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.

Making Decisions in a Climate of Doubt

A billboard by the Heartland Institute outside of Chicago, May 2012.

What's going on with climate change? How are we doing?

As of this writing, the concentration of CO₂ (carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere, as recorded atop Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii, is a little over 394 ppm (parts per million) and rising at an accelerating rate.    Carbon dioxide, as we all should now know, is the primary greenhouse gas that is driving anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) global climate change.  The higher the concentration, the greater the change.

For some time, climate scientists have warned that atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ above 350 ppm would take the planet into a realm that is outside of historic human experience.  Indeed, "350" has become the mantra of a global grassroots movement seeking political and social solutions to this imminent threat.  Atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ have exceeded 350 ppm since the late 1980s.  Given the current trajectory, some scientists and policy makers have proposed a new target.  In order to keep the change in global average temperature over the next century to less than 2 degrees Celsius (a small number with massive implications), we need to keep the concentration below 450 ppm.  At a recent open lecture at Northeastern University, Henry Jacoby, Professor of Applied Economics at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at MIT, warned, "We are about to blow through that level."  Massive change is going to happen.  He suggested, somewhat resignedly, that we will likely need to move the goal post back to something like 650 ppm - a concentration that projects a global average temperature rise somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 - 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.  This is a global temperature difference not seen since dinosaurs walked the earth.  No polar ice caps.  Sea levels from 30 to 120 meters higher than they are today.

There are lots of bright spots. Since about 2008, emissions of greenhouse gases from the wealthier, industrialized nations of the world have actually flattened, or even decreased.  This is good, although it appears to have had more to do with the economic recession and the rapid replacement of coal with suddenly cheaper natural gas (from fracking) than with with any deliberate effort.  Unfortunately, these decreases have been more than offset by rapid growth in emissions from industrializing nations, especially China and Brazil.

There is significant global action on climate change, but it is widely distributed or dispersed.  This action has been happening almost entirely at the local or regional level: by the European Union, by many states or provinces, by cities, and by a variety of non-governmental organizations, from businesses to non-profits.  Coordinated global action by the world's governments, however, is notably absent.  This absence of global leadership is striking.  The science around climate change has only improved.  The signals of rapid global change are not only clearer, but appear to be moving faster than even the worst case scenarios had predicted.  And for the last twenty years, it's been popularly assumed that a single, global treaty is the only viable way for the world to avert disruptive climate change. What happened to global leadership?  There is no simple answer to this question, but one issue that must be confronted is the role of the social and political movement against action on climate change.

The Kyoto Protocol was the first, and up to this point, last, serious international attempt at a global treaty to reduce greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol was drafted in December 1997 by hundreds of delegates from around the world under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  It called for binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions, starting with the developed nations most responsible for the bulk of emissions to date.  At that time, the climate change policy debate was informed by more than three decades of accumulating scientific analysis from around the globe.  That's right, three decades.  Negotiations over this global treaty were intense and plagued by uncertainty, but advocates at the time had more than just decades of science on their side.  There was precedent for coordinated, global action on environmental threats.  Only a decade before, the U.S. led the charge on the Montreal Protocol.  This successful, global treaty banned the production of CFCs, a ubiquitous class of chemicals eating away at the ozone layer - a thin layer of gas in the atmosphere that protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation. A variety of other international environmental efforts, from the control of transboundary air pollution to whaling, seemed to show that there could be coordinated, global action.

Proponents of the Kyoto Protocol argued that the science around climate change was well supported, the problem was urgent, action today would reduce the necessity of more costly and disruptive responses in the future, etc.  To a contemporary reader, what is probably most striking is how much these arguments haven't changed, and how they have only been reinforced by accumulating evidence and improved scientific understanding.  However, advocates of the Kyoto Protocol faced a new breed of political opposition.  New conservative organizations, many of which only emerged in the late 1980s, launched a well-funded and strategic campaign to cast doubt on scientific predictions about climate change and to thwart any policies aimed at controlling greenhouse gas emissions. In the early 1990s, these efforts were strengthened by a dramatic political shift in the U.S. that enabled conservative Republicans to take control of Congress, giving skeptical, conservative voices a powerful platform to amplify their message and to steer the U.S. away from making binding commitments. It was a critical moment in the incipient effort to tackle climate change, and we are still grappling with the implications of those decisions.

Today, it's hard to imagine a time when the issue of climate change wasn't polarized or partisan.  But there was a time, mostly before the late 1980s.  The political division over climate change that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s was profound, and it caught a lot of people off guard.  Some of the arguments against the Kyoto Protocol are still familiar and not particularly radical: concerns about impacts to the U.S. economy, concerns about imposing limits on the U.S. while allowing countries like China and India to continue unrestricted, concerns about the technical ability of the U.S. to even achieve the desired reductions.  There were, of course, more exotic arguments: the argument that more carbon dioxide will be good for plants and make the world greener, the argument that a warmer world will actually be more comfortable, etc.  But the most disruptive arguments have been the distortions and aspersions leveled at the science and scientists themselves.  Attacking the science seems to have sown confusion and left very little space for common ground.

During that last climate change lecture, Professor Jacoby asserted that the "Argument [against action on climate change] is not really about the science; it's about the role of government in your life."  Possibly.  It has often seemed that the debates have been at cross purposes; one side talking past the other.  For the scientifically-literate and the environmentally sensitive, the debate over whether to take action, or whether there even is a problem, has simply been baffling and frustrating.

It seems to me that the drama of climate change is not the increasingly dire message of impending catastrophe.  Rather, the drama is the political debate.  Climate change may be the biggest environmental threat ever faced by humanity, but it is the politics that poses the greatest challenge.

The story of the Kyoto Protocol is an excerpt from the chapter "Should the U.S. have signed the Kyoto Protocol?" in my book The Environment since 1945 (New York: Facts On File, 2012). 

Recycling, Climate Change, and Youth

How young is too young to learn about greenhouse gas emissions, Life Cycle Analysis, and embodied energy?

This past Monday I had the opportunity to present these concepts to a group of 40 5th graders at Brickett Elementary School in Lynn, Massachusetts.  Their teacher, Donna Whalen, had invited me a couple months back to talk about recycling or climate change.  She and her class wanted to learn more about different environmental issues so that they could develop a public project to work on.  This was no small thing.

Mrs. Whalen and her industrious students are known regionally and nationally for their environmental activities. This past spring, Mrs. Whalen's 5th grade class won the Disney Planet Challenge for their project “Think Before You Idle,” which was an effort to decrease needless vehicle idling in Lynn. Their local initiative not only reduced this pernicious source of toxic air pollution near schools, it sent her and her students on a four-day trip to Disney World. Last year, Mrs. Whalen's 4th graders launched a campaign to educate residents about the need for rain barrels and convinced a local cable company to donate the use of one of its billboards to spread their message. The campaign earned them a visit by the Mayor of Lynn, and an official declaration of Monday as Rain Barrel Day in Lynn.  Two years ago, Mrs. Whalen's 4th grade class was recognized with a River Stewardship Award, and a state legislative citation, for their efforts to promote water conservation in Lynn and throughout the state. In fact, I first learned about Mrs. Whalen and her amazing students through a casual conversation with a member of the Saugus River Watershed Council during a regional climate change adaptation planning meeting convened by the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council. This individual gushed about Mrs. Whalen and her students.

I'm not generally used to interacting with anyone younger than my cat (i.e. college aged), but this opportunity presented an interesting challenge. I could have talked either about recycling or climate change, but I offered to talk about the connections between these two important issues.

The main link between recycling and climate change is energy.  It takes less energy to make products from recycled materials than from virgin materials (a lot less in the case of aluminum).  The amount of energy expended in making products is significant because most of the energy we use (for heating, electricity, transportation, manufacturing) comes from burning fossil fuels (e.g. coal, oil, natural gas).   Using less energy means that we produce less carbon dioxide (CO₂) - the primary greenhouse gas implicated in human-driven climate change. Other greenhouse gases, such as methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O), are also reduced in certain cases as a result of reduced use of chemical manufacturing processes. Greenhouse gas emissions are the primary issue in global climate change. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have the property of allowing sunlight to enter the atmosphere (kind of like the glass of a greenhouse), while blocking (or retarding) the escape of heat back into space (kind of like a global blanket).  This "greenhouse effect" is a natural process, but human industrial activity over the past two centuries has released a lot more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than is normal (more than has been seen in 800,000 years), meaning that a lot more heat than normal has been retained in the atmosphere.  As a result, the world is warming, the climate is changing, and we are experiencing all kinds of hard-to-predict and often undesirable environmental changes.

In the spirit of show and tell, I showed and told my presentation using a few simple props: a glass drinking bottle, a plastic drinking bottle, an aluminum can, and a newspaper.  We talked about the life cycle of each of these products: how they are created (e.g. did you know plastic is made from oil and natural gas?), how they are used, and what can happen to them after we are done with them.  In each case, we identified the resource consumption (e.g. trees, minerals) and the energy use and the greenhouse gases emissions that happen in each phase of a product's life (e.g. did you know it takes 95% less energy to make aluminum cans from recycled aluminum?).  Recycling (as I showed them in a PowerPoint slide), changes the lives of these products in significant ways: reducing natural resource consumption (e.g. did you know it takes 17 trees to make one ton of newspaper?), saving landfill space, reducing energy use, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As a final exercise, we walked through the process of actually calculating the greenhouse emissions that could be prevented if their school recycled all of the glass bottles it consumed. For this last exercise, I had prepared a simple worksheet (although not so simple to produce!) that allowed them to input their own values.

I have to admit that as the day of my presentation approached, I grew increasingly nervous that my lesson plan would be too complex, or worse, too boring.  I am happy to report that my fears were groundless.  These students were really there with me the whole time.  They listened eagerly and had lots of really good, clarifying questions.  Which recycled product has the biggest impact on energy and greenhouse emissions? The least?  If plastic is made from oil, is it possible to get that oil back?  How do all those tons of gasses stay up in the atmosphere?  I was equally impressed by what they already knew - about natural resource consumption, about recycling, about pollution. When we walked through the exercise to calculate their school's greenhouse gas emissions from glass consumption, they called out the answers at each step, and even corrected me when I made a couple of mathematical mistakes. Whoa.

I feel compelled to point out that these students are from a largely non-White, and low income community. These are not privileged kids - or at least not from a socioeconomic perspective. They are, however, clearly advantaged by the quality of this teacher and this institution.

These young people (e.g. 8 - 9 years old) are also clearly capable of understanding and engaging with complex environmental topics.  They need to be.  The social and environmental challenges that face us will undoubtedly span generations, and these young people will inherit these problems, as will their children.  I am hoping that this type of education, and its level of sophistication, can become the new norm.  Understanding the importance of environmental stewardship the way we understand and teach about the importance of washing our hands - something based on decades of complex, scientific research, but in the end comes down to a simple idea: it's good for our own health and welfare and those around us.

Climate Threat Inflation

As the legitimacy and urgency of climate change have sunk in, the scope of considered impacts has broadened. One area drawing increasing attention is national security - issues that affect the integrity of nation-states. What does it mean to take a "national security" approach to climate change?

In June 2007, the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post in which he connected political instability in the Darfur region of Sudan with drought exacerbated by climate change. For at least the last five years, nations with Arctic borders have been contemplating a new tangle of claims over previously inaccessible domains. Dramatic decreases in sea ice over the Arctic are opening up vast areas of ocean bordered by Canada, Russia, the US and Nordic countries - all of whom see in this change a variety of opportunities (like new shipping lanes) and strategic conundrums (like who owns what). More recently, Senator Kerry has made the national security implications of climate change a central issue, and it seems the Pentagon has been listening.

Of course, Pentagon concerns draw their own concerns. Climate change skeptics, like James Carafano of the conservative Heritage Foundation, are clearly wary of lending climate change any more credibility with the imprimatur of military concern, while more liberal-minded scholars are worried about the inverse, justifying military investment with the imprimatur of climate change. Regardless of the political motivations, the Pentagon has in fact begun to explore national security implications of potential climate change impacts: flood, drought, environmental refugees and mass migration, and wars over natural resources. Potential conflict, of course, draws the most attention.

Interestingly, there is actually a large body of empirical evidence showing that nations are more likely to find peaceful solutions than go to war when faced with competition over scarce natural resources - like water. Aaron Wolf, a professor of Geography at Oregon State University and director of the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database, has compiled an enormous database on this exact issue. In a recent report for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, he and his colleagues pointed out:

• No nation has gone to war specifically over water for thousands of years.
• Between1945 and 1999, instances of cooperation between river-sharing nations outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one.
• In the last 50 years, only 37 disputes involved violence, and 30 of those occurred between Israel and one of its neighbors.
  
• Outside of the Middle East, researchers found only 5 violent events while 157 treaties were negotiated and signed.

Violent conflicts do occur, of course, but they mostly occur within nations, rather than between nations. Think on that. The authors conclude that water is actually a "pathway to peace" rather than conflict between nations.

Surely climatic instability has the dire potential to create social instability. How can people get along if they are worried about survival? But threats carry the potential for unity as well - especially common threats. According to an old Asian proverb, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The trick is to define the threat/enemy clearly and in a way that highlights our common interests in defeating this threat together. It has been done before and it can be done again.

Climate Change Squared

On Thursday I attended two very different and similar meetings on climate change.

Climate Change Meeting 1
The first meeting was with the Roxbury Environmental Empowerment Project (REEP) - a youth-led environmental justice organization based in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood. I visited with them at ACE in order to help them with their presentation on global warming. They have their script down pretty well - concise and basically right. Not surprisingly, there were some kinks and some needed clarifications:

1. The 'greenhouse effect' is actually a natural process. The problem is that we are over-enhancing it.
2. Global warming and the ozone hole are two different problems (a lot of people seem to confuse these two issues).
   
3. It's generally okay to use the terms 'climate change' and 'global warming' interchangeably, but 'global warming' should not be interpreted to mean it's just going to get warmer. The effects of climate change are not the same everywhere. The western US is getting drier and hotter, while the northeast is getting a lot more precipitation and stronger storms both in summer AND winter (including more intense ice storms).
4. The biggest immediate and chronic impacts on urban communities are heat stress and worsened air pollution. Heat stress is deadly for the very young, the very old, and the chronically ill - especially if you don't have A/C, have under-treated health conditions because you lack money or health insurance, and are stuck in a concrete environment with little or poorly maintained vegetation. Add to that the fact that smog - especially ground-level ozone and particulate matter - are enhanced by warm weather. Worse smog can be deadly, if not downright unpleasant, to the very young, the very old, and the chronically ill ... you get it. Houston, we have a problem.
   

Unlike most organizations raising the alarm about climate change, REEP is primarily interested in the meaning of environmental problems for vulnerable communities. It also means that they are looking for opportunities in this crisis. The last point is an interesting one, and it overlaps in interesting ways with the other meeting.

Climate Change Meeting 2
The second meeting (to which I arrived late because it was hard to stop talking over at ACE) was with the state's Climate Change Adaptation Advisory Committee. I've been attending the Key Infrastructure subcommittee. I need to thank Gene Benson from ACE, who was actually appointed by the Governor to the Committee, for suggesting me as a participant, as well as Brian Brodeur at DEP, for vouching for me to the subcommittee chair. The subcommittee meetings have been where the action is, but this big meeting was an opportunity to hear what all the other subcommittees have been doing regarding: coastal zones, public infrastructure, health and human welfare, terrestrial habitats, government and private business, etc. Each of the subcommittee chairs summarized their work to date, most of which had to do with identifying key vulnerabilities and suggested strategies. However, the point, as the Committee Chair reminded us, was not to "get into the weeds" on the details.

What's interesting to me, is the way in which many of the participants have seized on this crisis assessment as an opportunity for meaningful change - not just a panicked reaction to some imminent threat. As Ed Kuntz from DEP put it, we have the opportunity to change the whole paradigm of land use, economic development, and environmental management. Two strategies in particular stand out (at least to me):

1. Incorporating "nature-based" adaptation and mitigation strategies. This is similar to the idea of using "green infrastructure." Basically, this means recognizing and making use of the amazing variety and robustness of "services" that natural ecosystems provide. For example: wetlands for water filtration and buffering from storm surge; trees to provide cooling and absorption of excess water; open/green space to allow infiltration of rain and prevent excessive runoff and flooding, etc. Bob Zimmerman of the Charles River Watershed Association did an amazing presentation for the Infrastructure subcommittee on this issue.
   
2. Using the lens of community vulnerability to set priorities and design strategies. At a minimum, this means identifying those communities that are exposed to hazards AND less able to handle or recover from them - a concept known as resilience. It also means that when you look to clean things up, say by eliminating inefficient industrial practices or technologies, you begin by cleaning up the dirtiest in the most impacted neighborhoods. Finally, the lens of community vulnerability forces us to look for ways to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience by changing the very conditions that create vulnerability and low resilience - low socioeconomic status, geographic and social segregation, political influence, etc. First step: direct job and restructuring opportunities (i.e. stimulus funds) to communities most in need.
   

For all its threats, climate change presents a fascinating problem and a unique opportunity to redirect our society. Find more information on the Committee's website as well as notes from the public meetings. A final report to the state legislature is due December 2009.

The Artwork of Science

On Tuesday, March 18, 2008, our own Dr. Stephen Young opened a unique art exhibit entitled "Earth Exposed" at the Winfisky Gallery at Salem State College. The exhibit features a wide array of aerial and satellite-based imagery of the earth, from urbanized, coastal Salem, to the so-familiar arm of the Cape, to dendritic patterns of a delta in southeast Asia.

But these are more than simply pictures from high up. These are uniquely strange perspectives of the familiar. The images range from panchromatic black and white, to wildly bright and bold pinks and purples and fuschias. These are not the hues of the landscapes we know. Rather, this is the earth through the eyes of instruments that record what human eyes could not otherwise see - invisible brightnesses and energies that reveal natural forces and processes that are no less real for having been missed before. And this is where science meets art. Within science, these images are important for the data they contain, for the information that can be gleaned. But they are beautiful too. The familiar is made exotic and alien. The organic fluidity and symmetry compel the viewer to think he is looking at some kind of organism. Maybe he is.


On December 24, 1968, astronaut William Anders snapped a photo of Earth from lunar orbit and changed history. The photo, entitled "Earthrise," was described by photographer Galen Rowell as “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken.” Indeed, this one photograph of a planet has often been credited with altering the consciousness of an entire world. It was hard to believe that all of human history, and all humanity's future, rested on something so fragile and small. This iconic image offered a warning and hope of unity in tumultuous times.

Since that time, there have been significant advances in technologies that have allowed us to acquire so many more images of Earth. You might expect fascination to wane. But it hasn't. The "Earth Exposed" exhibit was well attended by students, faculty and administrators, as well as members of the community. The imagery is still fascinating and compelling.

But it's worth remembering that this kind of imagery, and this exhibit in particular, is not simply about abstracted beauty. There is a message here, and there is information with very practical and immediate relevance. The "Bye Bye Salem - Hello Salem Harbor Islands" series is a deceptively benign set of panchromatic aerial images of Salem and its harbor. But what these images show in stark black and white is the gradual disappearance of Salem beneath a rising ink black ocean. This is the message and the warning of our times, once again communicated through imagery.