Implementation Woes

Environmental justice is back on the political agenda. Environmental injustice, unfortunately, never went away. The Biden administration has made EJ a priority, but the responsibility for implementing political directives will fall primarily on federal agencies. Some progress has already been made on that front, particularly in relation to appointments, significantly with a number of people of color heading and working in many agencies.

But the work to advance environmental justice within agencies requires more in-depth assessment and potential institutional reform. While this administration’s early activity has fostered numerous articles and analyses, few have taken a look at the ongoing fight to foster EJ within government agencies themselves. Jill Lindsey Harrison’s new book From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice Within Government Agencies does just that.

An associate professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder, Harrison spent eight years interviewing and observing current and former representatives from a variety of federal and state agencies that work on environmental justice initiatives. These include EPA (headquarters, eight regional offices, and satellite offices), the federal Department of Justice and Department of the Interior, California EPA, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, and Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Professor Harrison’s work illustrates how agency dynamics can fundamentally undermine environmental justice policies, including their implementation.

My students often ask me why — so many decades after the Clinton administration issued Executive Order 12898 in 1994 and many (many!) strategy and policy documents on environmental justice later — there has been such a lack of progress. We assess case after case where cumulative impacts are not taken into account, and the particular vulnerabilities of environmental justice communities are overlooked by federal and state agencies. To answer their overarching query, I articulate for them what Jill Harrison calls the “standard narrative”: lack of regulatory authority, limited resources at federal agencies to incorporate EJ needs, and the lack of analytical tools to identify at-risk communities. Harrison’s book fleshes out these deficiencies in detail, emphasizing that these are existing, and very real, constraints to EJ policy implementation within government agencies.

Yet these explanations often feel incomplete. Harrison’s book completes the picture for us. While she accepts that these standard narrative deficiencies present very real barriers, the spectacular lack of progress on these issues points to the fact that, as Harrison notes, “Something else is going on.” Her work provides clear examples of career professionals within federal agencies who struggle to understand and prioritize environmental justice. Based on interviews with agency staff (including EJ staff) and observations of agency meetings between 2011 and 2019, the book provides an internal picture of organizational inertia, and even resistance, to EJ initiatives within government agencies. While at times painful to read, her findings are important to confront and address.

Harrison divides these internal obstacles into several categories. The first includes strategies that agency staff, including management, use to undermine environmental justice. For example, in the infamously ineffective office at EPA that handles Title VI complaints, Harrison notes that past management directed staff to use any administrative grounds possible to reject Title VI filings. In addition, none of the staff at the office had any interest or experience in civil rights law, and some were assigned to the office after having done poorly within other jobs at EPA.

The second category concerns staff narratives used to undermine environmental justice. A widespread example of this is EPA staff who feel “we do ecology, not sociology.” These narratives involve claims of agency neutrality, but also discomfort at being required to incorporate EJ into their work, as it is often perceived as peripheral to agency mandates and staff expertise.

It is not all benign neglect. Harrison documents that some agency staff feel that prioritizing communities of color constitutes reverse racism, and use colorblind and post-racial narratives to reject EJ reforms. Some staff bolster this narrative by claiming that colorblind approaches are codified in law, and therefore claim they cannot take into account communities’ racial identities. At the same time, agency staff may also ignore low-income neighborhoods, many of which are white, focusing only on the racial element of environmental justice.

An anonymous feedback note sent to one EJ staff member (who conducts environmental justice training using videos) is illustrative:

“The whole idea of this thing [environmental justice] is based on a lie. There are many people that I have spoken to about this training that fundamentally disagree with what EJ proposes to do. In the minds of many common sense folk this is nothing but propaganda. The lady in the video basically eludes [sic] that everything we do is racist, whether hat’s in the work environment, during our leisure time, or just as individuals. Not true at all.
. . . The training also concludes that when in doubt just blame a white person for your life circumstances if they are bad. I think that is the most racist thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

Other agency narratives documented by Harrison include prejudiced disparagement of environmental justice communities themselves, including alleging that communities cannot be trusted to use large EJ financial grants wisely.

Another category of internal constraints is staff using perceived regulatory limits as a way to avoid revisiting existing interpretations of agency authority, or proposing reforms of their mandates. Body language is also a factor, with EJ staff complaining about rolling of eyes, yawning, and checking of phones during EJ training. Most disheartening to read were stories of abuse and disrespect leveled at EJ staff (many of whom are people of color) within agencies.

Despite these many documented obstacles, Harrison notes that many agency EJ staff have persisted, even if their efforts detrimentally affected their career progression. This highlights another important internal obstacle: the refusal to diversify agency staff and management. In addition, performance reviews rarely include environmental justice assessments, and staff can even be reprimanded for taking time to integrate EJ analyses in their work.

Harrison helpfully provides examples of strategies EJ staff have used to manage these obstacles. These include data and mapping tools, which can help to silence discursive pushback. These tools also allow EJ staff to frame environmental justice as central to the mandate and mission of the agency. EJ staff also advise communities on how to frame their feedback in a way that agency staff will value. Some EJ staff remove discussions of race altogether from environmental justice initiatives. Others make EJ a regular part of their work discussions. One staff member interviewed by Harrison noted that she adopted (and vocalized) a personal policy that she would not attend an agency meeting that did not in some way bring up issues of justice. Others challenged coworkers’ narratives of impartiality, and the implications of that narrative for environmental justice communities.

Some of these obstacles are being tackled under President Biden. There should already be a much clearer administrative signal to agencies that EJ is a top political priority, not just a fad. While there are no easy fixes, some of these hurdles should be lessened going forward.

More difficult to tackle within agencies will be cultural and organizational practices, built up over time, which create institutional inertia and resistance. This is why Harrison’s work is so timely and important.

One of the more hopeful strategies the book identifies to combat these narratives is the critical role lawyers can and do play within agencies. Harrison notes that many staff she interviewed identified lawyers as one of the largest and most influential groups of staff within agencies. One staff member recalls how agency attorneys effectively gutted efforts to implement environmental justice, whittling initiatives down to “tame and lame” recommendations. Many agency lawyers are simply not trained in environmental inequalities.

However, lawyers can serve as proactive advocates of EJ initiatives within agencies. Providing clear messages, repeated over time, to employees that race can be one of, if not the sole, criterion used by agencies when considering environmental justice, can combat the colorblind narrative. Harrison notes that finding creative legal solutions within existing regulatory constraints is critically important.

Law schools too have a role to play here. They should produce lawyers who prioritize and care about environmental justice issues, and who are willing to carve out entire careers in that area. This means that law schools must create a pipeline of committed EJ advocates who can harness the law, as it stands, to implement environmental justice. Agencies themselves also need to be involved in this work — building a diverse and culturally sensitive workforce will be a key component of agency effectiveness. Law schools can also contribute to this process, which means increasing the diversity of the student body overall, and particularly those studying environmental law. Representative diversity is important within law schools, NGOs, and government agencies. Environmental justice communities deserve this attention by committed legal practitioners, and, as Harrison documents for us, government agencies clearly need it.

Lisa Benjamin is an assistant professor of law at Lewis & Clark Law School.