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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.

Chapter 2 provides a historical overview of the political, social, and academic roots of the federal government’s environmental justice policy activities. The chapter begins with the case of the controversial siting of a PCBs disposal facility in Warren County, North Carolina, and then describes the research and events that occurred over the subsequent decade to bring the environmental justice issue to the national agenda. The chapter next describes the main initiatives pursued by the federal government in response, including the creation of the Office of Environmental Justice within the EPA, the establishment of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and, most importantly, the signing of Executive Order 12898 by President Clinton in 1994. The chapter also reviews the limited amount of past research evaluating federal efforts to address environmental inequities, and describes policy efforts during the Obama Administration to renew attention to environmental justice through Plan EJ 2014. The overall purpose of the chapter is to establish the context for the empirical chapters that follow.

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.

This chapter discusses the environmental justice issues that arise in the context of standard-setting. Specifically, the chapter evaluates the degree to which the EPA has effectively considered distributional issues in its rulemaking. The author begins the chapter by examining the set of policy instruments (command-and-control regulation, market-based mechanisms, and information-based approaches) that the EPA can pursue to achieve its goals under the statutes it implements, and how instrument choice can create different types of distributive and procedural justice concerns. The chapter then explores a variety of equity concerns that have arisen in EPA rulemaking in practice under a variety of pollution control laws including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and argues that the EPA has largely fallen short of incorporating equity considerations as part of standard-setting. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some recent progress, but notes that much is left to be accomplished.

This chapter examines federal environmental justice policy in the area of facility permitting. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of how distributive and procedural environmental justice issues have been adjudicated in several venues important to permitting under major environmental statutes such as the Clean Air Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Much of the analysis focuses on the decisions of the Environmental Appeals Board (EAB), which is responsible for adjudicating administrative appeals of permitting decisions under the major laws that the EPA implements. The author argues that challenges to new permits brought to the EAB on the grounds of disparate impacts to low-income and minority communities have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, there is little evidence that the EPA has integrated environmental justice concerns directly into permitting decisions, although the EAB does now as matter of practice require that EPA permit writers perform an environmental justice analysis and invite broad participation in permitting decisions. The chapter also examines recent policy developments as part of Plan EJ 2014 and the EPA’s implementation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which provides some reason for optimism for future consideration of disparate impacts in federal and state permitting decisions.

This chapter considers the role of the judicial system in addressing environmental inequalities. The authors begin the chapter with a careful review of empirical studies of environmental litigation outcomes, and conclude that monetary fines and penalties handed down from the courts do not appear to be directly discriminatory. Rather, studies suggest that, if discrimination in sentencing exists, it is likely to be indirect. The chapter next turns to the important question of whether courts can be successfully used by communities to overcome unfairness or bias in facility siting decisions, by providing a venue for individuals and advocacy organizations to challenge what they believe to be discriminatory practices. The authors examine this question in the context of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the National Environmental Policy Act. The analysis reveals that the courts have thus far provided few opportunities for environmental justice advocates to purse change through these venues. The chapter concludes with a set of lessons learned that can be employed to help achieve fairer outcomes in the future.

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.

This chapter analyzes the difficult challenges that arise when considering the environmental justice effects of federal rules and regulations. It complements the discussion in Chapter 4 by examining a different part of the rulemaking process. Specifically, the authors identify five issues as being important in any analysis of distributional implications of a new environmental standard: the geographic scope of the analysis, the identification of potentially affected populations, the selection of a comparison group, how to spatially identify effects on population groups, and how exposure or risk is measured in an analysis. For each issue, the authors consider how it has been addressed in the academic literature, as well as in practice by the EPA as part of five recent proposed or final rulemakings completed under various pollution control statutes. The chapter concludes that, even though there has been a substantial uptick in the number of rules that consider environmental justice issues in their accompanying economic analysis, there remain significant analytical issues to resolve before this becomes a routinized practice.

In this chapter, the authors examine patterns of race- and class-based disparities in federal and state regulatory enforcement. The chapter begins with a review of past research evaluating these types of disparities in government enforcement activity under major environmental laws. It then sets up and reports the results of an original statistical analysis that takes advantage of detailed, facility-level data on historical EPA and state enforcement activity under the Clean Air Act. The analysis investigates whether the EPA and state government agencies conducted more compliance monitoring inspections and levied more punitive actions at facilities located in poor and minority communities in the years following the adoption of the federal environmental justice policy initiatives of the mid-1990s. Despite explicit calls in Executive Order 12898 and in EPA environmental justice strategy documents that called for the targeting of firms in these communities, the analysis yields sparse evidence that enforcement effort changed during the post-policy period.

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.

“Planetary health is primary; human well-being is derivative.” (T. Berry) This chapter demonstrates religious ethics in a new key. It does so by centering planetary health and by showing how human identity and well-being are bound, with every cell of the body, to ecospheric health. To illustrate this in detail, the chapter uses one of the primal elements—earth as soil. Attention to soil and its life demonstrates how the foci of the previous chapters—change, theory, community—appear when morality and ethics emerge from reflections on a primal element. This in turn illustrates the method of religious ethics in a new key. Special note is given to method as the way anyone and everyone structures his or her ethic. Method is what we think with as we think about moral matters. How do we think in ways that are Earth-honoring?

This theoretical chapter reviews the role that environmental justice studies have played in unraveling the environmental inequalities faced by low-income populations and communities of color (including contamination, resource extraction, and waste transfer) as well as the tensions and conflicts that have arisen from them. It also examines the multifaceted roots of environmental injustices. Furthermore, this chapter is framed within the political economy of development in the city and explores the broader processes and actors that played central roles in the long-term environmental decay of marginalized neighborhoods and that residents and their allies resisted. Research in sociospatial segregation, inequalities, urban growth, right to the city, and spatial justice is particularly relevant for these issues. The second part of the chapter links traditional understandings of environmental justice with scholarship on place and place attachment and its analysis of the role that place and community play in historically distressed neighborhoods. It is a broader critique of existing studies of community organization for their lack of attention to place within the context of long-term environmental revitalization and justice in urban distressed neighborhoods. It finishes by highlighting the need to strengthen the nexus of environmental justice and place remaking in cities.

This chapter discusses a scientific analysis conducted by the Southern California Environmental Justice Collaborative. This community-based participatory research project, focusing on environmental health in Los Angeles schools, used secondary data analysis to answer scientific questions that informed policy advocacy and the organizing strategies of community partners. The chapter also presents quantitative results from the analysis on environmental inequality in exposure to ambient-air toxics and associated health risks among schoolchildren. It examines the implications of this work for regional and state policy, and the possibility of better application of the precautionary principle to issues of environmental justice. Integrating environmental justice and the precautionary principle is essential to protect vulnerable populations and eliminate persistent racial and class-based disparities in environmental hazard exposures and health outcomes.

Individually and collectively, people around the world have opposed environmental injustice for hundreds of years. However, most commentators agree that the conceptualisation and use of the term ‘environmental justice’ first emerged in the 1980s, out of resistance to the siting of toxic facilities in black and other minority ethnic communities in the United States. Therefore, the term ‘environmental justice’ was originally applied to the socio-spatial distribution of pollution within national borders and, in particular, environmental racism in facility siting. It has since been taken up in other parts of the world and, over the past decade, the concept of environmental justice and its associated research methodologies have begun to be used in other countries around the globe. In the process of expanding its boundaries, environmental justice has become a somewhat contentious term. In general, it seems that activists have tended to promote a wider, and often more radical, use of the concept, applying it to more diverse contexts and issues, while policy makers and most academics have clung to a narrower definition. This chapter explores these debates.

Chapter 1 situates the book vis-à-vis relevant literature on social movements, environmentalism, environmental health and these areas as they relate to China. In the first part, it suggests that environmentalism may take very diverse forms and it is powerfully shaped by its cultural, social, political and economic contexts. These contexts in turn affect the ways in which locals value environment, health and development and the extent to which they may be uncertain about pollution’s health effects. In light of this, the chapter presents “resigned activism” as a conceptual tool for bridging analyses of activism and resignation, and for showing how they merge across a wide range of villagers’ attitudes and everyday practices. In the second part, it outlines some of China’s environmental challenges and burgeoning environmentalism. It argues in favour of looking beyond the obvious environmental agents (NGOs) and strategies, towards less visible environmental subjectivities.

This chapter elaborates on the three approaches that singly and collectively contribute to and underpin an eco-justice perspective: environmental justice, ecological justice and species justice. Eco-justice is itself a complex notion that incorporates elements from all three justice approaches. Fundamentally, applying an eco-justice perspective involves weighing up the nature and degree of harm, in specific risk situations, in relation to humans, eco-systems and nonhuman species (including plants). Action outcomes and specific interventions can and should only proceed on the basis of detailed knowledge and discussion of these three types of injustice, and how they ‘fit’ together and overlap in any given circumstance. After briefly outlining these approaches, the main part of the chapter explores the conceptual and methodological challenges associated with defining and measuring ‘harm’, including environmental harm. The purpose is to raise issues and provide a background framing for the analysis of eco-justice concerns in subsequent chapters.

The main focus of this chapter is to explore how environmental harm is constructed in relation to humans. Environmental justice refers to the distribution of environments among peoples in terms of access to and use of specific natural resources in defined geographical areas, and the impacts of particular social practices and environmental hazards on specific human populations (e.g. as defined on the basis of class, occupation, gender, age, ethnicity). In other words, the concern is with matters of social justice in relation to environmental harm. The chapter explores social patterns of risk and harm pertaining to human populations, and the physical location and scale of environmental harm within particular geographical contexts.

Chapter 4 relates response in Roxbury, Massachusetts—a section of Boston where a group formed in opposition to Boston University’s bid to host an NBL. Civic partisans there invoked a direct action style of civics and discourse reflective of local civic history, ongoing civic relations, and resonant civic virtues. In this context, the NBL was regarded as an environmental injustice insofar as its placement in Roxbury reflected the political disenfranchisement of neighborhood residents based on their race and class positions. Risk acceptability and dispute therefore echoed social and political history in which de facto segregation, municipal neglect, and ongoing marginalization of the neighborhood’s minority residents left them suspicious of both “white” trustee institutions and those from outside their neighborhood. Chapter 3 demonstrates that in Roxbury claims making emerged from a specific civic and political legacy where claims were not new even if the proposed NBL was.