The movement for “environmental justice” and against “environmental racism” began in the 1980s. Its premise is that racial minorities, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, suffer disproportionately from pollution.
The data supporting this premise are underwhelming, as Christopher H. Foreman Jr. notes in The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, his new analysis of the movement. Studies often define “minority community,” for example, to include any area where the percentage of nonwhites exceeds the national average, so that a community may be labeled “minority” even though the vast majority of its residents are white. Not only is there little evidence of a correlation between race and the enforcement of pollution laws, but what evidence there is suggests that facilities in minority areas have actually been assessed higher penalties than those elsewhere. “Much of the seminal environmental-justice research,” Foreman concludes, “has been called into serious question.”
The curious thing is that it doesn’t seem to matter to believers in environmental justice. As Foreman puts it — under the apt heading “Beyond Evidence” — “formal analysis is to a considerable extent irrelevant to the underlying objectives and gratifications that stir activist and community enthusiasm.” Thus, “for many activists, environmental justice is mostly about accountability and political power rather than the more technical issue of environmental risks facing communities.”
The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice is a superior analysis of the intellectual failures of environmental justice as well as the social, economic, and public-health disasters the movement promises. And yet, at the same time, Foreman uses his book to make a futile attempt to rehabilitate the movement by expanding environmental justice to include anything helpful to minorities (whether related to environmentalism or not). Thus, we could have the movement claim credit for creating jobs by closing down manufacturers in minority areas — and then hiring some of the unemployed workers to do the cleanup. While Foreman recognizes the falsity of environmental justice and the damage it does to minorities, he cannot quite bring himself to reject the movement altogether.
One venue in which environmental justice has found political currency is the Clinton administration. In 1994, President Clinton signed an executive order declaring that
each Federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations.
As Foreman explains, the Clinton administration embraced environmental justice, not least because “the racial minorities that constituted most of the . . . movement — African Americans, non-Cuban Latinos, and Native Americans — were crucial elements in the Democratic Party’s (and President Clinton’s) electoral coalition.” It was good symbolic politics, even if it had no factual basis. And the Congressional Black Caucus this summer called upon the administration to “strictly enforce its rules making excess pollution in minority areas a civil-rights violation.”
The primary legal tool of environmental justice is the theory of “disparate impact.” No one would hesitate to condemn the actual targeting of a neighborhood for pollution because it was black. But what the administration wants to ban is actions that have a disproportionately bad effect on minority neighborhoods. The result of disparate-impact theory in employment law, where it began, has been to push employers to adopt racial quotas. And the extension of the doctrine to environmental law now encourages the enforcement of pollution statutes with an eye to race — supposedly the thing that environmental justice opposes. Where pollution is a significant threat to health, it should be addressed no matter what the color of its victims. But color-blindness is not what advocates are after these days.
Earlier this century, the Left characterized the struggle for racial equality as simply one part of its general plan for the redistribution of economic and political power. In more recent years, however, the Left has tried whenever possible to recast each element of its agenda as part of the continuing struggle against racism. The attempt to limit welfare, the war on drugs, and the fight to end racial preferences have all been declared racist. And now pollution is racist, too.
It is not hard to understand why this shift has taken place. The over-whelming majority of Americans oppose racial discrimination. Indeed, the mid-century battles against racial discrimination may be the last time the Left was correct about anything.
It is of course unfair to call businessmen or local zoning officials racist when they are not. But the real victims in this scam are the racial minorities themselves. Crying racism when there is none cheapens the charge and encourages deafness when the claim might be real. Worse, the tactic encourages seeing every misfortune as the product of a racist conspiracy. This is not only false; it saps the self-reliance and personal responsibility essential for anyone to succeed — especially those starting on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
When the environmental-justice movement began, it seemed for a short time to promise a division in the Left. “Mainstream environmentalism,” writes Foreman, has been “overwhelmingly white and middle-class,” more attuned to mountain trails than inner cities. But the leaders of the environmental and civil-rights groups — both against capitalism and in favor of central planning, both populist in theory and elitist in fact — quickly discovered that they could gain by joining forces.
As the child of this union, environmental justice has inherited the worst feature of each parent. The most poisonous item on the civil-rights agenda is racial quotas. And so the environmental-justice movement holds that pollution decisions must be made with reference to race. Foreman notes that at least one advocate has demanded this principle be used to ensure that EPA’s expenditures are racially proportionate — despite the consequent “tendency to hamper the EPA’s ability to direct funds where they are most needed in light of other, arguably more compelling, policy criteria, such as public-health impact.”
One result is distraction from real health problems. The effect is “particularly insidious” given the fact that those distracted “have even fewer resources, and greater vulnerabilities, than more affluent citizens.” Worse, “environmental-justice proponents generally eschew personal behavior (and necessary changes in it) as a primary variable in the health of low-income and minority communities.”
A 1994 National Health Interview Survey found that 28 percent of white men smoked, versus 34 percent of black men and 54 percent of Native Americans. Among those at or above the poverty line, 24 percent smoked, while 35 percent of those below it did. Foreman observes that “it might appear mean-spirited rather than helpful to observe that the death of [environmental-justice advocate] Hazel Johnson’s husband from lung cancer at age forty-one might have had more to do with his cigarette smoking than with ambient industrial pollution.” But it’s true.
The bad trait inherited from the environmentalists is a distaste for economic development. Foreman is not entirely satisfying on this issue. The worst thing you can do for a slum is chase jobs from it. More and more, blacks and urban leaders are rebelling against the environmental activists who oppose economic development in their communities. “I’m trying to think of a policy that would be more effective [than EPA’s environmental-redlining policy] in driving away entrepreneurs and jobs from economically disadvantaged areas — and I can’t do it,” the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently declared in a speech to the Black Chamber of Commerce.
The oddest chapter in Foreman’s book — the place where he most obviously flees from the conclusions his own analysis suggests — is the chapter entitled “Opportunity,” in which he asserts that “the enhancement of economic opportunity in low-income and minority locales has emerged as a central theme of environmental-justice policy.” Foreman is exactly right in pointing out that “having little money or education has severe consequences: a greatly restricted menu of life’s amenities, some of them environmental.” But he then tries to make the environmental-justice movement into part of the solution, when it is part of the problem.
There may be something to be said for environmentalism, but no one can seriously argue that it has the effect of creating jobs. Nonetheless, Foreman suggests that, when environmental-justice advocates block economic development until cleanup measures are taken, they help create a net increase in jobs because someone will have to be hired to do the cleanup.
Similarly, Foreman claims that cleaning up urban “brownfields” — polluted areas where development is blocked by environmental laws — will aid economic development. But he then acknowledges that limiting brownfield development is dubious in the first place. Is he saying that the environmental-justice movement can claim credit for post-cleanup development by blocking pre-cleanup development? Or is he saying that the environmental-justice movement can claim credit for both cleanup and post-cleanup development after earlier development had been blocked by other brands of environmentalists? Either way, it’s a suggestion that won’t fly.
Foreman’s logic seems to be that since environmental-justice advocates want good things for their neighborhoods, and economic development is a good thing, economic development ought properly to be considered environmental justice. As a result, we find initiatives that have nothing to do with environmentalism suddenly on the agenda. This dramatic expansion of the movement can have comical effects: A House committee demanded that one program encourage “pre-employment job training; literacy; life skills; construction skills; training in the abatement of hazardous waste, lead, and asbestos; and so on.” And so on? Foreman sometimes recognizes that including every issue with any connection to the environment — isn’t that everything? — makes environmental justice hopelessly unfocused. But at other times he himself tries to expand its definition.
The better approach for Foreman would have been to accept the natural implication of his own critique: The movement doesn’t have anything worthwhile to add to the debate about pollution. Not only does it exaggerate the extent to which pollution raises health concerns — something common among environmentalists — but it insists that our environmental and health problems are largely racial, which is simply wrong. The other key premise — that government intervention (rather than free enterprise and personal responsibility) is what poor people need — is wrong, too.
The environmental-justice movement has no support in the empirical data, its legal claims are unsound, and its desired results damage the health and economic possibilities of its intended beneficiaries. Worse, the movement encourages racial paranoia and a victim mentality, distracts attention and energy from valid public-health concerns, and discourages individuals from assuming personal responsibility and adopting a healthy lifestyle. The movement, in short, is a false and dangerous distraction.
A former deputy in the civil-rights and environment divisions of the Justice Department, Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
