Foreword
By Reynold Siemens
On April 8, 1995, Harvard Law School's Environmental Law Society celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary by hosting a conference on the current state of the debate over environmental equity, entitled Environmental Justice: The New Wave. The conference consisted of panels and research papers on issues currently at the center of national discussion about the relation of race and class to pollution. It assembled many of America's leading authorities on environmental justice and drew an audience of about four hundred from around the world. This volume contains selected proceedings of the Harvard conference.
The term “environmental justice” refers to the equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits across racial groups or economic classes. As early as the late 1970s, “environmental discrimination” drew the attention of community organizations, agencies of state and federal government, corporate decisionmakers, civil rights advocates, environmental organizations, and social scientists. In the wake of a 1983 study by the United States General Accounting Office, a nationwide consensus began to form that minority and low-income communities do indeed bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of pollution. President Clinton officially acknowledged the federal government's role in creating environmental inequity when he issued the Executive Order of February 14, 1994, requiring agencies and departments of the federal government to integrate equity concerns into their environmental regulatory and enforcement activities, and establishing an interagency working group to guide the development of federal environmental justice policies. On January 20, 1995, the first interagency public meeting on environmental justice was held in Atlanta, Georgia, with satellite downlinks provided to thirty locations nationwide. That meeting gave interested members of the public a preview of the draft federal environmental justice policies, and unveiled such crucial information as: statistical methods by which federal agencies propose to identify environmental discrimination; mechanisms by which federal agencies propose to protect community members' right of meaningful participation in environmental justice decisionmaking; and strategies that federal departments and agencies intend to pursue in redressing environmental inequities.
The Executive Order has prompted a massive review by state and municipal governments of their own environmental regulations and enforcement practices to ensure their compliance with Title VI and other federal civil rights statutes. It has also sparked innovation at the regional, state and local levels aimed at minimizing the burdens of environmental regulation in low-income and minority communities relative to its benefits. Corporate policymakers and members of the private environmental bar have responded to this change in the regulatory climate in a variety of ways. Some have rejected the fundamental claims of the environmental justice movement as not legally cognizable or based on bad statistical analysis. Others have instead challenged the assumption that the marketplace is necessarily hostile to environmental equity and called for reform of laws and regulations that draw environmentally undesirable activity disproportionately into low-income communities and communities of color. Finally, environmental justice litigation has continued to shed new light on the usefulness of Title VI, Title VIII (the Fair Housing Act), and the public participation requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and their state law equivalents in redressing environmental inequities. Thus recent events have made environmental justice, which was once the exclusive concern of affected communities and a handfull of academics and activists, the central ecological concern of the 1990s.
The Harvard Law School conference was designed to address this development while reflecting the diversity of the environmental justice movement today. Among the twenty-three invited speakers were distinguished attorneys, public and private sector policymakers, community organizers, and residents of affected communities. The conference was comprised of panels and scholarly papers on general philosophical issues, private sector responses to environmental inequity, community empowerment, access of urban residents to a quality environment, housing discrimination, recent government initiatives, and scientific methodology.
One of my aims was to guarantee that the “voice” of communities affected by environmental inequity was heard. Thus, a great majority of the speakers at the Harvard conference belonged to minority groups, had substantial experience in community organization, or a mixture of both. Another of my aims was to ensure that the conference would not simply be a cheerleading session for the movement. To that end, corporate, private bar, and government representatives were invited, and some sessions were given to discussion of the growing body of legal and scientific criticism of the very concept of environmental discrimination. The heat generated by this mixture of backgrounds and viewpoints is something that the published proceedings cannot reproduce. Nevertheless, the mixture was consciously intended. One goal of this conference was to reinforce the principle that environmental justice is necessarily an interdisciplinary pursuit: environmental equity, if it can be achieved at all, will not be achieved through the actions of one constituency in isolation. Another goal was to present information about current environmental justice issues that would be sufficiently specific to be useful to environmental justice practitioners while also addressing students and nonspecialists. A third goal was to engender good will and future cooperation from individuals of diverse racial, class, and occupational backgrounds who share the goal of environmental justice. I would like to think that Environmental Justice: The New Wave helped in some measure to slow the growing compartmentalization and territorialization of the movement.
I wish to thank the following for their generous support of the conference: Foley, Hoag & Eliot; the Harvard Asian Pacific American Law Students Association; the Harvard chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review; the Harvard Environmental Law Review; the Harvard Law Review; the Law Office of Antonio Rossman; Straw & Gilmartin, P.C.; and the University Committee on Environment. I would also like to thank Kevin Lyskowski and the editors of the Virginia Environmental Law Journal for their enthusiastic dedication to this project. Finally, I must thank my wife, Carolyn, for her inspiration.
The term “environmental justice” refers to the equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits across racial groups or economic classes. As early as the late 1970s, “environmental discrimination” drew the attention of community organizations, agencies of state and federal government, corporate decisionmakers, civil rights advocates, environmental organizations, and social scientists. In the wake of a 1983 study by the United States General Accounting Office, a nationwide consensus began to form that minority and low-income communities do indeed bear a disproportionate share of the burdens of pollution. President Clinton officially acknowledged the federal government's role in creating environmental inequity when he issued the Executive Order of February 14, 1994, requiring agencies and departments of the federal government to integrate equity concerns into their environmental regulatory and enforcement activities, and establishing an interagency working group to guide the development of federal environmental justice policies. On January 20, 1995, the first interagency public meeting on environmental justice was held in Atlanta, Georgia, with satellite downlinks provided to thirty locations nationwide. That meeting gave interested members of the public a preview of the draft federal environmental justice policies, and unveiled such crucial information as: statistical methods by which federal agencies propose to identify environmental discrimination; mechanisms by which federal agencies propose to protect community members' right of meaningful participation in environmental justice decisionmaking; and strategies that federal departments and agencies intend to pursue in redressing environmental inequities.
The Executive Order has prompted a massive review by state and municipal governments of their own environmental regulations and enforcement practices to ensure their compliance with Title VI and other federal civil rights statutes. It has also sparked innovation at the regional, state and local levels aimed at minimizing the burdens of environmental regulation in low-income and minority communities relative to its benefits. Corporate policymakers and members of the private environmental bar have responded to this change in the regulatory climate in a variety of ways. Some have rejected the fundamental claims of the environmental justice movement as not legally cognizable or based on bad statistical analysis. Others have instead challenged the assumption that the marketplace is necessarily hostile to environmental equity and called for reform of laws and regulations that draw environmentally undesirable activity disproportionately into low-income communities and communities of color. Finally, environmental justice litigation has continued to shed new light on the usefulness of Title VI, Title VIII (the Fair Housing Act), and the public participation requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and their state law equivalents in redressing environmental inequities. Thus recent events have made environmental justice, which was once the exclusive concern of affected communities and a handfull of academics and activists, the central ecological concern of the 1990s.
The Harvard Law School conference was designed to address this development while reflecting the diversity of the environmental justice movement today. Among the twenty-three invited speakers were distinguished attorneys, public and private sector policymakers, community organizers, and residents of affected communities. The conference was comprised of panels and scholarly papers on general philosophical issues, private sector responses to environmental inequity, community empowerment, access of urban residents to a quality environment, housing discrimination, recent government initiatives, and scientific methodology.
One of my aims was to guarantee that the “voice” of communities affected by environmental inequity was heard. Thus, a great majority of the speakers at the Harvard conference belonged to minority groups, had substantial experience in community organization, or a mixture of both. Another of my aims was to ensure that the conference would not simply be a cheerleading session for the movement. To that end, corporate, private bar, and government representatives were invited, and some sessions were given to discussion of the growing body of legal and scientific criticism of the very concept of environmental discrimination. The heat generated by this mixture of backgrounds and viewpoints is something that the published proceedings cannot reproduce. Nevertheless, the mixture was consciously intended. One goal of this conference was to reinforce the principle that environmental justice is necessarily an interdisciplinary pursuit: environmental equity, if it can be achieved at all, will not be achieved through the actions of one constituency in isolation. Another goal was to present information about current environmental justice issues that would be sufficiently specific to be useful to environmental justice practitioners while also addressing students and nonspecialists. A third goal was to engender good will and future cooperation from individuals of diverse racial, class, and occupational backgrounds who share the goal of environmental justice. I would like to think that Environmental Justice: The New Wave helped in some measure to slow the growing compartmentalization and territorialization of the movement.
I wish to thank the following for their generous support of the conference: Foley, Hoag & Eliot; the Harvard Asian Pacific American Law Students Association; the Harvard chapter of the National Lawyers Guild; the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review; the Harvard Environmental Law Review; the Harvard Law Review; the Law Office of Antonio Rossman; Straw & Gilmartin, P.C.; and the University Committee on Environment. I would also like to thank Kevin Lyskowski and the editors of the Virginia Environmental Law Journal for their enthusiastic dedication to this project. Finally, I must thank my wife, Carolyn, for her inspiration.
