And Justice For All

hester, Pa., a town of 42,000 on the Delaware River just south of Philadelphia, has problems. Once home to a booming steel and manufacturing economy fueled by a middle-class workforce, Chester now houses oil refineries, waste processing plants and a poor, largely minority population, many of whom are seriously ill.

A 1995 study by the Environmental Protection Agency found excessive blood-lead levels in Chester children and high risks of cancer and liver, kidney and respiratory diseases among the population as a whole. The cause of these health conditions-whether pollution, genetics, lifestyle choices such as diet or a mixture of them all-remains a matter of debate, as does the permitting policy that allowed so many facilities to operate in one small area. All sides agree, however, that Chester residents bear a disproportionate amount of the area's environmental hazards.

Since 1996, locals have been battling state environmental officials in court hoping to change permitting procedures to prevent future Chesters. Five of the seven state waste permits issued for Delaware County over a 10-year period were for Chester locations, notes Jerome Balter, who represents Chester residents in the case and is a staff attorney at Philadelphia's Public Interest Law Center. The Chester plants handle more than 2 million tons of sewage and other waste each year, compared with 1,400 tons per year at the other two sites together, he says. The essence of Balter's argument: State permitting decisions violated Chester citizens' environmental justice rights.

The Premise

Environmental justice, by definition, means no community should be subject to a disproportionate amount of environmental hazards such as toxic emissions or excessive noise from factories, highways, airports and other facilities. In other words, "You shouldn't be in a dangerous environment just because you're poor," says Robert Knox, acting director of EPA's Office of Environmental Justice.

"This issue is incredibly emotional," notes Christopher Foreman, senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's governmental studies program, who has written a book on the subject. "People are sure that something horrible is being done to them."

Even agency officials get emotional over the subject. People still remember EPA Administrator Carol Browner's teary-eyed speech to an impassioned crowd of activists in Washington at the February 1994 symposium on Health Research and Needs to Ensure Environmental Justice. "Browner was clearly shaken by all the horror stories of pollution, disease and death," recalls one meeting attendee.

Translating the emotion into policy is difficult, given the dearth of scientific evidence correlating pollution with health problems, Foreman says. The movement "rests on a very weak empirical foundation," he says. "Everyone knows it, but people don't like to talk about it."

Science aside, no one disputes the fact that low-income and minority neighborhoods historically have borne most of the pollution associated with industrial and development activity. One reason is these areas have cheaper real estate costs, but the communities also didn't actively oppose proposed development sites. In some cases, they welcomed new jobs brought to the area. But in many other cases, residents weren't aware of site plans until well after requisite permits had been issued and building had begun.

The environmental justice movement's goal is to promote awareness and public dialogue so communities can be players in the development process before sites are approved. If communities know what's going on, the argument goes, they can make informed decisions about whether they want a facility in their back yards. In turn, they will be less likely to launch lawsuits against companies or the government after facilities are built.

As one federal agency official puts it, "Environmental justice is nothing more than giving the public an opportunity to know what you're doing so they can be an active participant."

Thinking Ahead

Federal agencies have had to pay extra attention to environmental justice issues since Feb. 11, 1994, when President Clinton issued an executive order requiring each of 17 agencies to "make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, the disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations." Independent agencies not named in the order were only requested to comply.

The order created an interagency working group to advise agencies on how to identify "disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects" on these populations and to develop interagency environmental justice model projects, among other things. Agencies had to submit an environmental justice strategy to the working group by December 1994.

"In essence, the order obliged agencies to think about the issue," notes a Housing and Urban Development Department official. "It said for the first time that agencies had to look at the pattern of environmental effects their work was having on communities." The order also empowered people within agencies who care about environmental justice, adds Richard Lazarus, environmental law professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Four and a half years later, community activists complain that agencies haven't done enough to implement the order. They also criticize the White House for not monitoring the situation more closely. Their comments prompted Vice President Al Gore on April 22, Earth Day, to issue a memorandum calling on agency chiefs to strengthen their environmental justice efforts. Though past experience makes them skeptical, observers say they are encouraged and hopeful Gore's interest will rejuvenate agency commitment.

Grassroots Beginnings

Environmental justice traces its roots in part to the 1960s civil rights efforts. But the idea first received official recognition in 1971, when the White House Council on Environmental Quality's annual report cited evidence that race-based discrimination was hurting poor communities' ability to improve the environmental quality of their lives.

The matter got national attention in 1982, when citizens of Warren County, N.C., protested a state proposal to build a waste site for soil laced with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, commonly referred to as PCBs. Although the protests didn't stop the state's plan, the episode launched environmental justice as an issue capable of mobilizing grassroots forces, Foreman notes.

The Warren County episode prompted the General Accounting Office in 1983 to study four major hazardous waste dumps in the Southeast. Three were in predominantly black neighborhoods, GAO found.

A succession of other studies and reports included the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice's 1987 "Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States," which concluded that the racial makeup of an area was closely tied to the likelihood that a hazardous waste site was located there. Then in 1992 the National Law Journal published a study that found, based on EPA data, significantly more aggressive enforcement of environmental statutes in white communities than in minority neighborhoods.

By the early 1990s, minority groups concerned about disproportionate environmental hazards increasingly approached EPA, says Knox, who has worked at EPA since its inception. For example, American Indians were worried about health problems associated with their traditional fish diet, given that industrial pollution had contaminated fish stock in some rivers. Farm workers living near crop-dusted fields were concerned about pesticide exposure.

"They said, 'What about us? You didn't set the [environmental] standards to protect us,'" Knox recalls. "We were part of the problem . . . because [EPA] set the standards to protect the average person," who has less-concentrated exposures than these population subsets.

All the attention forced EPA to take note. Former EPA Administrator William Reilly established the Office of Environmental Equity in 1992. That same year, then-Sen. Gore proposed the Environmental Justice Act, which would have forced EPA to identify the 100 counties with the most toxic chemical pollution. EPA and the Labor Department would have had to inspect all toxic chemical facilities in those areas at least every two years. Nothing came of Gore's bill, but when he and Clinton won the 1992 election, environmental justice advocates saw an opportunity and worked with the Clinton-Gore transition team promoting their ideas.

Their work appeared to have paid off when, soon after taking office, Clinton appointee Browner renamed EPA's three-person Office of Environmental Equity as the Office of Environmental Justice and pumped it with extra resources. The office now has 12 full-time employees. Browner also created the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council in September 1993 to help guide agency environmental justice policies. Five months later, Clinton issued the executive order.

Agency Action

Agency efforts to implement the environmental justice order have varied considerably. HUD's written strategy, for example, is nearly 30 pages long. The Labor Department's is three pages. Some agencies created new programs and boosted staff training to promote awareness. Others mainly repackaged existing programs and labeled them environmental justice initiatives.

EPA-for obvious reasons, many people say-is widely cited as the most active agency on the matter. For example, the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, which is responsible for overseeing environmental remediation work, has pushed cleanup of "brownfields," former industrial sites often located in poor, inner-city neighborhoods, so they can be redeveloped to give the communities an economic boost. HUD has helped fund training and development in these areas. Some HUD grants are even used to train residents in cleanup techniques, so they can get jobs with environmental remediation companies.

HUD and EPA also have awarded grants to help build infrastructure in the colonias, immigrant towns in four states along the U.S.-Mexico border. These Hispanic communities have long faced dangerous environmental conditions in part due to inadequate housing, plumbing and sewage disposal systems. Federal money is helping to improve the situation.

Environmental justice at the Energy Department has translated into more public involvement in environmental cleanup projects, says Georgia Johnson, assistant director for socioeconomic research at DOE. The goal is to reduce the harm to low-income and minority communities by DOE activities, Johnson says. Similarly, the Defense Department tried to boost public participation in its Restoration Advisory Boards, which serve as liaisons between military bases and communities during cleanup discussions.

For the Federal Transit Administration, public involvement has not only tempered opposition to projects but has helped turn transit investments into social ones. FTA's "Livable Communities" initiative called for extensive dialogue between San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit District and the Spanish Speaking Unity Council of nearby Fruitvale on a plan to build a train station in Oakland. The effort led to the building of a "transit village" that includes a station, child-care center, health clinic, public library, senior citizen housing and a police substation.

Generally, agencies have incorporated environmental justice into studies mandated by the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. The law requires agencies to conduct environmental impact analyses of major proposed actions likely to "significantly affect" human environment The Council on Environmental Quality, an executive branch office that advises the president on environmental policy, has drafted guidance encouraging agencies to set up a public participation strategy accounting for "linguistic, cultural, institutional, geographic, and other barriers to meaningful participation," among other things.

Falling Short

Agencies may have made some progress on the environmental justice front, but many observers aren't satisfied with overall performance. "A lot of communities are frustrated," says Tom Goldtooth, national coordinator for the Indigenous Environmental Network in Bemidji, Minn. "They don't feel the administration is doing enough. Things are bogged down in bureaucracy."

Luke Cole, general counsel for the San Francisco-based California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation's Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, agrees. "The executive order was long on words and short on substance," Cole says, adding that success stories can be attributed mostly to individual government employees pushing the programs rather than to a broad administration effort.

"Some of it is a matter of not understanding" what environmental justice means, says Charles Lee, with the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice in New York. "It requires [agency staff] to do things a different way. And it involves [situations where] people are being hurt, so there's a lot of controversy." Government employees often shy away from controversy, he adds.

Environmental justice advocates both within and outside government also blame the Council on Environmental Quality. Inadequate oversight by the council allowed the issue to drop from a Secretary-level priority in 1994 to, in many agencies, an issue monitored by lower-level career professionals who themselves may be committed to the issue but have little decision-making power on policy matters.

Another sign of the council's lack of commitment, they say, is the fact that guidance linking the 1969 policy law and environmental justice wasn't finalized until last December and wasn't published until this spring. White House sources note that draft environmental policy guidance was released back in 1995. And while they acknowledge that slack oversight has allowed environmental justice to fall off some agencies' radar screens, they place much of the blame on agency heads, who were required by the order to ensure compliance. "Agency leaders were expected to take the ball and implement the order," a White House official says.

Compounding the problem for agency career staff, department-level leadership changes have made it difficult to maintain commitment to the issue, say several sources, many of whom asked not to be named. "I've just about given up hope," says one agency official who repeatedly has presented environmental justice concerns to new department leaders to no avail.

"People don't think agencies are serious about the executive order or that they're doing enough," the official adds, recalling complaints heard at an environmental justice advisory council meeting last December in Durham, N.C. "It's only a matter of time before the lack of action embarrasses the whole government."

It was against this backdrop of growing discontent that Gore issued his Earth Day memo, hoping to breathe new life into the President's order. "There have been strong expressions of concern from community leaders that our efforts to date have not been sufficient," he wrote. He ordered each Cabinet member to designate someone in his or her office to work with the environmental quality council. The council is to report back to Gore this month on what agencies have done or need to do to comply with the order.

"The executive order was intended to have the force of law, and that's why it's important to make sure there's compliance with it," says Bradley Campbell, associate director of the environmental quality council. "The Vice President thought it was important to renew the focus on this issue."

Ultimate Impact

Though they are disappointed by administration efforts, even the staunchest critics agree the executive order has had some effect. "The executive order recognized at the highest level of government-from the lips of the President himself-that environmental justice was an important issue," forcing state and local governments also to take the issue seriously, Cole notes. Indeed, at least 21 states have enacted, proposed or shown interest in environmental justice legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The order definitely has promoted awareness, Goldtooth adds. If environmental justice as a movement provided a language for low-income and minority groups to express their feelings about long-festering issues, the executive order provided an official context for that language, he says.

The order also boosted awareness within industry, Knox points out. Where industrial facility managers talk openly with local communities, environmental compliance records are better, he says. "You couldn't have predicted it would take this twist."

Whether Gore's renewed interest in the matter will once again make environmental justice a federal government priority remains to be seen. But the seeds of awareness already have been planted, Lee believes.

"There are a significant number of people in the federal bureaucracy who have begun to understand the importance of environmental justice and really want to see the right thing done," he says. "I don't think it's something you can turn back on. These issues are here to stay."