How much environmental justice is "too much"?

Communities in the Berkshires, Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts (where I live) are waging "grassroots" campaigns to protect their "pristine" environments from being forced to host wind energy projects that they insist will mar their beautiful landscapes and obstruct their views of nature's beauty.

Nature determines where the best sites for windfarms are. On the other hand, politics usually determines where fossil fuel-burning electricity plants, waste incinerators, dumps, trash transfer stations, etc. are located. Guess how many of the latter are sited in the Berkshires or on Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket? As few as absolutely possible is the answer.

Meanwhile, the state's poorest neighborhoods like Roxbury and Dorchester host a disproportionate share of the state's less-desirable infrastructure.

It's time to start distributing the responsibility for supporting the nation's infrastructure more equitably. Establishing more job-creating green businesses in our cities and supporting wind energy projects where they make the most sense would be a good start. (GW)

Not in Whose Backyard?

By Amanda Griscom Little
New York Times Sunday Magazine
September 2, 2007

Consider this curiosity of United States environmental policy: Countless federal laws have been written to preserve far-flung wilderness that Americans rarely visit (the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for instance) and endangered species that we scarcely see (from longhorn fairy shrimp to piping plovers). Yet no legislation has been tailored to protect a landscape that is perhaps the most vulnerable: the low-income communities that shelter most of America’s polluting facilities.

Later this month, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will introduce the Environmental Justice Renewal Act, which would direct additional federal funds to assisting environmentally beleaguered communities. The bill complements another proposal Clinton helped sponsor, which would require the Environmental Protection Agency to monitor and mitigate the health impacts of power plants, waste-transfer stations, truck fleets, refineries and other industrial infrastructure, which tend to be overwhelmingly concentrated in America’s poorest neighborhoods.

Both bills are expected to meet opposition in Congress. Nevertheless, their introduction suggests a coming of age for the environmental-justice movement. The movement — whose proponents hold that minority and low-income populations should not be subjected to more environmental burdens than others — has been growing at the grass-roots level for decades. Yet disproportionately high pollution levels continue to plague poor communities, and race often correlates with which populations are hit the hardest: African-Americans, for instance, are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in areas where air-pollution levels pose health risks, according to a 2005 Associated Press analysis of E.P.A. data. Lead-poisoning rates among Hispanic and black children are roughly double those among white children.

Environmental-justice advocates take pains to assert that they are neither antidevelopment nor anti-industry. “We can’t fight this battle at the expense of jobs,” says Majora Carter, a MacArthur fellow from the South Bronx, where children’s asthma rates are several times the national average. “We need to work; we also need to breathe — our goal is to find a way of doing both.” Carter and the organization she founded, Sustainable South Bronx, have fought dozens of proposals for new or expanded industrial sites, while simultaneously exhorting green businesses — like a high-tech recycling plant — to bring skilled jobs to the community. (The latter goal got a boost this summer when the House and Senate passed bills to put about $100 million toward training workers for jobs in green energy.)

But are environmental-justice goals always compatible with economic growth? There is a debate, says Daniel Doctoroff, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding: “On the one hand, environmental issues, versus having more jobs.” Real estate is scarce. No matter how clean and efficient industrial sites are, he says, “there will always be things that nobody wants, and we have to find places to put them.” And taxpayers will inevitably question why they should foot the bill for a sewage-treatment plant on the Upper East Side when it could be placed in a far less expensive neighborhood.

Some critics of the environmental-justice movement go further. It is not surprising, they say, that land near toxic sites is inexpensive and that the people who live there are poor. “It’s neither possible nor desirable in a free society to have all groups living equally close to everything — be it libraries or landfills,” argues Michael Steinberg, a Washington lawyer with clients in the chemical industry. “Even the old Soviet Politburo would have a hard time pulling that one off.” The mere fact of disparate impact, he says, is not evidence of intentional discrimination in the placement of polluting facilities — it’s just economics.

On the other side of the spectrum, some environmental-justice advocates say Clinton’s proposals don’t go far enough. Norris McDonald, president of the African American Environmentalist Association, calls the bills “a Band-Aid, nothing more.” He points out that they don’t give citizens the legal power to sue the industries polluting their backyards. McDonald sees Clinton’s recent efforts as a political move to secure the black vote.

Two years ago, Clinton and Barack Obama collaborated on a community-health bill. Now environmental-justice activists are waiting to see if Obama, who has been cautious on race-related issues, will respond to Clinton’s latest proposals with a countermeasure: “Okay, Barack,” McDonald taunts, “you gonna dance or let Hillary have the floor?”