More Americans Are Going to Fall Into Toxic Traps
Environmental justice was patching over gaps in federal law that allowed for zones of concentrated harms.
Tracking the Trump administration’s rollback of climate and environmental policies can seem like being forced through a wormhole back in time. The administration tried to freeze funding that Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act directed to clean energy, turning that particular clock back to 2022. The Environmental Protection Agency could scrap the finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose threats to human health and the environment, which has underpinned federal climate efforts since 2009. The Trump administration has also barred scientists from working on the UN’s benchmark international climate report, a continuous collaboration since 1990. And it has demolished federal work on environmental justice, which dates back to the George H. W. Bush administration. As part of its purge of so-called DEI initiatives, the administration put 160 EPA employees who work on environmental justice on leave, rescinded Biden’s executive orders prioritizing this work, and pushed to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental-justice offices and positions by March 21.The concept of environmental justice is grounded in activists’ attempt in the early ’80s to block a dump for polychlorinated biphenyls, once widely used toxic chemicals, from being installed in Warren Country, North Carolina, a predominantly Black community. Evidence quickly mounted that Americans who were nonwhite or poor, and particularly those who were both, were more likely to live near hazardous-waste sites and other sources of pollution. Advocates for addressing these ills called unequal toxic exposures “environmental racism,” and the efforts to address them “environmental justice.” In the early ’90s, the first President Bush established the Office of Environmental Equity, eventually known as the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, and President Bill Clinton mandated that federal agencies incorporate environmental justice into their work.Biden, though, was the first president to direct real money toward communities disproportionately affected by pollution—places where, say, multiple factories, refineries, truck yards, and garbage incinerators all operated in a condensed area. As with so many targets of Trump’s crusade against DEI, the damage will be felt by poor people across the country. This choice will certainly harm communities of color, but it will also touch everyone, including many of Trump’s supporters, living in a place burdened by multiple forms of environmental stress. Under Trump’s deregulatory policies, that category will only keep expanding.“There are still these places where life expectancy is 10 to 15 years less than other parts of the country,” Adam Ortiz, the former administrator for EPA Region 3, which covers the mid-Atlantic, told me. Cancer rates are sky high in many of these areas too. Some of these communities are predominantly Black, such as Ivy City, in Washington, D.C., a historically redlined, segregated, working-class community where the air is fouled by a rail switchyard, a highway, and dozens of industrial sites located in a small area. But plenty of the small rural areas that have benefited from environmental-justice money look like Richwood, West Virginia, where catastrophic flooding—a growing climate hazard in the region—knocked out the local water-treatment plant. Residents there are poor, white, and generally politically conservative. In many cases, these communities had gotten little federal attention for generations, Ortiz said.Untangling the knot of pollution in these places is slow work, in part because federal laws don’t adequately address overlapping environmental ills: The Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act regulate only one form and one source of pollution at a time. A population exposed to many pollution sources simultaneously, or to a cocktail of toxins, has little redress. Each business regulated by these laws may follow them and still end up creating places that, like Ivy City, have dangerously bad air quality. Cumulative impact is a gaping regulatory chasm into which millions of Americans fall each year. Federal environmental-justice efforts aimed to fill it.The Trump administration has now halted projects such as the ones Ortiz worked on. People who had spent years gaining trust with local communities, and who had worked with local companies to help them alter things such as how they vented pollution, were dismissed or reassigned. By then, in Ivy City, the EPA had managed to address a “handful” of the 40 or 50 pollution sources plaguing the area, Ortiz said.But some work did get done, and its benefit will likely persist despite the Trump administration’s attempt to make environmental justice disappear. Paul Mohai, a professor at the University of Michigan who served as a senior adviser to the EPA’s environmental-justice office, told me. In his view, one president can’t erase the progress made over the past decades, particularly outside the federal government.Because he was there at the beginning, Mohai knows what these knotty pollution problems looked like when few in government were paying attention. When he co-wrote a review of the literature on environmental justice in the early 1990s, he struggled to find more than a dozen papers on the topic. Now, he said, more publications are coming out and more nonprofit groups have formed to tackle these issues than he can keep track of.Surely some of them will be affected by the president’s restrictions on grant making for scientific research. But the facts accrued through existing research cannot be erased: People of color in the U.S. are exposed to a 38 percent higher level of the respiratory irritant nitrogen dioxide, on average, than white people. Low-income communities are disproportionately targeted for hazardous-waste sites. Poor people and people of color suffer the most from climate impacts such as flooding and extreme heat. Several states have also put environmental-justice considerations into their laws; one in New Jersey restricts certain new industrial permits in places that are already overburdened, for instance. The decisions of a single administration can’t undo all that.But millions of disadvantaged Americans live in states that are not interested in passing these kinds of laws. And layoffs at the EPA will dilute what protections federal clean-air and water legislation do afford, by making enforcement less possible. As the climate crisis deepens—growing the threats of extreme heat, sea-level rise, and catastrophic rainfall, each a hazard that can rob people of safety—more places could succumb to the gaps in these laws as well. Many climate dangers are akin to those of pollution because they create zones of harm where residents bear the costs of the country’s environmental compromises and have little to help them through it. Nothing in any federal law specifically compels the government to protect people from extreme heat, or from unprecedented flooding, though both are set to descend on Americans more often and disproportionately harm poor people and people of color.As these stresses multiply, they’ll be layered onto a landscape already dotted with sites where heavy industry and major traffic create concentrations of emissions. Without laws to address the cumulative impact of these, more Americans will be left sicker and will die sooner. It’s taken decades for the country to start reckoning with that fact to begin to move toward a more useful vision of safety. For now, it seems, all progress is on pause.
