GoGreenNation News: Opinion: America, this is what environmental justice is — and what we all stand to lose
Editor’s note: A version of this op-ed was originally published on Matthew Tejada’s LinkedIn profile.There is a lot of misinformation out there, much of it quite intentional, about what environmental justice, or EJ, is.As a result, billions of dollars in funding and technical assistance that flows directly to communities and their partners has been jeopardized and the EPA EJ staff who oversee the use of these funds have largely been put on leave. The work of making our government more just —– work that has been pursued for decades —– has essentially been wiped from our federal government in a matter of weeks. The staff who’ve been put on leave were responsible for listening to the concerns of people across the U.S., supporting tribes and states and local governments in solving some of our most complex health problems, responding to emergencies to make sure the most vulnerable communities receive the help they need, and working to make sure the federal government serves everyone in our country.Critical tools such as EJScreen that were used for everything from transportation planning to disaster response have been taken offline. Powerful forums for the American public to engage their government, such as the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) and National EJ Town Halls, have all been put on ice. For almost 11 years, I had the honor of running EPA’s environmental justice program. It pains me to see the dismantling of this flagship program for advancing equity and justice in our society. If folks could understand exactly what EJ is within our government from the perspective of someone who led the work, I believe they would understand what we all stand to lose. In the United States, we still have communities that do not have access to safe and reliable drinking water or access to sewer systems that are forced to pipe their waste into yards, ditches, or a nearby stream. There are communities across our country where, regardless of national air quality standards, people are breathing in things that cause cancers, asthma, cardiovascular issues, and pulmonary disease, among many other afflictions. There are communities in our country, in rural and farming areas out west and in Alaska and in our oldest cities, that face pollution levels many of us would refuse to live next to and certainly wouldn’t want to raise our children around. Yet people do. Every single day. Oftentimes, these are the only places they can afford to live or where they feel safe and have community and history. All people, no matter their ZIP code or bankroll, should be protected from pollution. This is as true for working class white communities as it is for migrant farmworker communities and residents in centuries-old Indigenous villages and historic African American neighborhoods. Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash Helping these communities become safe to raise a child in, to clean up pollution, to develop economically and build their capacity, to come together to have a hopeful vision of their future: this is the mission of environmental justice in our government.The challenges facing these communities are the toughest to crack — they are complex, entrenched, and long-lived beyond most folks’ imagination. Many communities don’t have sewer service because they are in rural areas where poverty has persisted for generations, neighbors are spread out over square miles, government agencies are not used to working with one another, and the very geology under the community makes digging a trench or situating a traditional septic tank cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. Sources of air pollution wound up in many places because they’re close to ports, railroads, highways, raw materials, and labor. Pollution made these places cheap, so low-income communities moved in and schools were built. More new pollution sources also came to these communities because they didn’t have the political power to say no, and our government institutions had neither the will nor an interest in protecting them. As a result, the U.S. has sacrificed whole communities — Black, brown, Indigenous, and low-income white — by allowing multiple dangerous sources of pollution to build up in already contaminated places and starving them of government resources without giving a second thought to the fact that we shouldn’t have families living and growing in those same places.Solutions to these problems must come from the bottom up, and they involve every person and every entity that has a stake in the problems and the solutions — community leaders and organizations, government at every level, philanthropy, academia, nonprofits, and the private sector. At EPA, the EJ program brings together all of these actors in pursuit of community-driven solutions to the problems standing between the community and their vision for their future. The EJ program supports communities that have never been involved in forming broad, complex collaborations, especially when so many of the necessary partners have typically been in opposition to them. The tough truth is many communities in our country have not been served well by our government, its systems, and its structures. They do not serve well those communities that have limited capacity to fight for a cleaner environment and future, those that aren’t near our centers of power, or those that have been targeted, forgotten, and marginalized throughout our history because of their skin color, their language, or how much they earn. The way we clean up the environment has been baked in over 50 years. Changing a policy, bringing in new and different data, challenging stale legal interpretations, and getting bureaucrats out of their cubicles and out into other spaces where they can take in the realities of how different people live in different communities is the work of environmental justice in our government. Photo by UUSC on FlickrIt is a difficult job confronting some of the toughest challenges in our society. EJ staff are often the ones who get the call to be the first government face in a room full of people who are beyond angry because they just found out that generations of their children have been playing on land full of lead. Or they learned that their drinking water is full of arsenic. Or they heard that yet another incinerator or metal shredder is moving in across the street. Or that they yet again are not going to get the funding to fix their sewers. EJ staff lift up their voices and realities when they go back to their colleagues at EPA, or a state capitol, or city hall, or a Tribal office and tell them what’s going on and ask them to do something differently, something new, something maybe a bit hard. As you’d expect, that is 99 times out of 100 a really tough sell. But that’s the job of the EJ professional, and they are damn good at it. Few bureaucrats have both the bravery and stamina to go into those hot rooms time and time again to face really angry human beings and absorb enough of their fire until folks get to a place of having a constructive conversation. Few bureaucrats’ jobs are to try to change the way everyone around them does their job so that it benefits more and more people in our country. Few people would take on a lifetime commitment knowing they will rack up way more losses than they ever do wins and come back again and again with a smile to try once more. Few bureaucrats regularly have their work — their passion — mischaracterized and abused as something nefarious or threatening when all they are trying to do is make our country work, and work well, for everyone. That is what we — our government, our country, our society — stand to lose if we lose environmental justice from EPA. We will lose the vanguard of courageous, talented, committed civil servants who work every single day to make our country better for everyone. We will lose the ones who are willing to represent our government in its toughest moments. We will lose the ones whose faces are often the first that communities across our country encounter that make them feel heard and understood by their government instead of ignored and pushed aside. The ones who make every person in this country feel that their government might actually treat them with the respect and dignity we all deserve. The ones who also work to make their government actually treat everyone with that respect and dignity. That is not just a loss for the communities that depend on our government to do better for them. That is a loss for all of us. It is a lost opportunity for our society to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our democracy to be better. It is a lost opportunity for our country to finally be one of equality and fairness. It is a loss we cannot afford to accept.
