it off:

• Norbert Kovacs, Connecticut Coalition for Environmental Justice
• Sheri Neely, Fairfield County Environmental Justice Network
• Staci Rubin, Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE)
• Steve Fischbach, Rhode Island Legal Services

The day started off with a hearty breakfast, a welcome from youth organizers, and then opening comments from two officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Curt Spalding, Administrator for EPA's New England Region (Region 1), and Lisa Garcia, Senior Advisor to the Administrator for Environmental Justice. The EPA speakers affirmed their support for environmental justice work, citing a number of national initiatives (Plan EJ 2014, Partnership for Sustainable Communities, Healthy Communities Map (EJView Mapper) and local accomplishments (Fairmont Line in Boston), and assured everyone that environmental justice is EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's top priority.

Energy Justice

After the opening comments, I attended the workshop on "Fairness & Energy Justice." Facilitator Rev. Bob Murphy from Cape Cod introduced us to the concept of "energy justice" and asserted that "Energy is a human rights issue." The goal of energy justice, he explained, is "to provide all people, in all places, with an adequate supply of energy that is safe, affordable, and sustainable." Energy, like most basics in life (i.e. food, clothing, shelter), is both vital and dangerously scarce for low income households and communities. Lack of access to safe, affordable, and sustainable energy creates all kinds of hardships: hypothermia in the winter, hyperthermia in the summer (not just uncomfortable, but deadly for the very young and old, as well as those with chronic diseases), and of course, economic strain.

We heard from three speakers on different energy justice issues. Judy Diamondstone and Scott Guzman from Worcester Energy Barnraisers talked about their organization's work to promote environmental sustainability as well as social and economic justice though collaborative home energy efficiency projects. Their modus operandi is an energy barn-raising - an event where the community gets together and spends the day working to weatherize a house, making it more energy-efficient. They've modeled their work on that done by HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team) in Cambridge. It's worth noting that Massachusetts already has a state ratepayer-funded program in which utilities collect a fee from all customers in order to fund energy efficiency upgrades and weatherization projects. Through the MassSave program, homeowners can get a free "energy audit" and qualify for a variety of free or subsidized efficiency and weatherization improvements: CFL bulbs, door sweeps, weather stripping around windows and doors, insulation of walls. The problem is that the contractors for this program will not work on homes that are complicated by "pre-weatherization" issues: where there is knob and tube wiring, a dirt basement floor, asbestos, or mold. These "pre-weatherization" issues are common in old homes throughout New England, and especially so in lower income homes. The result is that households that could use this help the most are essentially shut out of the benefits of this program (which, it should be remembered, they have paid into through their utility bills). Judy and Scott argued that advocates need to promote funding to address these issues so that these program benefits can be realized for those who most need them. Worcester Energy Barnraisers attempt to fill this gap in Worcester by doing work that MassSave contractors will not.

Other issues stymie these public programs for weatherization. The households most in need of weatherization (to save money, improve their quality of life, and promote energy sustainability) are renters. However, renters have little incentive or authority to invest in a building that do they do not own. Landlords often have little incentive either, especially if energy costs are passed on to renters. Advocates who work on these energy justice issues suspect that, as a result of these and other barriers, the benefits of rate-payer funded energy efficiency programs are being largely or entirely captured by middle and upper-middle income homeowners. This is a potentially serious and regressive public policy problem. However, the data to evaluate the situation are hard to come by. Utilities and contractors that implement these programs have been reluctant to share their data.

Dan Gilbarg of the Coalition for Social Justice and Coalition Against Poverty (CSJ & CAP) spoke about his organization's work with with the Green Justice Coalition to push utilities and the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Advisory Council to create a publicly accessible database that would allow the public, and especially energy justice advocates, to monitor how these public energy efficiency programs are being implemented, who is benefiting, what neighborhoods are or are not being served, etc. There is a bill pending in the state House Ways and Means Committee to create such a database. I and my student Adam Kohn (who just graduated) have been working on this very same issue, interviewing Massachusetts community organizations involved with energy issues to understand their energy data needs and barriers to energy program implementation. I will post more on our work later.

Dan was joined by Kate Archand, a community activist from Brockton, Massachusetts, who spoke about her organization's efforts to prevent the siting of a fossil fuel-fired power plant in Brockton. Citing a report by Dr. Danny Faber at Northeastern University, Kate pointed out that Brockton is the 9th most environmentally overburdened state in the Commonwealth and one of the top four in terms of asthma rates. The fight over this power plant has been going on for more than five years at this point, and has drawn in numerous community and environmental justice organizations from around the state. CSJ & CAP, in collaboration with StopthePower, have worked to keep residents in Brockton informed about the positions of their elected officials regarding the power plant."

The state of environmental justice

After the morning session, Danny Faber reviewed the current environmental justice issues facing Massachusetts and the country. He argued that the GOP has launched an unprecedented attack on environmental policies, regulations and institutions, and the movement for environmental justice itself. At the same time, the forces that create environmental injustices are still at work, targeting and exploiting communities that are fragmented by race, ethnicity, and language. Drawing largely on his 2005 report, Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards, he rattled off a variety of statistics about the very inequitable distribution of environmental burdens in Massachusetts. Although inequitable burden is the quintessential environmental injustice, Faber asserted that the goal of environmental justice is not for everyone to be polluted equally. Rather, it is to prevent anyone from being polluted. He argued that environmental justice communities need to align themselves with all communities, including more privileged communities, in order to make headway. This is a positive argument that he makes eloquently in his 2008 book Capitalizing on Environmental Injustice. I reviewed this book for the Northeastern Geographer. As I noted in the review, Faber's message is positive, but it is still problematic because he essentially asks the environmental justice community to abandon its focus on institutional discrimination and to focus instead on a class-based, political economic identity.

Safe Housing

After lunch I attended the afternoon workshop "Healthy Housing: A Way to Connect Rural & Urban EJ." This workshop was led by Laura Brion, Childhood Lead Action Project in Providence, Rhode Island, Mary Sliney, from the The Way Home in Manchester, New Hampshire, and Meghaan Tollman from Visible Community in Lewiston, Maine. They each talked about their program work, which revolved largely around safe and affordable housing issues in urban communities: lead contamination, dealing with bed bug infestations, support for immigrant residents, dealing with city government and landlords. The take-home message was about the value of community organizing as an effective and efficient way to deliver services, to educate community members, and of course, to mobilize residents for policy and political action.

Community and Government dialogue

Following the afternoon workshop, everyone reconvened in the main hall for a government and community dialogue. Federal (EPA, HUD, FEMA) and state government representatives sat on the platform along with a group of community representatives to discuss questions from the community. The questions were overly general, as were the answers. It is clearly important for the community to have informal and safe settings to interact with government officials and kudos to the organizers for arranging this opportunity. There is still a lot of distrust and misunderstanding and I could hear it from the community members and activists around me. A lot of work to do still.

Updates on the status and upcoming activities of this New England Environmental Justice coalition can be found at neej.wikidot.com and on New England Environmental Justice Forum on Facebook.

Biofuels Are No Free Lunch

It appears that the promise of biofuels for curbing carbon dioxide emissions and weaning America off of its dependence on foreign oil has some complications. Many of these complications have to do with the the interdependencies of a globalized world, and they have to do with the hard lesson that solutions to one problem often create other kinds of problems, or simply shift the original problem somewhere else.

Biofuels - fuels derived from plant products such as corn, soy or palm oil - have a lot going for them on the face of it. With minimal processing, most vehicles can run on gasoline or diesel that has some proportion of vegetable-derived fuel, such as ethanol. Ethanol has been particularly important as a replacement for the fuel additive MTBE, which while increasing fuel efficiency and reducing air pollution, has the annoying habit of contaminating vast areas of surface and groundwater. MTBE was itself originally a replacement for lead in gasoline. Lead is bad. Of course, lead itself was originally added to gasoline in order to increase octane and reduce engine knocking, and interestingly, to help gasoline compete with ethanol as a viable fuel! That's another story (see "The Secret History of Lead," The Nation Mar 2000), but it brings us back to ethanol.

The initial (and ongoing) excitement around the potential for biofuels led the U.S. Congress to pass The Energy Policy Act of 2005, which, among many other things, requires a dramatic increase in the mixing of biofuels with gasoline sold in the U.S., and a tripling of domestic production of biofuels by 2012. The European Union (EU) similarly set a target of getting 10% of Europe's road fuels from plants. For both the EU and the U.S., biofuels offer a way of reducing dependence on foreign oil, reducing air pollution, and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (which contributes to global climate change).

A number of things have turned up to dampen some of the initial enthusiasm for biofuels as panacea. Recent studies by leading academics and scientific organizations, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have found that increasing production of biofuels may actually contribute more to the release of carbon dioxide and lead to worsening environmental damage. Specifically, if one takes into account the full energy-intensive process of modern agriculture, refining of the fuel, and transport, then biofuels may be no better, and in some cases, even worse, than conventional fuels. At the same time, incentives to grow more crops for biofuel production mean that more land must be brought into production. Bringing new land into farm production often means habitat loss, and habitat loss is second only to climate change as a leading environmental concern (see "Biofuels Deemed a Greenhouse Threat," NYT Feb 8, 2008).

What's particularly interesting to me, however, is the way increased production of biofuels ramifies throughout the world. The push to produce biofuels has greatly increased the value of the crops used to produce biofuels, many of which are also food crops. This may be good for farmers, both here and abroad, because it means more income for a commodity in higher demand. However, the farmer's gain may be the consumer's loss. Higher food prices are particularly hard on poor people who must inevitably spend a greater proportion of their income on food than the more privileged. This is what is known as a 'regressive' economic impact. Increased food prices are a serious reality (see "A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill," NYT Mar 9, 2008; also see "Surging costs of groceries hit home," Boston Globe Mar 9, 2008).

The relationship between biofuel production and food is particularly striking in less developed countries. The soaring price of palm oil has hit the poor in places like India, Malaysia, and Indonesia particularly hard. Palm oil is a significant source of calories and nutrients for the less wealthy in tropical parts of the world, and it is one of the most costly. Palm oil is also one of the most sought after sources of biofuel and the most productive. An acre of palms produces 8 times as much oil as an acre of soy. Palm oil prices have increased by 70% over the last year. The increased price and the resulting diversion of palm oil from food to fuel has meant higher prices and less availability. The economic incentive of palm oil production has also encouraged growers to bring more land into production, which has meant an accelerated rate of deforestation in tropical parts of the world (see "A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories," NYT Jan 19, 2008). Loss of tropical forest threatens wildlife, such as Orangutans in Borneo (watch "Palm oil demand threatening wildlife," BBC Mar 2006).

Environmental changes in tropical parts of the world are not just a threat to the non-human environment; they also threaten the livelihoods of people dependent on natural resources. Human rights and environmental advocacy groups issued reports showing that indigenous groups in Indonesia are being negatively impacted by the expansion of palm oil farms, both through loss of forest and expropriation of land (see "Biofuel demand leading to human rights abuses, report claims," The Guardian Feb 11, 2008). The EU has taken both environmental and human rights issues surrounding biofuel production quite seriously. It is seeking to encourage the use of "sustainable" biofuel production (see "EU promises sustainable plant fuel," BBC News Jan 14, 2008).

To be fair, the negative news about biofuel does not necessarily mean that it is a lost cause. In fact, there is considerable room for improvement through increased technological efficiencies as well as decisions about which plant products to use (e.g., non-food plants). Clearly, however, biofuels are not a panacea, because there is no such thing as a panacea. On a more positive note, however, the negative attention to biofuels has highlighted global interdependencies, which involve not just markets, and environmental conditions, but also social conditions and issues of justice. These are the things with which a more globalized, and globally aware, world must contend.