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.

The Food Project 20th Anniversary Gala

On Wednesday evening Neenah and I attended The Food Project's (TFP) 20th Anniversary gala "20 Years of Growing Together". It was a spectacular event. It was held at the WGBH studios in Brighton and the venue was packed with TFP staff, supporters, and guests, and food stations featuring locally grown cuisine (a good portion grown by TFP youth) prepared by some of the area's top eateries. The gala was a celebration of TFP's accomplishments and growth, and an invitation for continued support of this amazing organization.

The guest speakers for the event were Gordon Hamersley, one of the most respected chefs in Boston, and Frances Moore Lappé, author or co-author of 18 books including Diet for a Small Planet. However, I have to say that our emcee, Robert Lewis, Jr., VP for Programs at The Boston Foundation, really made the event. Toward the end of the night he acted as the auctioneer, helping to auction off a variety of donated items and services, from catered dinners prepared and served by TFP youth, to a beautiful quilt. Two things really struck me: One, I had never seen a man speak so quickly and think even faster on his feet. Two, the level of bidding quickly rose well beyond anything I would have imagined, and I think I wasn't the only one who kept stock still for fear of signaling a bid. But it was fun to watch and gratifying to see individuals with the means and desire to support The Food Project. Of course, TFP relies not just on big donors for support. This organization needs the support of many people, at all levels, to keep doing its work for another two decades.

Since 1991, The Food Project has engaged high school students from diverse neighborhoods across the greater Boston area to grow sustainable food, and through this activity, engage in both social and personal change. The youth who participate are placed in unusually responsible roles where they learn about the land, each other, and the environmental and social justice issues challenging our society - and ways to personally and collectively facilitate positive change. Food from the farms is distributed through TFP's community supported agriculture programs and farmers' markets, and donated to local hunger relief organizations.

TFP is an unusual organization that operates at the nexus of environment, youth, and community. I have been a member of the Board of Trustees of this organization for more than two years now, and I invite you to learn about this wonderful organization and its good works. You can learn more at http://thefoodproject.org/. To contribute to or get involved with the The Food Project, visit http://thefoodproject.org/get-involved.

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.

Counting Trees

On Friday morning I attended an informational session on the current tree inventory that is being conducted for the City of Chelsea. The inventory is being led by the Urban Ecology Institute (UEI), though it includes a variety of other governmental and non-profit participants. The tree inventory is a count of street trees only, although aerial imagery is being analyzed at the University of Vermont to calculate total canopy coverage for the whole city. The survey is not complete yet, but preliminary results seem to show that Chelsea is seriously lacking in tree coverage - about 9% of the city's area is covered by tree canopy, compared to Boston's average of 29%. It is worth noting, however, that East Boston (where this author lives) had a calculated tree canopy coverage of only 6% when Boston's tree inventory was completed in 2006. The lowest in the city.

The vegetative cover in urban areas is vitally important for the healthy functioning of the city itself (i.e. mitigating storm runoff, moderating temperature extremes, reducing air pollution), as well as quality of life issues. Interestingly, the analysis for Boston, and the soon-to-be-released report on Chelsea, reveal the potential for a substantial increase in vegetative cover.

In 2007, the City of Boston announced a plan to plant 100,000 trees by 2020 with the goal of increasing the city's canopy coverage from 29% to 35%. While ambitious, it seems that Boston's goals are quite tame in comparison to other cities' tree planting programs.

The tree survey of Boston, and the one going on in Chelsea, are focused on street trees. However, according to UEI's John Walkey, Director of the Sustainable Cities program, street trees represent only 8% of the city's canopy coverage. The rest is on private property. This presents an interesting problem for devising policies to increase canopy coverage.

Spread World PEAS

On Thursday Neenah and I attended the New Entry Sustainable Farm Tour in Dracut, Massachusetts. The tour was arranged by World PEAS (People Enhancing Agricultural Sustainability). We and about 100 other curious visitors were invited to see how the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project trains people with limited resources who have an interest in small-scale commercial agriculture, to begin farming in Massachusetts AND to see how the food that the World PEAS CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) sells is grown. This is the second year that Neenah and I have been members of the World PEAS CSA and it was quite exciting to meet the people who grow our veggies and to see how the whole operation works.

We visited two working farms where a number of current trainees manage acre-sized plots (an acre is A LOT of land) to grow a variety of crops for market, to learn how to grow food organically, and to prepare to get their own commercial farms up and running. It was a beautiful day to be out - sunny, mild and dry. Of course, the nice weather belied the struggles the farmers have had with this year's unusually wet weather. Large areas of the farms were unusable because they were still too wet. Worse, the outbreak of late blight has devastated this season's tomato crop, especially for organic farmers. Nevertheless, the farmers we met were happy to share their experiences and answer questions.

The farmers we met with were a testament to the breadth of this program:

• A group of young people from inner city Lowell who are part of UTEC (United Teen Quality Center), a safe-haven program for youth development and grass-roots organizing. Teens involved in the UTEC Fresh Roots Program grow and cook healthy food to feed and educate their community. This group manages a two-acre organic vegetable plot in Dracut and a commercial kitchen in downtown Lowell. THEY DO COMMERCIAL CATERING for anyone in the Merrimack Valley. In fact, they prepared a full buffet for our visit, using the food they had grown, and it was incredible.
• Bill the farmer, an affable man and quick to laugh. When asked how he had come to the New Entry program, he said, "Through the unemployment office." He was out of work and needed to change directions. Now he's preparing a business plan for his own farm. He provided us with a bumper crop of peppers this season, and was one of the very few organic farmers to actually get red tomatoes!
• Adisson from Haiti. Adisson is a trained agronomist with experience in managing coops. He and his teenage daughter are growing a variety of vegetables with the idea of going back to Haiti to teach others how to grow food without pesticides.
• A Korean woman who already has a full time job and but manages her farm on the weekends.
• A number of farmers from southeast Asia who are experimenting with ways to grow tropical crops in Massachusetts.

The New Entry program and the World PEAS Coop represent a remarkably progressive approach to sustainable and socially just agriculture. Their goal is to advance local, organic agriculture by helping small scale farming operations by immigrants and others of modest means succeed. This is more than just environmentally friendly agriculture; it is a program to help empower otherwise marginalized people to help themselves and others.

Sustainability as Transdisciplinary (but not-so-diverse) Praxis

According to the most recent report on Sustainability in Higher Education, students graduating in 2008 were less likely to be "environmentally literate" than they were when the survey was administered back in 2001. The report attributes this backward slide in eco-awareness to a lack of exposure to ecological principles in the curriculum. The irony is that the report also showed a greening of physical campus infrastructure (e.g. recycling, renewable and reduced energy use, etc.) and ever greater pledges of commitment to reduced environmental impact by the campus administration and leadership. The report does not rank or rate individual campuses. I am not sure how our College compares to the report's overall findings, though it occurs to me that we have a campus "sustainability officer," and we report on our progress in greening our physical infrastructure, but we have no coordinator or measure of sustainability in our curriculum.

Over the winter break I attended a workshop at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia to learn ways to better integrate environmental sustainability into our curriculum. The workshop was sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), and its purpose was to help "faculty leaders of all disciplines who wish to develop curriculum change programs around sustainability on their campuses." My original purpose in attending was to figure out how to improve our Department's new Sustainabilty concentration, but the workshop was actually aimed at showing us how to encourage and assist any or all faculty, in any or all disciplines, to integrate sustainability into their curricula: anthropology, biology, business, chemistry, English, foreign languages, geography, history, philosophy, political science, sociology, etc. The key, we learned, is to respect individual faculty members as experts in their respective disciplines, and to allow them to figure out how best to integrate sustainability. Our job is simply to educate or encourage appreciation of sustainability, and guide discussion and planning of curriculum changes.

The idea of breaking down disciplinary barriers was strong. One of the articles we read in preparation for the workshop went so far as to argue that schools should avoid establishing specific departments or programs in sustainability. Sustainability, they argued, will be more successful in the long term if it is a perspective or value that permeates all disciplines rather than being the protected turf of a particular department or group of experts. I know this must have raised some hackles, but they were raised quietly. This perspective makes sense to me. The concept of sustainability or sustainable development or environmental sustainability is supposed to occur at the intersection of economics, society/culture and the environment. How do we create, and sustain, a world that meets the needs of the present and the future across all of these domains? No one discipline or expert can possibly fathom all aspects of this problem (though Geographers come close!).

Inherent in this transdiciplinary ideal is an appreciation for the value of a diversity of perspectives. Indeed, our workshop hosts very deliberately admitted a diversity of attendees (37 in total): a wide variety of academic and professional disciplines, men and women, older and younger, tenured and untenured. Good. But somehow, racial or ethnic diversity, as far as I could tell, fell well short. I think, though I could be wrong, that I was the only racial/ethnic minority in the room. Not so good. Why does this matter? It matters for the same reason that it matters to involve people with different disciplinary training, with different forms of experience, or with different cultural orientations; different kinds of people, with different kinds of experience, bring different kinds of perspectives to what may appear to be the same issues (and to which people with the same perspective may be blind). For all of the self-congratulatory rhetoric about our post-racial society (look, we've got a Black President!), race/color/ethnicity remain defining aspects of Americans' identities, experiences, and for too many, their chances of success and happiness in life.

Low racial or ethnic diversity is a widely acknowledged problem in academia in general. However, I think it is especially problematic for sustainability. One of the most important transformations (or disruptions) in Environmentalism was the emergence of the Environmental Justice movement - the push to acknowledge the unique needs and problems of marginalized or oppressed groups in environmental problems and how these were interrelated with larger social (in)justice problems. Classic environmentalism was about saving the natural (i.e. non-human) environment and about averting catastrophic degradation of our world; not a bad thing. What often went unacknowledged, however, was how common environmental problems weighed most heavily on minority and working class or poor communities. Worse, efforts to cleanup or protect some places often mean simply displacing environmental burdens on to other places with less economic or political clout (read: marginalized communities). The issues go deeper, but the point is that these were aspects of our environmental crisis that were either ignored or were simply invisible, in part, because they were not within the experiences of the more privileged (i.e. well-heeled, White male) leaders of the early Environmental movement.

Today's Environmentalism is better for having acknowledged the social justice aspects of environmental problems. As with most big problems, however, our work is nowhere near done. My own anecdotal experience is that the socio-economic dimensions of sustainability continue to be underappreciated or misunderstood (why am I always the only one asking about the distributional implications of these efforts?). For sustainability to succeed, it must penetrate disciplinary boundaries AND it must incorporate the widest array of human perspectives. Otherwise, we're likely to miss something important.