On September 29, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized new rules to improve air quality in areas surrounding oil refineries across the United States, a move that the agency maintains will reduce the risk of cancer for 1.4 million people. The regulations require the monitoring of emissions on “fence lines” where refinery-generated pollutants enter nearby communities, mandating corrective action if levels of benzene and other toxins exceed established limits. The new policy has been heralded as a promising signal of the EPA’s commitment to environmental justice: the notion that all people ought to receive equally robust measures of environmental protection. But such triumphalism is unwarranted. While the rules represent progress, their significance is tempered by the scale of the United States’ inequitable and geographically stratified environmental discrimination.
Unfortunately, the United States owns a history rife with obstruction of environmental justice. The notion of environmental justice maintains that no specific group or community must bear disproportionate burdens from hazards like polluted air and water. But in the US, the safety of one’s environment varies immensely on the basis of race and class. Racialized inequality of environmental protection is rooted in the history of American urban and suburban development. In the 2oth Century, housing practices such as racially restrictive covenants and violent white resistance to the integration of residential areas promoted urban racial segregation that persists today, as evinced by the fact that 86 percent of white people live in neighborhoods where people of color make up less than one percent of the population. Discriminatory federal housing policies, including the refusal to invest in regions where black people lived, rendered segregation disproportionately harmful to people of color. Today, while 75 percent of poor whites live in predominately middle-class neighborhoods, 75 percent of poor blacks and 50 percent of poor Latinos live in areas where over a fifth of the households are in poverty. Poor black people are six times as likely as poor white people to live in regions of concentrated poverty.
Los Angeles offers a vivid example. Beginning in the 1920s, as white residents moved outward to the suburbs, Chicano, African American, Japanese American, and Chinese American residents were relegated to the central city. During this same period, civic leaders attempted to expand the city’s manufacturing capacity; the industrialization occurred in nonwhite and working-class space, not the residential suburbs where affluent whites resided. In the World War II era, the Home Owners Loan Corporation and Federal Housing Administration sought to increase housing supply in blatantly racist fashion. These entities ranked neighborhoods from “A” to “D,” reserving the highest grades for new, affluent suburbs and assigning “D” designations to neighborhoods with populations predominated by black and brown people. This overtly racist system became the basis for stark urban inequity: Less than two percent of housing backed with federal mortgage insurance was accessible to black people. Money was channeled away from inner-city segregated neighborhoods, with burdensome industrial projects as its substitute. For example, the Los Angeles freeway system was literally built through neighborhoods of color. Today, the legacy of over a century of racist development has left Southern California both highly segregated and suffused by environmental injustice. Latino residents are disproportionately exposed to uncontrolled hazardous waste sites, with over 60 percent of such sites in the eastern part of the city located in areas with majority Latino populations. Facilities that release air toxins are also concentrated in areas with lower incomes and more residents of color. Los Angeles, as a microcosm of American metropolitan conditions, illustrates the links between segregation and environmental inequity.
Geographic concentration of poverty essentially creates powerless neighborhoods where people lack the political clout to resist harmful development. Thus economic injustice, engendered by racist cultural ideologies, translates into environmental injustice because hazards such as waste stations, chemical plants, and oil refineries are placed in the most disadvantaged residential areas. That black people in the US experience morbidity and mortality rates significantly above the national average is one sordid but foreseeable consequence of these residential disparities. The sheer scale of environmental injustice in the US dictates social, political and health realities on the national level, indicating the magnitude of the challenge against which the EPA’s new regulations are stacked. The emissions rules may very well help to enact environmental justice for communities located near petroleum refineries, but their impact cannot easily remedy a wrong as profound and historically entrenched as environmental racism.
Though the EPA touts environmental justice as a priority, it has often been complicit in the crisis afflicting marginalized neighborhoods. Executive order 12898 directed the federal bureaucracy to “make achieving environmental justice part of its mission” in 1994, but even eleven years under this explicit mandate proved insufficient for the EPA to commit to the task. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office found that the EPA “generally devoted little attention to environmental justice” in its work on clean air rules. A 2015 report by the Center for Public Integrity lambasted the EPA for failing to intervene in discriminatory situations through the arm of the agency designated for that very purpose: the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights. Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act forbids discrimination by recipients of federal funding, and the Office of Civil Rights can utilize this law to combat actions that promote environmental inequality. But the EPA has dismissed or rejected 90 percent of the complaints submitted to the Office; out of 265 Title VI cases, not one resulted in a formal finding of discrimination. The dispiriting evidence acquired by the Center for Public Integrity corroborates the conclusions of a 2011 Deloitte Consulting evaluation, which concluded that the Office of Civil Rights “has not adequately adjudicated Title VI complaints” and “has not completed compliance checks of EPA grantees, in a timely or effective manner, to ensure that grantees are not engaging in discrimination in their work.” Inaction by the EPA on civil rights, situated within the failure of the agency to adhere to a federal directive on the importance of environmental justice, illustrates the shortfalls that supersede the new petroleum regulations. While the EPA has recently made some attempts to prioritize environmental justice, progress made under Barack Obama’s presidency has only begun to repair the agency’s deeply flawed procedures. Similarly, emissions monitoring is auspicious for the six million people living within three miles of an oil refinery. But focusing on the EPA’s new regulations to the exclusion of the agency’s failures amounts to sophistry.
The capacity of the new rules to procure environmental justice may also falter at the hurdle of implementation. Even before their release, these petroleum regulations endured lengthy obstruction and delay, a bureaucratic pitfall that often seems a common pattern within the EPA. The agency was ultimately required to finalize the regulations under a court order sought by community representatives and environmental activists from several states, who sued the EPA in 2012 over missed deadlines. As the new refinery protocol was announced, the National Association of Manufacturers was already launching vigorous opposition to the EPA’s next objective, a new atmospheric ozone standard. The struggles of the EPA to enforce these policies indicate the degree to which implementing environmental protections, including those designed to promote justice, is still fraught in the US.
Davis M. Konisky, Associate Professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University, Bloomington has catalogued the restraints on the EPA’s ability to pursue environmental justice, from hostile political circumstances to a dearth of popular support. While the responsibility to administer environmental regulations lies with the EPA, its ability to fulfill that duty in no small way rests with the public, which has offered little assistance. This minimal commitment to environmental protection raises a salient question about American culture and environmental justice: If Americans recognized the work of the EPA as relevant to social equity, would they place greater importance upon environmental issues? Or have environmental, socioeconomic, and racial discrimination become so deeply woven into the national culture that they will be countenanced by apathy and ignorance? Perhaps the release of the emissions rules suggests a hopeful step away from American indifference to environmental injustice. But the EPA’s actions do not obviate the country’s need to address environmental inequities pervading residential areas nationwide.
Those who herald the EPA’s new refinery regulations as a watershed for the environmental justice movement overestimate the significance of the rules and underestimate the endemic afflictions at play; in the context of the EPA’s and the nation’s larger record on environmental justice, this progress is inchoate. Perhaps the most important lesson to be gleaned from the new stipulations, rather than an inflated sense of the federal government’s commitment to protecting marginalized communities, is a greater cognizance of how deeply the wounds of residential segregation and environmental injustice have scarred the nation.
Photo: Walter Siegmund