Recently, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler spoke to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the EPA's founding. He used the opportunity to reiterate the agency's commitment to its “straightforward” mission to “protect human health and the environment.” He also emphasized that the agency’s mission meant “ensuring that all Americans – regardless of their zip code – have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean land to live, work, and play upon.”
Why did Wheeler refer to zip code? Because decades of research have documented that pollution, and its adverse health effects, are not spread equally across the country. Instead, polluting industry tends to be concentrated in certain zip codes that, due to a history of racist redlining and housing discrimination, are predominantly the home of Black and Brown Americans.
The groundbreaking 1987 study Toxic Waste and Race in the United States first documented that race is the most significant predictor of living near a toxic facility. Over the ensuing three decades, evidence for this connection between America’s racial geography and pollution has grown even stronger. Indeed, EPA’s own researchers recently documented that race, rather than poverty is the strongest predictor for pollution exposure.
By affirming EPAs duty to ensure a clean and healthy environment regardless of zip code, Wheeler was explicitly recognizing that achieving environmental justice is integral to EPA’s statutory mission.
Less than a year ago, in its 2019 Environmental Justice Progress Report, he was even more explicit. In reporting its progress toward environmental justice, EPA restated the agency’s commitment “to ensuring that environmental justice is integrated into EPA’s programs and activities to strengthen environmental and public health protections for low-income, minority, indigenous, and disadvantaged communities. . . .” Why? Because these communities “are more likely to live near contaminated lands or be disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards.”
Yet just last week, EPA postponed an internal speaker series on environmental justice. The reason for this postponement: the appalling suggestion, as per a recent White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo, that recognizing racial disparities in environmental protection is somehow "un-American."
The Constitution guarantees all Americans equal protection under the law. For a quarter century, all federal agencies have worked to identify and address “disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations in the United States.”
Race-based environmental disparities remain far too high. In communities across the country, Black and Hispanic residents breathe air polluted with higher levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) than do white residents. Black Americans are 75 percent more likely than white Americans to live in communities adjacent to sources of pollution. As a direct result of the higher pollution load they bear, Black Americans experience higher rates of pollution-related morbidity and mortality. Black children are more than twice as likely as white children to have asthma and experience disproportionately worse asthma outcomes, including higher hospitalization and death rates.
Yet like a toddler who covers their eyes and says “You can’t see me,” the Trump administration seems to be pretending these facts do not exist.
Facts are not un-American. America is old enough to have developed object permanence. We realize that covering our eyes does not make things disappear. Indeed, Wheeler himself recently emphasized that the communities dealing with the worst pollution in this country “tend to be low-income and minority.” He acknowledged that these communities “face multiple environmental problems that need solving.” Training government employees to recognize and respond to the environmental problems faced by communities of color and low-wealth families is part of fulfilling EPA’s mandate, not undermining it.
Yet here we are. Presumably to appease a president whose appeals to the nation are increasingly unhinged, EPA now pretends that environmental justice trainings are a problem rather than part of the solution. By playing along with this administration’s racist nonsense, the agency betrayed science, its mission, and the American people it purports to protect. Administrator Wheeler should be ashamed.
Showing 2,914 results
Rebecca Bratspies | September 21, 2020
Recently, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler spoke to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the EPA's founding. He used the opportunity to reiterate the agency's commitment to its “straightforward” mission to “protect human health and the environment.” He also emphasized that the agency’s mission meant “ensuring that all Americans – regardless of their zip code – have clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean land to live, work, and play upon.” Yet just last week, EPA postponed an internal speaker series on environmental justice. The reason for this postponement: the appalling suggestion, as per a recent White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo, that recognizing racial disparities in environmental protection is somehow "un-American."
Joel A. Mintz, Victor Flatt | September 17, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a wave of worrisome and needless regulatory relaxations that have increased pollution across the United States. Recent reporting by the Associated Press and other outlets has documented more than 3,000 pandemic-based requests from polluters to state agencies and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for waivers of environmental requirements. Numerous state governments, with the tacit encouragement of the EPA, went along with many of those requests.
Rena Steinzor | September 16, 2020
Presidents since Ronald Reagan have endorsed the assumption that government is too big and too intrusive. Yet the figurative poster children targeted by these chill words have been public health agencies heavily dependent on science-based decision-making as opposed to—as just one example—the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. No president has spent any concerted amount of time explaining how protective public health interventions, including regulation, make life better. No president has praised the civil servants who weather seemingly endless—and enervating—disputes over science and law that make it possible to deliver those protections. For the sake of the civil service and its broken morale, and for the American people, who are exhausted and rendered hopeless by the indiscriminate attacks on the government’s competence to keep the population safe, the next president should use the bully pulpit to advance a positive narrative about government’s accomplishments.
Joel A. Mintz | September 15, 2020
As I noted in a previous post, the pending case of United States v. DTE Energy, Inc. tacitly raises issues concerning the constitutionality of both Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) and the citizen suit provisions of environmental laws. This second post considers another constitutional issue that may emerge in the DTE Energy litigation: whether SEP agreements -- and citizen suits more generally -- interfere with a “core executive function” of the president and executive branch and longstanding constitutional notions of separation of powers. To resolve that question soundly, one must look to the text of the Constitution itself, the Federalist Papers, and the relevant body of law that the lower federal courts have already developed.
Joel A. Mintz | September 14, 2020
Over the past few years, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has shown increasing hostility to the use of Supplemental Environmental Projects (SEPs) in settlements of federal environmental enforcement cases. Aside from a series of ever-tightening SEP policies, however, DOJ has never asserted in court that these projects are unconstitutional. At least not yet.
Matthew Freeman | September 9, 2020
CPR Board President Rob Verchick is out with a new episode of the Connect the Dots podcast, the first in a new season focused on climate justice. As he puts it, "We’re looking at people living in the cross hairs of climate change, those disproportionately carrying the burden of the world and suffering on a daily basis."
Rena Steinzor | September 8, 2020
As the country prays for relief from the global pandemic, what have we learned that could help us protect the environment better? Most alarming, I would argue, are COVID-19's revelations about the power of conspiracy theories and the antipathy they generate toward scientific experts.
Katlyn Schmitt | September 3, 2020
In the absence of meaningful action by OSHA, more than a dozen states, including Virginia, have issued emergency safety measures to protect essential workers from the risks of COVID-19. But Maryland – home to one of the largest poultry industries in the nation – is glaringly absent from that list.
Matthew Freeman | September 1, 2020
Writing in The Hill, CPR's Bill Buzbee and Mažeika Patricio Sullivan expand on a point they and their co-authors on an important article in Science magazine in August made ably: The Trump administration is running roughshod over science and law in its efforts to deregulate.