You may not have heard of “climate justice,” but chances are that you’ll support it when you know a bit more about it—that is, if you’re like most Americans surveyed in a recent study from Environmental Science & Policy.
To understand climate justice, let’s take a step back and remember the origins of the environmental justice movement. Environmental justice recognizes that everyone deserves equal access to the benefits of a safe, clean environment and a say in decisions about environmental policies that impact their communities. This notion might seem obvious, but before the 1970s, Americans didn’t have a clear vision of how deeply racism shaped access to basic environmental rights for many minority groups. Environmental justice emerged as a new faction of activism when researchers, spurred by the Warren County protests, uncovered a vicious pattern across American cities: garbage disposal sites and pollution-causing facilities are consistently located in low-income communities and communities of color, overburdening those communities with pollution.
In this context, we can understand climate justice as a natural extension of environmental justice that focuses specifically on the impacts of climate change. Climate justice is founded on the idea of addressing climate inequality, the proven idea that the brunt of ill effects caused by climate change is often disproportionately borne by minority groups. This pattern can be seen across the globe, but also on a smaller scale within the U.S., as the researchers of “Americans’ support for climate justice” pointed out.
A clear example is redlining, the collection of racist neighborhood grading policies that compelled mortgage lenders to refuse loans to Black Americans, making it effectively impossible for Black Americans to buy houses in desirable neighborhoods or accumulate wealth from home ownership. As a result of this, many more non-White populations currently live in areas that have historically lacked funding than White populations. Walking down the streets in these neighborhoods, you may notice few green spaces but many paved surfaces, factors that make warm summer air even hotter and increase hazardous exposure to heat. Residents of these disinvested neighborhoods are more likely to be exposed to air, water, and noise pollution, and statistically live by nearly twice the density of oil and gas wells compared to neighborhoods that were ranked highly in the redlining system. Essentially, entrenched systemic racism has resulted in many non-White populations living in underserved neighborhoods that are deprived of the infrastructure and support necessary to combat the effects of climate change.
Another example that might be on your mind is the recent wildfires that devastated Los Angeles. While people from a wide variety of economic walks of life all suffered tragic losses and property damage, only a slim minority of the ultrawealthy had the deep pockets necessary to hire private firefighters. Residents of Altadena, a diverse community, might not have the financial ability to rebuild their houses. Many fear the encroachment of private equity firms, and research has shown that Black Americans are less likely than White Americans to receive relief funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
So how does climate justice intend to remedy these inequalities? The aim of climate justice is, as defined by the investigators of the study, three-pronged: to decrease the unequal negative impacts of climate change, to create solutions that include benefits for disproportionately harmed communities, and to give a voice to these communities when making decisions. If that sounds reasonable to you, then you’re on the same page as 53% of study participants, who decided they supported climate justice after reading a definition.
In this study, a sample of generally representative Americans were surveyed to learn about how their knowledge of climate justice correlated with other variables. Researchers used their responses to questions about race, climate change, politics, and culture to build a statistical picture of how these factors interact with support of climate justice.
Overall, only 19% of respondents opposed climate justice. Researchers found that people concerned about climate change in general were likely to support climate justice if they knew about it, but only 34% of Americans had heard of the term. In terms of race, people aware of racial injustice were also more likely to support climate justice, although they might not be willing to actually take political action about it. A better predictor for desire to take action was race: non-White groups are more likely to act on climate justice than White groups. To fuel further work, researchers suggested a focus on outreach and education, with the goal of incentivizing the public to pressure policymakers and institutions to enact large-scale change.
You might ask what’s been done so far to mitigate these disproportionate effects of climate change. Funding has been diverted to impacted communities through initiatives such as the Justice40 initiative under the Biden administration and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Clean Air Council has worked directly with residents of overburdened communities, such as Southern Delaware County, to understand the impacts of local polluters like refineries and incinerators and work to lessen those harms. The Council aims to protect communities’ rights by collecting and spreading information, collaborating on and supporting local initiatives, and developing legal strategies to safeguard public health.
The Council also supports work to bolster communities’ climate resilience. Climate resilience is all about planning for the future. It can look like investments in infrastructure, such as planting trees to reduce heat, or forward-thinking policies, like developing disaster recovery strategies that rely on community input. These frameworks can help lighten climate-induced inequalities, and can boost every kind of community in their long-term ability to cope with climate change.
It’s clear how communities harmed by climate change would tangibly benefit from the goals of climate justice, but researchers suggest that even people who may not support climate justice could stand to benefit from its accomplishments, such as pollution reduction and job generation. In this way, climate justice can end up uplifting a broad array of people. Climate inequality is an unfortunate reality– but climate justice can present solutions.
HARRISBURG, PA (February 22, 2023) – Today, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court handed down a major decision in two suits where the public sought reimbursement for legal costs in environmental cases: the Clean Air Council, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, and Mountain Watershed Association v. DEP and Sunoco Pipeline and Gerhart v. DEP and Sunoco Pipeline cases.
The Supreme Court’s decision reversed a lower court ruling that had put up a major barrier to reimbursement of legal costs for environmental lawsuits brought by non-profits and residents. Now, members of the public, who are harmed by permits allowing industrial activities, and who successfully appeal those permits, are more easily able to get reimbursement of their legal costs. The reimbursement can come not only from the state, who issued the permit, but from the company holding the permits, and profiting from the permitted activity. Legal experts, fees, and other costs necessary for these cases can easily reach tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the cases can go on for years or even decades, making appeals like this out of reach for most absent the ability to recoup costs.
The decision is a victory for the environmental organizations, who had sought but been denied reimbursement for their legal costs from Sunoco Pipeline, the builder of the controversial Mariner East pipelines. It is also a victory for the Gerhart family, landowners along the pipeline route who stood up to the company and also had success at the Pennsylvania Environmental Hearing Board.
“Today’s ruling from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is a huge win for the public,” said Joseph Minott, Executive Director and Chief Counsel of Clean Air Council. “Too often, when members of the public have been harmed by big polluters, they are unable to afford legal support. Today’s ruling makes it easier for the public to be compensated for their legal costs when their lawsuits are successful. This opens the door for the public to finally have their day in court and for justice to be restored.”
Melissa Marshall, Community Advocate with the Mountain Watershed Association stated, “We are pleased with the decision for two reasons. Not only does it remedy a bad standard, but it also clarifies, for the first time, that it is the permittees – often exploitative industries, such as mining and fracking — and not just the taxpayers, who should bear the financial burden when environmental groups bring protective lawsuits.”
“Today’s decision appropriately recognizes the significant role that citizen objectors play in the vindication of environmental rights and the General Assembly’s laws protecting the public natural resources. This ruling helps support legal action against bad permitting decisions, and holds accountable the parties who stand to benefit financially from those decisions,” said Kacy Manahan, Senior Attorney for the Delaware Riverkeeper Network.
“Today’s opinion shows that Pennsylvanians who enforce the Clean Streams Law have a voice and that applicants who submit faulty permit applications to DEP can be held responsible for their sloppy or incompetent work,” said Rich Raiders, attorney for Stephen and Ellen Gerhart, Huntingdon County landowners who won a fee award from DEP, but not Sunoco, in a case decided with the Clean Air Council matter in today’s opinion. The Gerharts successfully challenged a wetlands determination on their Huntingdon County property where Sunoco was required to remediate a parcel of forested wetland disturbed during construction.
In March of 2022, Clean Air Council, Mountain Watershed Association, and the Delaware Riverkeeper Network petitioned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to overturn that lower court decision, which made it nearly impossible for residents or advocacy organizations to be compensated for their legal expenses from the permit holder when appealing a DEP permit. The Commonwealth Court decision affirmed the Environmental Hearing Board’s decision that denied the groups’ request for Energy Transfer (Sunoco Pipeline’s parent) to compensate parties for their legal fees stemming from an appeal of Sunoco’s Mariner East 2 pipeline permits.
Image credit: The Washington Post
This Black History Month, we are honoring Dr. Robert Bullard, the Father of the Environmental Justice movement.
Environmental justice is “the fair treatment of people of all races, incomes, and cultures with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Environmental justice looks like having impacted residents in the room when decisions are being made and policies are being enacted that will impact their health, welfare and quality of life. More than being present in the room, they need to have significant input and the final say to what kinds of projects, initiatives, and resources are advanced, and how they get applied.
In the ‘80’s, environmental justice was a new concept but didn’t initially get a lot of support. However, the movement has made tremendous strides thanks to Dr. Robert Bullard and advocates.
Dr. Robert Bullard was born in 1946 into a family that defied the odds of their time. In 1875, 10 years after the official abolishment of slavery in the United States, his great-grandparents acquired several hundred acres of timberland in Elba, Alabama. As property owners, his parents and grandparents were able to vote under the Jim Crow laws. Dr. Bullard and his siblings were able to go to college due to income from harvesting timber from the land. In 1968, Dr. Bullard graduated from Alabama A&M University with a Bachelors in Government, in the midst of the Vietnam War. He was drafted, but never deployed. Dr. Bullard went on to get his Masters in Sociology from Clark Atlanta University in 1972 and a Ph.D. in Sociology from Iowa State University in 1976.
In 1979, Dr. Bullard was teaching sociology at Texas Southern University when his wife, Linda Mckeever Bullard, a lawyer, asked for his help on a class-action lawsuit she was filing to stop a landfill from going into a middle class Black community in Houston. She wanted to know where the city’s other landfills were. Through the data gathered, Dr. Bullard discovered that even though Black people made up just a quarter of Houston’s population, all five of the city’s garbage dumps, six of its eight incinerators, and three out of its four privately-owned landfills were in Black neighborhoods. And, more than 80% of all garbage in Houston was being disposed in Black communities.
The data also highlighted that not all communities have access to the zoning process that protects them. This left them vulnerable to petrochemical plants, refineries, and coal plants because they were not able to adequately advocate for themselves. Big polluters followed the path of least resistance which means they usually end up developing in low-income communities and communities of color that lack the resources to fight them.
The case lasted 8 years. Bean v. Southern Waste Management found that the placement of the dump, if built, would cause irreversible damage to the community. The court specifically found that “the landfill would affect the entire nature of the community, its land values, its tax base, its aesthetics, the health and safety of its inhabitants, and the operation of Smiley High School which was only 1700 feet from the site.” But, the facility was built anyway and many more industrial sites followed after the dump was built causing property value to decrease, ultimately stealing the generational wealth of a whole community.
The data collected during the case became America’s first ethnographic study to identify neighborhoods in proximity to polluting industries. The case became America’s first-ever lawsuit against polluters charging environmental racism under the Civil Rights law.
During the 1980s, Dr. Bullard expanded his study of environmental racism to the entirety of the American South, focusing particularly on communities in Texas, Louisiana, West Virginia, and Alabama. The pattern remained the same— communities of color were over burdened by pollution causing increased health risks compared to white communities where pollution was not over burdening.
In 1990, Dr. Bullard published Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality in response to the court’s decision to allow the dump to be built and in response to environmental and civil rights organizations, at the time, who were on two different tracks. Environmental organizations told Dr. Bullard, when he approached them about environmental justice and injustices of these facilities, that they didn’t work on “social issues.” Civil rights groups told him their focus was on discrimination in housing, employment, and education.
Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality became an environmental justice bible. It traces freed Black communities as they purchased property in the formerly-slave owning South– and how the polluting facilities followed them. It shows that in addition to being deprived of infrastructure and education, sanitation, and clean water, these communities were also being exposed to higher-than-average levels of pollutants, compromising their health and well-being for generations.
In 1991, Dr. Bullard played a key role in organizing the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. It was during this meeting where a list of seventeen ‘Principles of Environmental Justice’ was adopted and are still used today in environmental justice work.
Dr. Bullard and clergyman Benjamin Chavis were asked to advise incoming President Bill Clinton and his administration on how to advance environmental justice. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898 after advice and research by a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which included Dr. Bullard, who chaired the Health and Research Subcommittee.
.In 2011, Dr. Bullard founded the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Climate Change Consortium, an annual conference for students, faculty, and researchers to develop and raise awareness on issues related to environmental and climate justice policies, community resilience, adaptation and other major climate change topics. The Consortium sent a delegation of 51 students and faculty to participate in United Nations Framework Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties 21st convening (COP21).
As of today, Dr. Bullard is the founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice and distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University. He has published 18 award winning books about environmental justice. He currently serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC).
Environmental justice has gained support over the past 20 years, but many communities are still fighting for the right to clean air, clean water, and to be able to make decisions for their own communities.
Clean Air Council works to protect these communities rights to a clean and healthy environment under Pennsylvania’s constitution; and works towards a day when ALL communities are safe and are allowed to make decisions for what’s best for themselves.
To learn more about Dr. Bullard and to support his work, please visit https://drrobertbullard.com/.
To learn more about Environmental Justice and Environmental Racism, please visit https://www.ejnet.org/ej/.
