It was supposed to highlight the Clinton administration's enlightened racial attitudes by protecting minorities from sinister, profiteering polluters. But instead of thanking federal regulators for the so-called environmental justice initiative, the purported beneficiaries have complained the initiative may actually aggravate environmental problems in states and localities rather than alleviate them. They don't know how much "protection" like this they can stand.
"The EPA is pimping the black community to further their own agenda of a pristine earth at the expense of our jobs," Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, said last month. Added Arthur Fletcher, who once led the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, "What's emerging is the feeling the EPA will come in and hang up economic development. But when it's all over, poor people will be left twisting in the wind in no better position and maybe worse."
The goal of the Environmental Protection Agency's initiative is, in civil rights-speak, to ensure that minority communities do not bear a disproportionately heavy burden of pollution from nearby businesses and industries. The feds worry that polluters may target such communities because minorities may not have the political or financial clout to stop what whiter, wealthier communities could. Nobody, said EPA head Carol Browner when she announced the initiative in 1994, can question that minority communities have borne a disproportionate share of the country's "modern industrial life."
Whatever "nobody" may think, there are numerous questions about the policy, the latest posed at a hearing by the Commerce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Thursday. Speaking on behalf of the Environmental Council of the States, a non-partisan group of state environmental officials, Robert Roberts complained the agency's guidance on enforcing the act was too vague; the geographical area to be surveyed for racist pollution isn't clear. It also invites federal intrusion into zoning decisions historically left to state and local officials.
Further, he said, the initiative may encourage business development in rural regions where race is not an issue, thereby contributing to urban sprawl. At the same time, it would discourage development in urban areas where environmental cleanup and economic growth are both needed.
Said Michael Hogan, an official with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, "We must further be careful not to devise a system that dampens the great strides that are being made in brownfields redevelopment and general urban revitalization. Drawing circles around our communities and declaring them to be 'environmental justice areas,' as some proponents suggest, will most certainly defeat attempts to bring in business and industry to clean up long standing environmental problems and develop those sites, with the resulting boost to local economies and job creation."
Ironically, as the Detroit News has reported, EPA officials have done their own study on links between pollution and racism, only to discover there is no link. In effect, the agency is trying to protect minorities from an environmental threat that doesn't exist.
At least it doesn't exist yet. If the agency does not drop its environmental justice initiative, then EPA policy, not industry or state officials, may itself wind up having a disproportionate impact on minorities. Green racism, as the affected communities could tell the agency, is no more welcome than any other kind.
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