ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE: Movement shifts focus from pollution battles to ‘green job’ creation
Posted on December 1st, 2008By Sara Goodman
Environmental justice activists are planning to shift a movement that has focused intensively for 25 years on fighting toxic pollution in poor communities to generating so-called green jobs for those communities.
The idea is to catch wind for the movement’s sails from a politically popular push for using renewable energy projects to boost a sagging economy and shift the nation away from fossil fuels.
“We’re focusing on spreading around the benefits of a green economy,” said Robert Verchick, a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans and a scholar for the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR). “It’s going to be juiced up by the government through all kinds of incentives, and if the government is going to get involved, it ought to say to companies that benefit that they need to make sure the same people that have always lost don’t lose again.”
The push for green jobs is coming from the top: President-elect Barack Obama and senior congressional Democrats have vowed fast action next year on a massive economic stimulus package that will include spending on renewable energy projects and other “green” projects that could spur job creation (Greenwire, Nov. 24).
Environmental justice advocates want to guarantee that poor and minority communities are not forgotten in the effort. Left to market forces, activists say, jobs building wind turbines or installing solar panels would flow to places with already-strong business infrastructure and bypass industrial areas with rusted economies and high unemployment rates.
“It sounds like a good idea to worry about how [green jobs] are being distributed,” said William Andreen, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law. “This is a huge problem because so much of economic development in green field areas is in the outskirts of cities, when many of the people who need jobs are located in the central city and have a difficult time getting to new facilities.”
To help ensure that this happens, Verchick’s group is urging Obama to amend or replace President Bill Clinton’s 1994 executive order urging agencies to make environmental justice part of their missions. Executive Order 12898, Verchick said, lacks “teeth.”
The center wants Obama to force agencies to consider environmental justice in their decisions and be held accountable for it. A new order should attach strings to incentives for developing renewable energy projects — for example, limiting grants to development that meets certain criteria, he said. Obama has contacted environmental justice scholars for advice on how to handle such issues, Verchick said.
Movement’s roots
The shift to job creation is significant for a movement that is widely believed to have begun in the early 1980s when residents of predominantly African-American Warren County, N.C., protested the development in their county of a state landfill for PCB-contaminated soil.
Benjamin Chavis, then-director of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, and other community leaders participated in a monthlong protest that, while unsuccessful, drew attention to what activists called “environmental racism.”
In response, former Rep. Walter Fauntroy (D-N.C.) asked the agency now known as the Government Accountability Office to assess hazardous waste landfills and the demographics of their host communities in eight Southern states. The 1983 GAO report found that three of every four dumps were near predominantly minority communities.
A report four years later by Chavis’ commission correlated waste facilities and demographics, finding three of every five African-Americans and Hispanics living in communities with toxic waste sites.
Since then, environmental justice has become a factor in issues ranging from the effects of industrial chemicals on the health of farmworkers to the effects of uranium mining on Native Americans in the Southwest. Despite progress, the movement has struggled to remain effective and to convince people to stay interested.
“Like the way all movements develop, this was in the beginning very reactive,” Verchick said in an interview. “There are still plenty of harms to address, but like all civil rights movements, you have to have an affirmative side, because people get bored of hearing about grievances. People want more than correction. They want a way forward.”
One complaint facing the environmental justice movement has been that it has focused too much on litigation, which restricts business and drives out jobs, William Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said at a conference last year (Land Letter, April 5, 2007).
Businesses would be far more receptive to a movement focused on creating jobs, Kovacs said in a recent interview.
“To the extent that they want to find jobs, we’re willing to work with them,” Kovacs said. “It really depends on what is the environmental justice movement trying to do: create jobs or stop them in their community.”
‘It’s all coming together’
David Schlosberg, director of environmental studies at Northern Arizona University, said green jobs have been at the core of the environmental justice movement from the beginning. But current events have managed to bring the issue to the forefront, he said.
“There are more resources available now and more recognition of the validity of just sustainability,” Schlosberg said. “It’s all coming together. It’s obviously an environmental justice issue, and now it’s a jobs and economic development, as well as climate change issue.”
The idea that environmental justice does not have to come at the expense of economic development is a major focus of the movement, said Catherine O’Neill, a professor at Seattle University’s School of Law and a CPR scholar.
“There’s the old apparent tension between economic prosperity and pollution,” O’Neill said. “The old notion was that communities that have good-paying jobs have to suffer the pollution.”
By trying to harness the growing awareness around green jobs, leaders of the movement are trying to change the dialogue about how to protect vulnerable communities by empowering them, Verchick said.
“We were cognizant of the push-me, pull-you relationship between the economy and the environment, where you’re either arguing for a better environment or better jobs,” Verchick said. “We saw this as how to put a positive component in the movement.”
Added Andy Bessler, Southwest Tribal Partnership representative for the Sierra Club’s Arizona chapter: “It’s a sign that there’s more empowerment and people feel a little more confident to propose new and creative ideas. Green jobs … is a good frame for a new strategy.”