From The Law and Politics Book Review

Vol. 9 No. 2 (February 1999) pp. 66-69.

 

THE PROMISE AND PERIL OF ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE by Christopher H. Foreman, Jr. Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1998. 191 pp. Cloth $22.95. ISBN 0-8157-2878-6.

Reviewed by David Lewis Feldman, Energy, Environment and Resources Center and Department of Political Science, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville. E-mail address: feldman@utk.edu.

 

The claim that racial minorities and other lower-status groups are at greater risk of exposure to, and harm from, hazardous waste landfills, industrial facilities, and other sources of air-, water- or soil-borne emissions and pollutants has become a contentious assertion among academic policy researchers. It has also become a clarion for environmental policy reform in the U.S. The premise behind this claim is twofold. First, the impacts and burdens of many environmental hazards fall disproportionately upon marginal groups because their economic status places them in closer proximity to hazards. Second, such groups are largely powerless to halt the presence of hazards because they are generally excluded from decisions to regulate and manage them. These assertions, and the political movement that has arisen from them, are the subject of Christopher Foreman's provocative monograph.

Foreman, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, posits that charges of disproportionate impact and "discriminatory regulatory enforcement" of environmental laws and regulations, while effective political rhetoric, are "weaker than environmental justice (EJ) advocates usually admit" due to a lack of empirical evidence. Instead, he contends that environmental policies rarely result from overt racism or deliberate discriminatory political and economic tactics. Decisions to site hazardous or noxious facilities are based on economic tradeoffs, assumptions about social benefits, and calculations concerning abatable harm to human health and the environment.

Foreman begins by claiming that the environmental justice movement is driven by a political agenda that seeks empowerment and social justice; not environmental policy change. While there is nothing particularly wrong with these goals, their vigorous pursuit under the guise of seeking environmental policy reform tends to exacerbate "economic inefficiency, muddled policy priorities, (and) the gap between expert and lay perceptions of risk" (p. 3). The environmental justice movement creates this problem by forcing policy makers to make decisions regarding environmental protection in response to popular outrage and misinformed demands, rather than upon rigorously thought-out risk-based environmental priorities (i.e., by considering how to reduce those hazards which most threaten society).

He then reviews the rise of the EJ movement and attributes its advent to legitimate minority group frustration with white, middle- and upper-class environmental movements that consistently failed to provide an effective voice to minorities, the poor, and inner city populations. In his discussion of EJ foundations, Foreman finds the movement to be vociferously devoted to abstract principles of fairness and equity but "strikingly unconcerned with the . . . ancient scholarly literature on equity and justice" (p. 9). This lack of concern is troubling, he feels, because it underscores the movement's scorn for dispassionate analysis and preference for redress of grievances caused by racism. The bottom line, he asserts, is that the claim of environmental racism is often hypocritical and ". . . ought to be viewed as just another tool in the considerable repertoire of community advocacy . . . ." (p. 11)

The book is well organized and researched. The first third of the text analyzes EJ movement documents, speeches by movement leaders as well as sympathetic academic researchers, federal agency reports, and other sources and traces the movement's philosophical and political foundations as well as the legal and policy tools available to movement advocates. Foreman cites a wealth of other appropriate literature, including works by some of its foremost advocates (e.g., the sociologists Robert Bullard and Paul Mohai), as well as studies challenging many of its premises. The latter range from dispassionate epidemiological treatises to conservative "think tank' critiques based upon microeconomic or anti-statist ideological arguments.

The final two-thirds of the book is devoted to challenging the empirical assumptions behind the movement by dissecting its claims about the relationship between demographic and racial background and the likelihood of greater exposure to, and suffering adverse health effects from, environmental nuisances. Appendices feature the text of President Clinton's Executive Order (E.O. 12898) mandating the incorporation of environmental justice considerations in federal agency rulemaking, and the Principles of Environmental Justice articulated by the 1991 "People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit."

Foreman concludes that a better way of addressing the legitimate claims of environmental harm held by minorities would be to "reconfigure" the environmental justice debate around a set of policy reforms that would lead to an opening up of the agenda-setting process. Such reforms would "bring ... new voices and concerns to the table" and engage the leadership of health professionals. Encompassing these voices would reorient the EJ movement away from a preoccupation with irrational fear and outrage and toward greater concern, states Foreman, over "disease and health" (p. 131).

Throughout the text, Foreman argues that the empirical evidence for disproportionate environmental burdens being borne by minorities is false because it fails to understand the economics of land use. Making use of an argument common in the economics literature, he asserts that evidence that hazardous and noxious facility siting and minority population proximity are somehow causally related is in most cases unproven. Residential settlement patterns, the timing of siting, the overall distribution of the waste stream, the actual distribution of exposures, and perhaps most importantly, evidence of disproportionate health and environmental effects; e.g., cancer, mutagenicity, mortality, morbidity, and so on, suggest "tenuous support for the hypothesis of racial inequity in siting or exposure, and no insight into the critical issues of risk and health impact (p. 27)." The book's intended audience is political scientists and other academic policy analysts interested in the efficacy of governmental management of risk, non-market tools of environmental management, and similar issues. Nevertheless, the book can profitably be read by laypeople interested in the roots, ideas, claims, and policy approaches of the EJ movement.

While the book makes a thorough, compelling, and clear-headed case for the limitations -- as well as the contributions of the EJ movement (e.g., Foreman acknowledges the movement's ability to mobilize disenfranchised segments of the population as a source of political strength than can be channeled in a positive direction, see p. 127) -- the argument does have some major flaws. For one, Foreman charges that the EJ movement suffers from a sort of "ethical myopia" due to its preoccupation with outrage, "emotion-packed argument" and finger pointing. He is especially troubled by the fact that the movement is, in some respects, more concerned with wining rhetorical arguments and inciting popular outrage than in intellectually justifying the bases for its outrage.

While there is certainly merit in this argument, the same charge can be made not only of some middle class environmental movements but, equally important, of many anti-environmental groups. For example, advocates of the so-called 'sagebrush rebellion' in the West have demonstrated a proclivity for uncivil rhetoric, contrived outrage, and more than a little hostility toward so-called 'intrusive' government and environmental regulation in an effort to undermine or circumvent environmental regulation. Moreover, as Charles Wilkinson (Crossing the Meridian, 1992) and Blaine Harden (A River Lost, 1996), among others, have recognized, these critics often base their anger on premises that are arguably less justifiable, and in defense of interests that are far-better subsidized by the very government they criticize, as compared with movements representing the poor, blacks, or native Americans. If there is a lesson here it may be that uncivil, emotional argument and outrage have, unfortunately, increasingly become the norm in American public policy debate, especially among groups that, for various reasons, are frustrated with their perceived inability to profit from the "rules of the political game." At its root, this problem is both ethical and structural, and while Foreman is right to suggest that reform of the process by which decisions about the environment are made are keys to change, one must acknowledge that failure to achieve such reform understandably exacerbates the frustration felt by many EJ advocates.

Finally, Foreman has a sometimes too-high regard for risk-based studies of environmental harm; interpreting, with confidence, for instance, evidence of a lack of correlation between hazardous waste sites and adverse environmental health effects. In fact, while the verdict regarding such correlations may, indeed, be unclear, EJ advocates legitimately note that studies remain, in many instances, inconclusive due to a lack of good baseline data. For instance, how can we know, for certain, what caused the health ailments that led to mortality and morbidity statistics among minority populations when previous historical records may be inadequate and public health officials may have disregarded the need to monitor such problems in the past? In addition, some environmental health effects may remain latent for many years.

Finally, prioritizing environmental issues according to risk is not easy. Assessing specific environmental health risks to one segment of a populace while also evaluating the risks to the remaining population remains a daunting task as more than a few state and local environmental priority-setting projects have discovered. Not only is it difficult and costly, but it also presumes that the impacts of hazards upon a given population can be discretely isolated. It also assumes that the political process normally aspires to setting priorities by jointly considering the magnitudes of disparity and the costs of reducing them. In fact, the EJ movement reminds us that few current environmental policies are truly founded upon a risk-based decisional process. Instead, public perception, programmatic pressures, and budgetary constraints drive them.

Foreman's greatest contribution is to identify the dual preoccupation of the EJ movement: modifying the outcomes of decisions -- ensuring that the burdens of environmental problems do not disproportionately fall upon certain groups, and reforming the process by which policy priorities are articulated in order to ensure wide access to decisions. "Access" encompasses the right to information, the right to hearings before major decisions are made, the ability to participate in risk management and mitigation frameworks, and even the right to be compensated for previous injustices. Despite its flaws, The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice is an important book that deserves a wide audience. It is a significant contribution to a debate that has seen more than its share of unchallenged rhetoric and too little dispassionate analysis.

 

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