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An exploration is made of how the environmental justice movement in the United States has taken on some of the communicative and participatory demands and practices of critical pluralism. The movement has been critical of the communicative methods of the mainstream – the top-down organizational structure and its one-way nature of communication, and the lack of attention to issues of public participation in policy-making – and issues of communication have been a central focus in the development and demands of environmental justice. Accepting the diversity and the situated experiences of individuals and cultures has fostered the use of, and demand for, a variety of innovative communicative processes. Internally, the movement has attempted to employ more open discursive processes, paying particular attention to communication within and across diverse groups. Externally, the movement has made demands with regard to issues of communication and more discursive and participatory policy-making on government agencies, particularly the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This chapter focuses on four federal agencies that bear some responsibility for protecting the nation's natural resources and environment, namely the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers in the Department of Defense, and the Office of Surface Mining and Minerals Management Service in the Department of Interior. Flush with resources and backed by strong public opinion, the environmental agencies initially generated a healthy flow of proactive implementing regulations that they vigorously enforced against some of the most powerful corporations in the country. Congress no longer appeared capable of enacting legislation to address emerging environmental problems. The last two significant environmental statutes were the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 and the Oil Pollution Act of 1990.

The radiation controversies of the 1950s and 1960s had focused on the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) programs, and the AEC had played the most visible role among the various federal agencies involved in radiation safety. The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave the AEC a potentially strong rival. The new agency took over the duties of the Federal Radiation Council, and its functions included the protection of the population from environmental radioactivity. The scope of the EPA's regulatory mandate under Nixon's reorganization plan extended, potentially at least, to all sources of radiation. Despite the breadth of its mandate, radiation protection was not a priority issue for the EPA. The importance of radiation safety to the EPA and the ambiguity of its role under Reorganization Plan No. 3 soon led to contention with other agencies. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has disputed the EPA's claim that its responsibilities included medical uses of radiation. Differences also quickly arose between the EPA and the AEC over their respective roles in radiation protection.

This chapter examines public participation in federal environmental decision-making from an environmental justice perspective. The authors begin with a broad overview of past research on public participation and environmental decision-making, and then discuss the opportunities and challenges that arise in the specific context of environmental justice. The chapter describes and analyzes the way that federal agencies have involved the public – particularly, low-income and minority individuals, and the groups that represent them – in environmental decision-making, which is an important part of government efforts to achieve procedural justice. The analysis compares efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Department of Transportation. Among the key findings are that there is significant variation in how public participatory processes are used to address environmental justice concerns across the three agencies examined, and that, while opportunities for public involvement have increased since the signing of Executive Order 12898, actual participation from low-income and minority communities has been uneven.

The final chapter of the book reviews and synthesizes the key findings from the preceding chapters. The main general take-away conclusion from the book is that the federal government, and in particular the EPA, has not effectively integrated environmental justice considerations into decision-making as part of its core regulatory programs and activities. More broadly, the environmental justice policy reforms put in place in the mid-1990s, especially Executive Order 12898, failed to deliver on their promise of changing federal environmental decision-making. The reasons for this conclusion pertain to challenges specific to permitting, rule-making, enforcement and the other areas studied in the book as well as to several factors that cut across these areas. Specifically, three factors are identified as having impeded general progress: failure of the EPA to develop clear policy guidance, inadequate coordination across EPA regions and states, and inconsistent agency leadership. Although the book concludes with a sobering assessment of the limits to date of federal environmental justice policy, the author concludes that there is some reason for optimism in light of recent policy efforts at the EPA under Plan EJ 2014.

The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 to administer the Clean Air Act of 1970 and a bevy of other ambitious new environmental interventions marked a high point in Americans’ belief in the capacity of the federal government to intervene in the economy to improve the public welfare. While Richard Nixon intended the EPA to simply implement policies that would be formulated elsewhere, the complexity of developing and enforcing functional policies that could achieve the Clean Air Act’s mandates made the agency’s regulations increasingly key to determining what pollution control looked like in the lives of ordinary Americans and the operations of American businesses. This recognition of the power in implementation sent environmental advocates, business representatives, and White House advisors scrambling to find ways of influencing the decision making of the new agency at the heart of the nation’s environmental governance regime.

The first chapter of the book introduces the subject of environmental justice, and then presents the main question analyzed throughout the rest of the book: did the federal environmental justice policy reforms of the mid-1990s result in the EPA and other federal agencies making environmental justice a core component of their decision-making? Although these reforms, particularly the 1994 presidential Executive Order on environmental justice have been in place for twenty years, there has been very little systematic analysis of their efficacy. The chapter argues that it is an opportune time for such an analysis. The balance of the chapter then sets up the rest of the book by reviewing 1) the empirical literature that has developed over the past three decades to document the type and degree of race- and class-based disparities in environmental amenities; and 2) previous research that has been conducted to evaluate the impact of environmental justice policy. The chapter then outlines a conceptual framework of justice issues (distributive justice, procedural justice, and corrective justice) used in the book to evaluate the performance of the federal government, particularly the EPA, in integrating environmental justice considerations into its decision-making, and provides an overview of each of the subsequent chapters.

By the late 1970s, the hazards of low-level radiation became a highly noticeable and a severely debated issue. There is a public debate about the low-level radiation which was triggered by complaints of “atomic soldiers” who had been exposed to radiation while witnessing nuclear weapons tests during 1950s and by a series of studies that lifted new apprehensions about the hazards of small dozes. In an atmosphere of continuing controversy and unavoidable uncertainty, both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission undertook major revisions of their regulations on radiation protection. Both incorporated new findings and approaches, but neither escaped criticism for policies that were in some minds overly lax and in others unduly stringent.

This chapter examines the government's response to toxic contamination in African American communities and the health consequences for the residents of those communities. It begins with an overview of the federal Superfund program, created in 1980 when Congress enacted the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), which allowed the federal government to respond to releases or potential releases of hazardous wastes that might harm people or the environment. It then considers the legacy of unequal protection in the Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement of its Superfund laws, increasing the risk for African Americans and other communities of color. It also presents case studies that highlight environmental racism and slow government response to disasters that threaten the health and welfare of African Americans in the Deep South.

This chapter focuses on the pesticide reform efforts of farmworkers, led by the United Farm Workers (UFW), in cooperation with the mainstream environmental movement in the years immediately following the DDT ban. It shows how environmental groups such as the Sierra Club expanded their lobbying efforts in Congress for the passage of a stronger regulatory law on pesticides. It also considers the Environmental Defense Fund’s attempts to get the Environmental Protection Agency to cancel all uses of aldrin and dieldrin. Finally, it discusses the UFW’s union battles with the Teamsters between 1972 and 1976 that affected its focus on agricultural chemicals, even as it continued to collaborate with some environmental groups on related issues.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

Eager to regain control over the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Nixon administration claimed a new White House prerogative to review administrative rulemakings before they became law, citing the potential economic disruption of expensive new mandates as justification for this regulatory review. Fearing that the influence that business representatives seemed likely to wield on the process and the possibility that the White House would use the new process to water down congressional mandates, environmental organizations turned to Congress and the courts to push back against regulatory review. Caught in the middle and eager to protect the EPA’s ability to fulfill legislative mandates, the EPA’s senior leadership increasingly turned to economics to understand and moderate the adverse impacts of its regulations and to justify a strong intervention program to the White House and the American public.

No discussion of how to achieve environmental justice would be complete without reference to the United States, the birthplace of the concept and what has become known as the ‘environmental justice movement’. This chapter critically assesses the state of environmental justice in the United States, drawing on the relevant literature as well as the authors own observations and a number of semi-structured interviews carried out between 2008 and 2012. The US is typologised here as the most capitalist of the seven case-study countries examined in this book, primarily because it has no recent experience of extensive public ownership of the means of production. The chapter outlines how the country is weak on substantive, distributive, procedural intergenerational, inter-species and international aspects of environmental justice. The main issues are excessive use of resources and production of waste; high levels of environmental inequities, based on pronounced social inequalities; and inadequate procedural justice frameworks and policies, which have often focused more on managing and controlling communities than on empowering them.

This chapter defines and describes hazardous wastes and their adverse health effects. Historical evolution of the management and public understanding of waste issues is traced. Other parts of the chapter describe hazardous waste management, including disposal landfills, land farming, incineration, and toxics use reduction. Various regulatory measures are described as well as nonregulatory measures for prevention and control of adverse health effects from hazardous wastes. Approaches to evaluating human health effects at hazardous waste sites are described, emphasizing special challenges and opportunities in environmental epidemiology. Social aspects of community involvement are noted. Steps of the Superfund clean-up process are delineated. Governmental contingency plans for coordination in emergency response situations are reviewed. In addition, a section describes pollution prevention and toxics use reduction.

Chapter 1 provides a map of key environmental health research and regulatory institutions, including the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), the National Toxicology Program (NTP), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It also considers the goals and perspectives of the chemical industry and of environmental health and justice activists.Focusing, then, on the contentious politics of the environmental health arena, it explores how the practices of environmental health scientists have been shaped by the forces and struggles in the field in which they operate

As the prosperity of the postwar period ran aground on the shoals of the dislocations of the energy crises and the deteriorating position of American manufacturing, critiques of the supposed inefficiency of large government programs gained ground among both Democrats and Republicans. Under Jimmy Carter, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which had been a champion of a liberal governance model in which experts established direct mandates for businesses to follow, became a key space for the development of market-based alternatives that shifted power back to businesses in the hopes of reducing the costs of achieving public welfare goals, even as the agency took on new authority to protect pristine air through the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977. As Carter set out to bring more economic scrutiny to the EPA’s rulemaking through expanded regulatory review processes, environmental advocates were forced to contend with the rising salience of monetary approaches of environmental value.

Elected on the premise that government was the problem, not the solution, Ronald Reagan marked a major challenge to the postwar consensus that a liberal state could and should intervene broadly to improve public welfare. But popular support for environmental protection remained sufficient to stop Reagan from pursuing his deregulatory agenda outright. Instead, at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Reagan sought to hamstring the agency’s ability to operate, disrupting its enforcement program and bleeding it of the resources it needed to fulfill expansive congressional mandates. Illustrating the investment of the agency’s former officials and career staff in EPA’s original mission, a group of current and former employees banded together to resist Reagan’s assault, eventually attracting enough attention that Reagan abandoned his deregulatory agenda as a political liability.

By the mid-1980s, as the nation confronted new problems such as the ozone hole and long-standing issues such as acid rain, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faced reduced political support for direct mandate interventions. Harnessing growing support for market-based strategies among environmental advocates, the EPA increasingly turned to incentives, tradable allowances, and other market-based policies in the 1980s. This shift culminated in the development of the nation’s first cap-and-trade program to address the problem of acid rain in the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. As the nation looked forward to new concerns including global warming, an era of direct mandates informed by natural rights to clean air and a healthy environment seemed to be at a close, supplanted by a new environmentalism that held out market-based policies and a monetary conceptualization of environmental value as a new model for governance.

Chapter 5 shows that science-based decisions, ranging from the development of new chemical products by chemical manufacturers to chemical assessments at EPA, involve social acts of negotiation between participants, multiple interpretations of scientific evidence, and political and economic concerns and constraints.