There’s nothing just or ecologically protective about the concept of environmental justice, at least as it’s practiced by the current administration.
The popular fantasy is a tale involving evil corporations that construct heavily polluting industries next to communities populated by minorities and the economically disadvantaged. In reality, lower-income families tend to settle in neighborhoods where property values are low, and those neighborhoods are often adjacent to areas that have historically hosted heavy industry.
The fundamental error in environmental justice theory isn’t merely about putting the cart before the horse; it’s about placing that particular conveyance miles in front of its modus operandi.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, U.S. industry grew at an unprecedented rate. Much of that growth involved heavy industry such as iron and steel, aluminum, automobile manufacturing, appliance production, the petrochemical industry, and many more. Those heavy industries shared two important characteristics: They attracted multitudes of job seekers, many of whom were migrants from the South and immigrants from overseas, and the nature of the times meant that those in charge of heavy industry and those involved in government paid little or no attention to the environmental impact of industrial operations.
Industrial centers such as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, etc., attracted millions of job seekers who flocked to those urban centers pursuing the personal freedom that good wages promised. It was natural, given the transportation limits of the time, for the newly employed to establish residences as near as possible to the factories where they worked. Potential concerns about exposure to air or water pollution associated with their host factory didn’t yet exist, or if such concerns did exist, they were relegated to a tiny minority.
The era of almost unchecked industrial growth in the United States started to come to a close circa 1970. That year marked the beginning of significant air pollution and water pollution legislation that recognized the government’s obligation to fairly administer shared natural resources. It was also the infancy of the modern civil rights era. Those two noble causes, which weren’t at all connected during their inception, would eventually become exorbitantly linked in modern progressive thinking under the umbrella idea labeled environmental justice.
Find an old neighborhood in a historically urban area that’s located near a large, heavily industrial site, no matter whether that site is currently in operation or has been shut down for decades. I would be shocked and amazed to find any low-income/minority residential neighborhood that preceded the introduction of neighboring heavy industry. Such instances may occur, but I doubt that their occurrence can be numbered greater than 1 in 100 circumstances. Increased low-income and minority residential growth doesn’t precede neighboring industrial expansion; it’s overwhelmingly a consequence of industrial activity that commenced in the distant past.
The problem with environmental justice is that it does little or nothing to reduce exposure to pollution. By and large, the biggest contributors to air pollution in any urban area these days have to do with vehicular traffic and what we call area sources, which accounts for everything else that’s a source of air pollution but isn’t associated with industry or vehicular traffic. Industry in most environmental justice areas is a very small contributor to the air pollution picture. What environmental justice initiatives are very good at is limiting economic opportunities in low-income neighborhoods and, of course, increasing dependence on government, which are two sides of the same coin.
Job creators who want to build new industrial facilities or expand existing ones aren’t likely to do so in any environmental justice area. This is true even when the new construction or expansion would include state-of-the-art environmental controls and compliance with all applicable standards. Developers know that if you build in an environmental justice area, you’re likely to be vilified by environmental NGOs and community groups, aided and abetted by the mainstream media. I’ve seen it happen time and again.
So those jobs that should have helped to revitalize low-income communities end up going to sites far away, where developers can invest capital with relative certainty of being able to complete their project in a reasonable amount of time. And it’s time that’s the real issue. Everyone knows that. Developers and those financing the development can’t afford to have a billion dollars sitting idle while waiting for the 15th round of public comments regarding a proposed permit.
Groups such as the Sierra Club fully understand this. They commonly use any delaying tactic available, such as attempts to choke the system with comments, engaging in complex legal maneuvering, enlisting help from their media allies, etc. All that the environmental justice proceedings do is give groups another arrow in their obstructionist quiver.
As noted in the beginning, the misnomer “environmental justice” has little or nothing to do with either.
