I Introduction

• Some form of EM since early 1900s.
• First wave of environmentalism in early 1900s was a conservationist movement by middle and upper class white males and the movement received support from corporations. Grievances concerned the scientific management of resources for maximum economic benefit without destruction of resource base. Movement emerged due to:
• excessive capitalist exploitation of the environment,
• flourishing of Progressivism, and
• the formal closing of the frontier
• Contemporary EM emerged in 1960s and fused conservationist concerns with communal values. Was a "hippie" movement until after 1970, then it became professionalized and led by while middle class males whose organizations lobby Congress for reform policies. Grievances concern preservation of lands, water resources, and wildlife. Movement emerged in the 1960s due to:
• the publishing of Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring,
• the flowering of the decade's counterculture,
• and the proliferation of a variety of other social movements.
• New grassroots, anti-toxics wing of EM formed in the 1980s. Working class people without prior social movement experience who organize when faced with environmental contamination in their own communities. Greater mistrust of government and corporations. Movement emerged due to:
• 1978 Love Canal revelations,
• 1979 Three Mile Island accident,
• continuing discoveries of contaminated communities.
• Environmental Justice movement is part of that grassroots wing of the EM and represents a fusion of the grassroots wing's economic analysis of environmental problems with the civil rights movement's racial critique of political and economic institutions. Grievances concern the inequity of exposure to sources of contamination. Minority and low income groups are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks because of racism and classism.

II The Emergence of the Environmental Justice Movement

• In 1982, North Carolina officials chose predominantly black Warren County as site for PCB landfill. Residents organized against the proposal and received help from the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ), Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. They lost and the landfill was built.
• General Accounting Office (GAO) report on demographic characteristics of the four Southern communities hosting commercial hazardous waste sites in EPA Region IV. Findings in 1983:
• blacks = majority of population in three of the four communities;
• in all four communities, at least 25% of population had below-poverty level incomes and most of the poor population was black.
• In 1983, sociologist Bob Bullard published study on Houston's waste disposal sites:
• 6 of 8 city-owned incinerators, all five city-owned landfills, and 3 of 4 privately owned landfills were in black neighborhoods.
• Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management: lost, but first case to use civil rights law to challenge waste facility siting.
• CRJ study on Southern hazardous waste landfills found:
• of 27 commercial hazardous waste landfills in continental US, 1/3 in 5 southern states;
• capacity of Southern landfills = 60% of nation's total;
• 3 of 5 largest landfills in black and Hispanic neighborhoods; and
• 4 landfills in minority neighborhoods represented 63% of South's total capacity.
• CRJ findings announced at press conference where Ben Chavis Jr. coined term "environmental racism."
• 1991 First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit brought together community activists and a few academic researchers.
• Characteristics of community-based environmental justice organizations:
• Grievances claim environmental discrimination on basis of race and/or class;
• Seldom funded by national groups, organizations are often led by women and are mostly working class people of color with no prior movement experience;
• Tactics: demonstrations, petitions, lobbying local officials, letter-writing, public meetings, citizen-conducted health surveys, educational forums, and litigation.
• Targets of protest are local, state, and federal officials held accountable by citizens for environmental decisions;
• Organizations are most successful when goal is to block construction of a proposed facility; less successful with operating facility but often win some concessions.

III Academic Researchers and the Environmental Justice Movement

• Prior to 1992, few academic researchers studied environmental racism. Bullard's work a bridge between activists and academics. 1990 meeting at U. of Michigan between activists and a few academics. Wrote letter requesting meetings that eventually resulted in EPA's creation of Office of Environmental Equity. 1992 Bullard named to Clinton's Transition Team on the Natural Resources and Environment Cluster.
• Flurry of academic research published in 1992 and 1993 that confirmed environmental racism:
• Bailey and Faupel on Emelle, Alabama (1992) found ER in siting of waste facilities.
• White on Alsen, Louisiana (1992) found ER in waste facilities siting.
• Lavelle and Coyle (1992) found racial bias in government-imposed penalties against corporate polluters, in speed of government responses to environmental hazards in a community, and in government choice of a solution for such hazards.
• Zimmerman (1993) and Hird (1993) found racial bias in location of Superfund sites.
• Szasz et al. (1993) and Burke (1993) found racial bias in location of Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) facilities.
• Mohai and Bryant (1992) studied distribution of commercial hazardous waste facilities in 3-county area around Detroit and found:

>the 16 facilities in Detroit area represented 76% of all state facilities;

>race more important predictor of location of waste facility than was income; and

>race predicted location in comparison of facilities inside and outside the city.

• Been (1993) re-did GAO report and Bullard's Houston study adding data to see whether discriminatory outcome due to discrimination in siting or to post-siting market forces.
• Re-do of GAO study: initial siting processes discriminatory but not market forces.
• Re-do of Bullard's study: initial siting processes and subsequent market forces were discriminatory.
• 1994 CRJ update of 1987 study used Been's techniques found increase in environmental racism.
• 1994 Clinton's Executive Order 12898, "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice and Low-Income Populations" reinforced Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964. Created Office of Environmental Justice and the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) to advise EPA on how to attain environmental justice. Bullard included on council.
• 1994: Bullard formed Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia: <www.ejrc.cau.edu>.

IV Shifts in Findings By Academic Researchers

• Change in findings in studies that did not confirm ER, concluding that class and other factors were better predictors of environmental exposure than race.
• Anderton et al. (1994) national study of commercial hazardous waste facilities: most significant predictor of location of waste facilities was proportion of industrial workers in a tract.
• Glickman and Hersh (1995) study of Pittsburgh's TRI facilities: not just race, but poor and elderly.
• Bowen et al. (1995) study of Cleveland's TRI facilities: facilities more likely to be located in poor than minority neighborhoods.
• Pollack and Vittas (1995) study of Florida TRI sites: location related to degree of urbanization and industrialization, population density, and housing prices.
• Cutter et al. (1996) study in South Carolina: at county level, locations more likely in white affluent communities in metropolitan areas and, at census tract and census block levels, race not a factor.
• Been (1995) criticized Anderton et al. and found that the neighborhoods most likely to have a waste facility were those characterized by:
• median family incomes between $10,001 and $40,000;
• black proportions of the population between 10% and 70%;
• and Hispanic proportion of the population more than 20%.
• Another shift in academic research in 1997 to confirming ER again:
• Boer et al. (1997) on waste facilities in Los Angeles County;
• Ringquist (1997) on all US TRI facilities;
• Downey (1998) on Michigan TRI facilities;
• Foster (1998) in waste facilities in Chester, PA;
• Hird and Reese (1998) on US environmental quality;
• and Szasz and Meuser (2000) on Santa Clara County, California TRI facilities.

V Case Study of an EJM: Chester, Pennsylvania

• Chester, PA:
• Description: in Delaware County,15 miles SW of Philadelphia; population = 39,000; 65% black; median family income = 45% lower than rest of county; poverty rate 3 times county's rate (25%); high unemployment and crime rates; mortality rate 40% higher than rest of county and highest child mortality rate in the state.
• Noxious facilities: between 1986 and 1996, Pa.'s Department of Environmental Protection granted 5 permits for commercial waste facilities in Chester and only 2 elsewhere in the county; Westinghouse incinerator = one of nation's largest garbage incinerators; more than 60% of county's waste-processing industries in Chester with a total permit capacity of 2.1 million tons of waste per year compared to 1,400 tons per year for the rest of the county; a sewage and waste treatment plant in Chester processes all of the county's municipal waste and sewage even though only 7.5% of county population lives in Chester; concrete recycling facility; several older industrial operations.
• Chester's history:
• Began in 1682 with William Penn and was established with small-scale manufacturing firms. By 1770s, a milltown. Prospered until 1940s.
• Economic depression began in 1940s. After WWII, many manufacturing industries moved overseas and "white flight" took place.
• Between 1950 and 1980, 32% of Chester's jobs disappeared and black proportion of population increased from 20% to 65%.
• 1985: Pittsburgh banking firm and Westinghouse formed Chester Solid Waste Associates and bought land in Chester; it owns or has corporate relationships with most of Chester's waste facilities. Pa. siting laws don't require consideration of cumulative impact of preexisting facilities nor disproportionate location of facilities in host community nor demographics of targeted community.
• Today Chester is one of the most economically depressed communities in Pa. School district one of worst in state. Highest crime rate in state. As a response, city government inviting all industries to town. Political corruption.
• Activism in Chester:
• 1992: Pa. DEP about to grant permit for infectious medical-waste sterilization plant. Town meeting held. Zulene Mayfield got ticked off and walked out. She joined with others to form Chester Residents Concerned about Quality of Life. Government and industry officials were consistently condescending to the citizens and withheld information. In December, the group held first protest.
• In 1993, the group fought a permit for another waste treatment facility but lost.
• 1994: EPA chose Chester for a study of cumulative risk assessment.
• 1995: EPA findings: unacceptable cancer risks and serious non-cancer risks such as kidney and liver disease and respiratory problems. EPA regional director said study only showed a correlation, not a causal relationship.
• Chester activists go to court:
• 1995: Pa.'s DEP granted permit to Soil Remediation Systems to build facility for treatment of contaminated soil.
• 1996: Chester group filed complaint to block permit by using Executive Order 12898's statement to use Title VI of Civil Rights Act. Complaint accused Pa., DEP (receiving federal funds), and state officials of unintentional racial discrimination. Intentionality an unresolved legal issue. Pa. counterargued that private citizens do not have the right under EPA regulations to challenge the state's actions in court. Issue: can private citizens sue over federal government agency regulations that allegedly result in racial discrimination.
• US District Court judge dismissed Chester citizens' suit.
• 1998: Third US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed District Court's ruling and reinstated the group's suit.
• State of Pa. appealed to US Supreme Court, requesting reversal of federal court decision and Court agreed to hear the case.
• In August, citizens discovered that the firm had requested that their permit be revoked and the DEP had done so. The citizens group requested that the US Supreme Court dismiss the case. Court declared case moot, which vacated the appeals court ruling but preserved the rights of parties to sue in the future.

VI Back to the EJM

• EJM = one of the most active social movements today.
• New issues added:

>unequal enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and public health laws;

>differential exposure of some populations to harmful chemicals, pesticides, and other toxins in the home, school, neighborhood, and workplace;

>faulty assumptions in calculating, assessing, and managing risks;

>discriminatory zoning and land use practices;

>and exclusionary practices that prevent some individuals and groups from participation in decision making or limit the extent of their participation.

• Less than 20 years after its construction, the state of North Carolina has allocated over $25 million to clean up and detoxify the Warren County PCB landfill.
• Environmental justice has to do with disproportionate exposure to environmental risks by race and by class. But no laws against discrimination on the basis of social class.

I INTRODUCTION TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

• Some form of environmental movement has persisted in the United States since the early 1900s. The particular composition of the various movements' membership has significantly shaped the grievances presented.



• In the first wave of environmentalism in the early 1900s,

>excessive capitalist exploitation of the environment,

>flourishing Progressivism, and

>the formal closing of the frontier combined to generate activism among affluent whites that stressed the need for resource management and the protection of public lands.

During the 20^th century, the strength of this conservationist movement waxed and waned. Its membership was dominated by middle and upper class white males. It received support from corporations that benefitted from government policies permitting exploitation of resources on public lands. Movement grievances concerned the scientific management of resources for maximum economic benefit without the destruction of the resource base.

• The contemporary environmental movement emerged in the mid-1960s, catalyzed by

>the publishing of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,

>the flowering of the decade's counterculture, and

>the proliferation of a variety of other social movements.

Conservationist concerns were fused with values stressing communalism over individualism and steady-state economics over ever-expanding economic growth to generate a youth-centered, "hippie" movement that culminated with Earth Day 1970.

• After Earth Day and the passage of significant environmental legislation, general public concern for the environment increased in the 1970s, as measured in numerous national surveys. The movement became less counter cultural and more mainstream as it was nationalized and institutionalized through the combined efforts of established conservation organizations such as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society and several new organizations such as the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council.



• The majority of the national environmental groups today focus their efforts on reform policies, engaging in congressional lobbying and electoral campaigns. Leaders and members of these professionalized organizations typically are white males of middle or higher social status. Movement grievances largely concern the preservation of lands, water resources, and wildlife. Many analysts assert the elitist character of this movement.



• In the 1980s, a new, grassroots wing of the contemporary environmental movement emerged in the wake of the 1978 Love Canal revelations and the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. This movement is sometimes called the anti-toxics movement. Its constituency and aims significantly differ from the national wing of the movement. The grassroots wing is primarily composed of working class individuals without prior movement experience who organize when faced with environmental contamination in their communities. They seek avoidance of environmental threat, remediation of environmental damages, and compensation for the adverse health effects of contamination. They use direct action tactics to pressure government agencies to enforce existing environmental regulations. They sometimes resort to litigation to force regulatory compliance, using expert testimony from behavioral and natural scientists.

The grassroots wing of the contemporary environmental movement differs from the dominant national wing in two ways.

• First, grassroots activists' grievances concern "a new species of trouble" (Erikson 1991) that derives from changes in postwar industrial technologies using synthetic organic chemicals and radioactive materials. The production processes, accidents, wastes, and end-products all pose much higher health risks than did their counterparts in wood, glass, and steel manufacturing. Accidents and unsafe storage and disposal of the chemical and radioactive byproducts led to contaminated neighborhoods and communities.



• Second, grassroots activists express greater mistrust of government and big business than does the dominant wing membership. In the Love Canal and Three Mile Island disasters as well as subsequent environmental insults in other communities, the government's failure to act competently and to comply in fulfilling legislatively mandated responsibilities has disillusioned many grassroots activists and led them to become mistrustful of the government's role in protecting citizens' rights and safety. Similarly, the failure of corporations to design safe production processes, to reduce toxic wastes, to develop safe waste storage and disposal technologies, and to assume responsibilities for accidents without being compelled through litigation fosters activists' belief that they are victims of a corporate state structure that denies their democratic claims. Grassroots activists view contamination and victimization as the inevitable byproducts of the economic growth machine which is supported by government and corporate officials and is predicated on the practice of externalizing onto the public the social and environmental costs of economic production.



• The environmental justice movement is part of the grassroots wing of the contemporary environmental movement and represents a fusion of the grassroots wing's economic analysis of environmental problems with the civil rights movement's racial critique of political and economic institutions. Environmental justice activists mobilize collective resistance by claiming that minority and low income groups are disproportionately exposed to the environmental risks because of racism and classism. Their grievances concern the inequity of exposure to sources of contamination and the desire for environmental, economic, and social justice.



• Let's talk in more detail about the Environmental Justice Movement.

II THE EMERGENCE OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

• Collective resistance rallying around the charge of "environmental racism" was precipitated by a 1982 incident in which North Carolina officials chose predominantly black Warren County as the site to construct a landfill for the disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Residents formed a grassroots organization to protest the siting of the PCB landfill and requested assistance in their struggle from the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ), a civil rights organization formed in 1963. Warren County residents, CRJ members, and representatives of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People engaged in civil disobedience to protest racial discrimination in the choice of a black community for the landfill site. Walter Fauntroy, a Washington, D.C. congressional delegate, was among the 500 people arrested in the demonstrations.

• The protests didn't help. The PCB landfill was constructed over residents' protests. But Fauntroy then requested a General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation of the demographic characteristics of Southern communities hosting four commercial hazardous waste sites in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Region IV. The GAO complied and, in 1983, released their findings:

>In three of the four communities containing the hazardous waste sites, blacks made up the majority of the population.

>In all four communities, at least 25 percent of the population had incomes below the poverty level and most of this poor population was black.

• Also in 1983, sociologist Robert Bullard published his study of Houston's municipal waste disposal sites, finding that six of eight city incinerators, all five city landfills, and three of four privately owned landfills were located in black neighborhoods. Bullard's findings were used in a case tried by his wife, Linda McKeever Bullard, who filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of a grassroots organization to block the construction of a landfill in a black neighborhood in suburban Houston. The citizens lost the 1979 lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., but it was the first case to use civil rights law to challenge the siting of a waste facility.



• In a 1987 press conference, the CRJ released a report on Southern hazardous waste landfills:

>Of the total of 27 commercial hazardous waste landfills in the continental US, on-third of them were located in five Southern states.

>The capacity of the Southern landfills comprised 60 percent of the nation's total landfill capacity.

>Three of the five largest landfills were located in areas in which blacks and Hispanics were the population majority.

>Four landfills in minority neighborhoods represented 63 percent of the South's total hazardous waste disposal capacity.

• It was at this press conference that CRJ Executive Director Ben Chavis Jr. reportedly coined the term "environmental racism" to describe the findings on racial disparity in locating hazardous waste sites. Findings from the GAO, Bullard, and CRJ studies as well as the claim of "environmental racism" were used to mobilize supporters in the environmental justice movement.

This early alignment of the environmental justice movement with civil rights organizations was founded on the presumption that "the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards was not random or the result of neutral decisions but a product of the same social and economic structure which had produced de jure and de facto segregation and other racial oppression." The civil rights alignment also distinguished environmental racism as a separate grievance from those of the anti-toxics movement.

• Many community based protest organizations were subsequently formed, drawing supporters with the theme of disproportionate exposure. Many of the protests were relatively successful.

>In 1989, residents of predominantly black Richmond, California organized in protest of the pollution produced by a petrochemical refinery. The facility is still operating, but activists won significant concessions on emissions levels.

>Residents of predominantly Latino Kettleman City, California organized against a 1990 proposal to build a hazardous waste incinerator in the neighborhood; construction was prevented.

>Native American residents of Rosebud, South Dakota in 1991 protested against a proposed solid waste landfill and prevented its construction.

• In late 1991, over 650 grassroots and national leaders congregated for four days in Washington, D.C. for the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The event was organized by CRJ Executive Director Ben Chavis, Charles Lee (director of the CRJ's environmental justice program), Bullard, and several environmental justice movement leaders. Delegates attended from all 50 states and from Puerto Rico, Chile, Mexico, and the Marshall Islands.

The summit brought academic researchers into the struggle for environmental justice and broadened the movement "beyond its antitoxics focus to include issues of public health, worker safety, land use, transportation, housing, resource allocation, and community empowerment." Cole and Foster (2000) identify several important outcomes from the conference, such as the formation of alliances and the dissemination of movement tactics, but probably the most significant outcome was the raised consciousness of community activists. This raised consciousness involved their realization of the links between racism and economic exploitation and their recognition that environmental inequalities are symptomatic of larger, structural forces.

• Community-based environmental justice organizations tend to exhibit some common characteristics.



• The grievances claim environmental discrimination on the basis of race or class.



• The organizations, seldom funded by national environmental groups, are often led by women and are composed primarily of working class people of color without prior social movement experience.



• Their tactics involve demonstrations, petitions, lobbying local elected officials, letter-writing, public meetings, citizen-conducted health surveys, educational forums, and litigation.



• The targets of protest are usually local, state, and federal officials whom residents deem accountable for their direct or indirect influence in environmental siting and enforcement decisions.



• The movement organizations tend to be most successful when the goal is to block the construction of a proposed facility, rather than to close an existing facility. In the latter cases, the groups frequently win some concessions from the facilities, such as capacity reduction, emissions controls, and monetary compensation.

III ACADEMIC RESEARCHERS AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

• Prior to 1992, few academic researchers conducted empirical studies of environmental racism. But Bullard's work provided a bridge between movement activists and academic interest in environmental racism. After his 1983 publication on racial disparities in Houston waste facilities, Bullard continued research on environmental racism, publishing a series of articles in the 1980s and his book, Dumping in Dixie, in 1990.

A small group of academics, including Bullard, and Bunyan Bryant of the University of Michigan met with Charles Lee in 1990 to discuss the topic. They sent letters that described the findings of disproportionate impact and requested meetings to the Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services and to the head of the EPA. EPA head William Reilly agreed to meet with the group of academics and the Office of Environmental Equity was subsequently created.

In 1992, Bullard and Ben Chavis were named to President-Elect Bill Clinton's Transition Team on the Natural Resources and Environment Cluster, formed to provide input into the policies that the new administration would try to implement.

• A flurry of academic research was published in 1992 and 1993 that confirmed the presence of environmental racism.

>Some were case studies, such as Bailey and Faupel's study of Emelle, Alabama (1992) and White's study of Alsen, Louisiana (1992).

>Lavelle and Coyle (1992) reported on a National Law Journal study of 1,177 Superfund sites that found racial bias in government-imposed penalties against corporate polluters, government response to environmental hazards in a community, and government choice of a solution for such hazards.

>In separate studies, Zimmerman (1993) and Hird (1993) found that the location of Superfund sites was associated with race.

>Several studies documented the relationship between race and the location of facilities required to report their emissions for the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) (Szasz et al.1993; Burke 1993).

>One of the most cited studies was Mohai and Bryant's (1992) examination of the distribution of commercial hazardous waste facilities in a three-county area surrounding Detroit. They found that:

~the 16 facilities in the Detroit area represented 76% of all state facilities;

~the relationship between race and the location of waste facilities was independent of income;

~and, in a comparison of facilities inside and outside the city, that race remained the best predictor.

• Been (1993) suggested that identifying the current demographic characteristics of neighborhoods containing waste facilities left open the possibility that market forces had reduced property values in those communities after the facilities were sited and subsequently attracted poor and minority folks who had little choice but to live in less desirable neighborhoods. To ascertain whether the discriminatory outcome was due to discrimination in the initial siting process or to post-siting market forces, she re-examined the 1983 GAO report and Bullard's Houston study, expanding both by adding demographic data on the communities at the time the siting decisions were made and then tracing the changes in those demographics in the next census.

• In her extension of the GAO study, she concluded that the initial siting processes had been discriminatory; market forces had not.



• In her extension of Bullard's study, she found that the siting processes and subsequent market forces had been discriminatory.

• In 1994, the CRJ released a report on an update of its 1987 study in which the researchers adapted Been's technique. With the use of 1990 census data to identify demographic changes in the communities between 1987 and 1990, they found that environmental racism increased: compared to 1987 figures, areas with at least one facility had more than twice the percentage of non-whites than areas without facilities.



• In 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, "Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations." The order reinforces Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racially discriminatory practices in programs receiving federal funds and directs federal agencies to ensure that their actions "do not have the effect of excluding persons (including populations) from participation in, denying persons (including populations) the benefits of, or subjecting persons (including populations) to discrimination... because of their race, color or national origin" (Section 2-2, Executive Order 12898).

The order calls for improved methodologies for data collection and encourages participation by affected populations in the various phases of impact assessment. Clinton subsequently created the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), whose task was to advise the EPA on methods for attaining environmental justice. Bullard was appointed to the Council, along with 24 others from the environmental justice movement, the federal government, industry, and academia.

• In 1994, Bullard formed the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia in an attempt to bring together community activists and academic researchers. The Center acts as a research, policy, and information clearinghouse on issues related to environmental justice, race and the environment, civil rights, facility siting, land use planning, brownfields, transportation equity, suburban sprawl, and sustainability (www.ejrc.cau.edu). Staff members assist, support, train, and educate people of color students, professionals, and community leaders to facilitate their inclusion in environmental decision-making.

IV SHIFTS IN FINDINGS BY ACADEMIC RESEARCHERS

• Among academic researchers, a significant shift occurred between 1994 and 1996 in the reporting of studies that did not confirm the presence of environmental racism but concluded that class and other factors were better predictors of environmental exposure than race.

>Anderton et al. (1994) found that the most consistent significant correlation with location of waste facilities was the proportion of industrial workers in a tract and, criticizing the methodologies of earlier studies, concluded that no nationally consistent and convincing evidence exists for environmental racism.

>Glickman and Hersh (1995) examined differential levels of risk from TRI facilities in the Pittsburgh area and found that five groups were at higher risk than the general population: all blacks, all poor, poor blacks, poor whites, and the elderly.

>Bowen et al. (1995) conducted a similar study in the Cleveland area, finding that TRI facilities were more likely to be located in poorer and less affluent communities than in areas with minority concentrations.

>Pollack and Vittas (1995) examined TRI sites in Florida and found that location was most closely related to the degree of urbanization and industrialization, population density, and housing prices.

>Cutter et al. (1996) investigated the association between demographic characteristics and environmental threats in South Carolina and found:

~at the county level, race and income were associated with the presence of a facility, but in the opposite direction from earlier findings: the disproportionate burden was on white, more affluent communities in metropolitan areas.

~At the census tract and census block levels, they found no association between race and the presence of a facility.

• Been (1995) countered Anderton et al.'s findings, exploring alternative explanations for their results, and found that the neighborhoods most likely to host a waste facility were those characterized by:

>median family incomes between $10,001 and $40,000;

>black proportions of the population between 10% and 70%;

>and Hispanic proportion of the population more than 20%.

She concluded that the outcome described as environmental racism is an "ambiguous and complicated entanglement of class, race, educational attainment, occupational patterns, relationships between the metropolitan areas and rural or non-metropolitan cities, and possibly market dynamics" (1995:21).

• Another shift occurred in the academic literature in 1997, a swing of the pendulum back to the confirmation of environmental racism. Findings of environmental racism were reported in studies by:

>Boer et al. on waste facilities in Los Angeles County (1997),

>Ringquist on TRI facilities in the United States (1997),

>Downey on TRI emissions in Michigan (1998),

>Foster in Chester, Pennsylvania (1998),

>Hird and Reese on environmental quality (1998),

>Stretesky and Hogan on Florida Superfund sites (1998),

<and Szasz and Meuser on TRI facilities in Santa Clara County in California (2000).

• Let's make this more concrete by looking at an example - a case study - of environmental justice movement organization.

V CASE STUDY OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT: CHESTER, PA

• Introduction:

Chester, Pennsylvania is a town on the Delaware River, about 15 miles southwest of Philadelphia. It has a population of 39,000. About 65 percent of the residents are black. Chester is in Delaware County. Excluding Chester, Delaware County's population is 502,000. About 6.2 percent of the county population, excluding Chester, is black.

>The median family income in Chester is 45 percent lower than the rest of the county.

>Chester's poverty rate is 25 percent, about three times the rate in the rest of the county.

>Unemployment rates and crime rates are high in Chester.

>So is the rate of health problems: Chester has a mortality rate 40 percent higher than the rest of the county and it has the state's highest child mortality rate.

Between 1986 and 1996, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection granted permits for five commercial waste facilities in Chester, siting only two such facilities elsewhere in the county.

>One of Chester's waste facilities is one of the largest garbage incinerators in the entire nation. More than 60 percent of the waste-processing industries in the county are located in Chester. Taken all together, Chester's waste facilities have a total permit capacity of 2.1 million tons of waste per year, compared to 1,400 tons per year for all Delaware County sites outside of Chester.

Chester contains other noxious facilities, too.

>A sewage and waste treatment plant in Chester processes all of the county's municipal waste and sewage, even though only 7.5 percent of the county population lives in Chester.

>There is also a concrete recycling facility

>and a number of older industrial operations.

• History that led to noxious facilities in Chester:

Chester's modern history began in 1682, when William Penn rowed up to a sandy stretch along the Delaware River and made is his first landfall in the colonies. Chester's location on the river set it up for small-scale manufacturing.

By the 1770s, Chester was a milltown and it prospered as a manufacturing center well into the 1940s. Up to that point, many southern blacks and immigrants from Poland and the Ukraine had moved to Chester.

But in the 1940s, Chester began to suffer from economic depression. After World War II, many of its manufacturing industries moved overseas. And "white flight" struck Chester, as middle-class whites moved into the surrounding suburban neighborhoods.

Between 1950 and 1980, 32 percent of the jobs in Chester disappeared. And the black proportion of the population increased from 20 percent to 65 percent.

Today Chester is one of the most economically depressed communities in Pennsylvania. Its school district is one of the worst in the state. It has the highest crime rate in the state. The city government tried to stop the city's decline by inviting just about any industry to come to town. On top of all that, the town was filled with political corruption from the Republican political machine that controlled local decision-making because of their financial investments in Chester.

• Chester as a site for waste facilities:

In 1985, an investment banking firm from Pittsburgh joined with Westinghouse to form Chester Solid Waste Associates and purchased land in Chester. That organization owns or has corporate relationships with most of the waste facilities in the city.

Current siting laws in Pennsylvania do not require consideration of the cumulative impact of preexisting facilities when a new facility is proposed. The laws do not require consideration of the disproportionate location of facilities in the host community, or the demographics of the targeted community. Instead, each permit is considered in a vacuum. Once such a facility is located, it's easy to expand it, allowing even more waste into the community. In Chester, Westinghouse continues to expand its incinerator operations and import more waste from other states.

• Activism in Chester:

In 1992, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection was about to grant a permit for an infectious medical-waste sterilization plant next to the Westinghouse incinerator. Chester's first Democratic mayor held a town meeting with local government officials and representatives from EPA, the Department of Environmental Protection, and private industries. Residents complained to the officials about the waste facilities, odors, dust, noise, and trucks that carried trash to the facilities and expressed concerns that the proposed facility would only make things worse. The responses of the officials were not sympathetic. They said things like, "Don't you think your government protects you?" One woman was offended by their condescension. Zulene Mayfield stood up, introduced herself, essentially called them liars, and walked out of the meeting in disgust.

Right after that, Mayfield and other concerned citizens began meeting weekly and formed Chester Residents Concerned about Quality of Life. Mayfield was the leader. At first, the group met with individual facility owners, and with city and state officials. But they were deeply dissatisfied with getting no real response - just stonewalling. So they decided to gather the facility and government representatives together in a meeting and get them to point their fingers at each other. Let me read to you what happened at the meeting.

[Read Cole and Foster pp.40-41.]

This pattern of behavior by government and industry officials continued. They seemed to try to keep citizens uninformed. Residents recognized two things:

>that decision makers had consistently treated citizens disrespectfully when they were only trying to obtain accurate information; and

>that their concerns were never going to be addressed - let alone resolved - if they relied on the tactic of working through the system.

So, in December 1992, the group held its first protest. Ten to fifteen residents, mostly senior citizens, lined up across a street to block trucks filled with garbage from getting to the Westinghouse incinerator. They did this for two hours. Westinghouse's chief financial officer flew to Chester to meet with residents and, eventually, Westinghouse officials agreed to build a new road for the trucks hauling trash to the incinerator that was a little farther from residents' homes.

In 1993, the citizens group fought a permit issued for the construction of another waste treatment facility in Chester. The group gathered more than 500 signatures on a petition in opposition to the project. The company withdrew its request for a permit and later re-applied under another name - but the citizens group had caught on to that tactic. Nevertheless, the permit was issued without an adequate public hearing.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Clinton's Executive Order on Environmental Justice, the EPA determined to conduct a six-month community study of cumulative risk assessment and chose Chester. The grassroots activists welcomed the study. When the agency released its study in 1995, activists' fears were confirmed by findings of unacceptable cancer risks and serious non-cancer risks, such as kidney and liver disease and respiratory problems. But the regional EPA director cautioned residents that the study showed only a correlation, not a causal relationship, between elevated health risks and the presence of noxious facilities in the community.

• Chester activists go to court:

In 1995, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection granted a permit to Soil Remediation Systems to build a facility in Chester for the treatment of contaminated soil, the eighth waste treatment facility to be squeezed into a less than half-square mile region.

In May, 1996, the Chester grassroots organization determined to block the permit. With the help of public interest lawyer Jerome Balter, they filed a complaint in federal court under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. They accused the state, the Department of Environmental Protection which received EPA grant funds, and various state officials of unintentional racial discrimination. Title VI prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin in their programs and activities. Although the statute bans intentional discrimination only, it does permit federal agencies to adopt regulations that also ban unintentional discriminatory effects. The US Supreme Court in1983 had ruled that federal anti-bias laws allow private lawsuits when intentional discrimination is alleged, but the court had not ruled on whether private lawsuits are allowed over unintentional discriminatory effects. Consequently, unintentionality remained an unresolved legal issue.

The Chester case was the first environmental racism lawsuit filed in the nation. Aided in data gathering by Bullard's Environmental Justice Resource Center, the grassroots suit contended that the state created a discriminatory effect by concentrating waste facilities in a 70% black community whose population comprised only 8% of the county population yet contained 60% of the county's waste facilities. The residents did not allege that the state agency intentionally discriminated on the basis of race, but that the results of the permit-granting process were racially biased.

In their counter-argument, the state of Pennsylvania argued that private citizens had no right under EPA regulations to challenge the state's actions in court. The legal issue was whether private citizens could sue over federal government agency regulations that allegedly result in racial discrimination. But a US District Judge dismissed the grassroots group's suit, ruling that suits filed by private citizens are not allowed when only a discriminatory effect - not a discriminatory intent - is alleged. Granting the state's motion to dismiss the complaint, the judge ruled that, unlike intentional discrimination claims under Title VI itself, no private right of action exists to enforce EPA's regulation.

In December 1997, the Third US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the US District Judge's ruling and reinstated Chester residents' suit. The appeals court ruled that Chester citizens only needed to prove a discriminatory effect, not a discriminatory intent, and interpreted the written opinions and votes of five justices in the 1983 US Supreme Court ruling to infer the court's endorsement of the right of private citizens to sue over discriminatory effects, regardless of intentionality.

In January, 1998, a federal court in Pennsylvania found for the Chester community group and ruled that residents have the right, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, to challenge legally the construction of multiple waste treatment facilities on the grounds of racially discriminatory patterns in decision-making processes.

The state of Pennsylvania appealed the case to the US Supreme Court, requesting that the court reverse the appeals court decision. In June, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments on the Chester lawsuit. The state's lawyers argued in their appeal that the Third Circuit Court had wrongly discovered a private right to sue in such cases and that federal law requires litigants such as the Chester group to prove the intentionality of discrimination. The case was likely to determine whether or not racial discrimination lawsuits must prove that the alleged discrimination was intentional.

(For the state of Pennsylvania, the stakes were higher than just the environmental racism case. If the Supreme Court found in favor of the State and against Chester residents, it would have eliminated the basis for the federal school-funding lawsuit previously filed by the School District of Philadelphia, the City of Philadelphia and others under the Civil Rights Act. That case claimed that Pennsylvania's funding of public schools had a discriminatory effect on minority students, but it did not assert that the alleged discrimination was intentional. The state's response to the school-funding case is that the allegation of discrimination in school funding is factually untrue. The case is currently pending in US District Court in Philadelphia.)

• Chester's environmental racism case was resolved in August, 1998. The grassroots group discovered that Soil Remediation Systems had requested that their permit be revoked. In May, the DEP had done so. The Chester group requested the Supreme Court's dismissal of the case. The court subsequently declared the case to be moot since the specific reason for the suit - the state's granting permission to Soil Reclamation Services to construct and begin business in Chester - was a dead issue. By declaring the case moot, the justices automatically vacated the ruling by the appeals court that validated the residents' right to sue the state. But vacating of the ruling did not change communities' rights to sue. When the Supreme Court dismissed the case as moot and remanded it to the appeals court with instructions for dismissal, the Court followed its usual practice of vacating the judgment below to preserve the rights of parties in future litigation. No group has tried it since then, though, so the question of intentionality in environmental racism remains open.

VI BACK TO THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

• Cole and Foster assert that the environmental justice movement remains one of the most active social movements today and indicate that the movement suggests the possibility of a broad-based, progressive coalition that could transform society. The issues adopted by the movement have broadened to include: unequal enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and public health laws; differential exposure of some populations to harmful chemicals, pesticides, and other toxins in the home, school, neighborhood, and workplace; faulty assumptions in calculating, assessing, and managing risks; discriminatory zoning and land use practices; and exclusionary practices that prevent some individuals and groups from participation in decision making or limit the extent of their participation.



• As for the case that started it all, the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill? Less than 20 years after its construction, the state of North Carolina has allocated over $25 million to clean up and detoxify the landfill.

• Another important point: environmental justice has to do with disproportionate exposure to environmental risks by race and by class. But remember, the US has no laws against discrimination on the basis of social class. So real environmental justice is not possible.