Green light to urban blight

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 27, 1998 | by Sean Paige

`Environmental justice,; a witches' brew of radical enironmentalism and federal civil-rights policy, is threatening to poison economic redevelopment in minority communities.

Detroit is a tough old town and has plenty of scars to prove it: Race riots, labor strife, crime waves, white flight and a long, losing war with poverty have left large tracts of the city desolate, filthy, despondent. Gaping urban meadows stand where neighborhoods once thrived. Vacant office buildings and silent factories testify to the city's atrophied industrial muscle. And, until recently, city leaders seemed to think merely proclaiming the dawn of a Rust Belt renaissance was enough to realize one.

Now the Motor City has become a battleground in a growing fight about something called "environmental justice," or EJ, a political movement binding federal environmental and civil-rights policies in a shotgun marriage based on the dubious premise that minorities are exposed to a disproportionate share of environmental hazards and need federal protection from "environmental racism." Detroit Democratic Mayor Dennis Archer leads a growing number of city and state officials who say that the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, interim guidelines on EJ policy are murky and meddlesome, and directly threaten efforts to bring redevelopment, jobs and economic revival to parts of the country, such as Detroit, that need them most.

At Archer's urging, the Democrat-dominated U.S. Conference of Mayors recently passed a resolution urging the EPA to suspend the EJ guidelines and rework them to retain permit authority and site selection for factories in local (rather than federal) hands; reconcile their many contradictions and conflicts with other laws and policies; and adopt terms and definitions that are clear, precise and based on sound science.

In opposing the guidelines, Archer "is just making sure we don't handcuff our economic development, which is critical to the city, with federal rules that are overly strict," says Anthony Neely, a spokesman for the mayor. And besides, "we already have state laws, city laws and federal laws these guys have to abide by," Neely says of prospective developers. "We're not going to let anybody just come in here and pollute." The passage of Archer's resolution follows a March vote by the Environmental Council of the States, representing 49 of 50 state environmental agencies, also calling on EPA to withdraw its EJ guidelines, arguing that they represent an encroachment of federal power and conflict with state and local efforts to bring industries and jobs back to economically depressed areas. The guidelines also work at cross-purposes with another EPA program set up to revitalize thousands of lightly contaminated, mostly urban, industrial sites called "brownfields," the critics say.

As the details of the EJ policy become known, and its fuller implications evident, industry groups and members of Congress are beginning to join the chorus of opposition. "It runs contrary to federal programs designed to bring jobs and cleanup to low-income and minority areas," William Kovacs of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has said. "For the last 10 years we have been trying to move financial resources into urban areas, trying to encourage jobs and growth."

But now just about any plant or industrial facility likely to be located near a minority community can be challenged not merely on its potential to pollute, anchored in quantifiable science, but as a possible civil-rights violation based on its its alleged potential for "cumulative adverse effects," including sociological, on that community. Based on the new policy, the EPA has held up construction permits for a $700 million Shintech plastics plant in Convent, La. -- whose $7,300 annual per capita income is 30 percent of the state poverty level and whose unemployment rate is twice the national level. And it has scuttled the construction of an uranium-enrichment facility elsewhere in the Pelican State. Civil-rights groups in predominantly black Chester, Pa., have evoked EJ in a court battle against a local waste-treatment facility. Objections brought by a neighborhood group funded with an EJ grant from the EPA delayed the expansion of a Ford Motor Co. paint shop in Dearborn, Mich., for four months. And at least 15 similar challenges reportedly remain under review by the EPA, though about 25 have been dismissed on procedural grounds.

While its fuller implications only now are becoming clear, stoking the bonfires of opposition that seem to be building against it, the EJ movement actually dates back to the golden age of American radicalism. It traveled a long and winding road before successfully insinuating itself into national policy under the Clinton administration, says Christopher H. Foreman Jr., a senior fellow at Washington's Brookings Institution who is writing a book on the subject.

In certain radical circles, the race consciousness of the sixties and seventies fused with ecoconsciousness to fuel the idea that minorities especially might be victimized disproportionately by polluters. The raw idea has been percolating ever since, but began to bubble up to public consciousness in a more refined state in the 1980s. In 1992, then-Sen. Al Gore offered the first piece of EJ legislation, which never went far.