Analyze

In April 2024, Formosa Plastics Corp. USA was among 137 companies to receive the 2023 Pinnacle Award by the Union Pacific Railroad for "safe shipping of hazardous materials". The transport company honors cusotmers that "release prevention protocols, corrective action plans and have zero non-accident releases of regulated hazardous materials shipments". 

Meanwhile, journalists at the Intercept have followed how in the aftermath of the East Palestine train disaster, lobbyists have both weakened rail safety (Thakker 2023) and supported the buildout of toxic polyvinylchloride (PVC) production (Mitchell 2023, 2024). The latter includes Formosa Plastics planned expansions in Louisiana's St. James Parish.

"The “1-mile rule”: Texas’ unwritten, arbitrary policy protects big polluters from citizen complaints. It’s not found anywhere in state law or the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s rules, but for years the agency has denied citizens the ability to challenge air pollution permits because they live more than a mile away." (Baddour 2023)

Throughout her 30-year career, Diane Wilson has been a prolific author, having published several books (Wilson 2005; 2011) that have been highly regarded by scholars of feminist and environmental literature (Poe 2013; Thornber 2014; Aming-Hong 2022). Wilson's book, An Unreasonable Woman (2005), has been praised by Karen Thornber (2014), an ecocritical writer who has noted that the book highlights the "global consequences of local and national behaviors" and can "work to change consciousness in the absence of public policy" (Thornber 2014, 991). Moreover, literature scholar Heidi Amin-Hong (2022) has argued that Wilson's "documentary aesthetics" demonstrate how Formosa's pollution of Vietnamese waters is part of a longer history of pollution caused by militarized projects across transpacific geographies, ranging from Vietnam to Taiwan and Texas (Aming-Hong 2022, 1). According to Amin-Hong, Wilson's use of dialogue "decenters individual authority in favor of collective knowledge gathering and communal action" (Aming-Hong 2022, 6).

Lee references work from two main sources: Jill Lindsey Harrison’s book, From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice Within Government Agencies, and Ana Baptista’s Ph.D. dissertation, “Just Policies? A Multiple Case Study of State Environmental Justice Policies.” Harrison describes how EJ managers and staff undermine environmental issues resisting EJ integration. She argues this resistance is based on: “environmental protection is colorblind, bettering the environment overall means that the environment is improved for everyone, EPA is a science agency while EJ deals with social issues, and other “standard narratives” rooted generally in American normative societal values or in long-held premises that have shaped the environmental protection field for decades” (Lee, 2021). Baptista’s concept suggest EJ practice’s inactivity contributes to procedural injustice while also highlighting the importance of structural justice when dealing with environmental injustice as it is deeply rooted in racial discrimination and the perpetuating of racism through the skewed relationship between governmental entities and black communities. 

In addition to these references, Lee also highlights contributions from Rebert Bullard, who developed a public health model of prevention that focuses on community-outreach practices to address disproportionate impact. Ryan Holifield, who accentuated the difficulty for government agencies to define “disproportionate impacts” presenting another challenge in legally reinforcing the order. David Pellow, who highlighted the importance of critically looking at race and understanding how attributed meaning to concepts dealing with race change over time. 

In order to advance these referenced works, Lee argues that the best way to integrate earlier findings is by building the capacity of the EJ practitioner “to deploy the core theories that guide EJ practice.” In this instance, the ability to define and  contextualize the term “disproportionate impacts” is a crucial tool to ensure the Executive order becomes operational.       

Lee’s main argument is that disproportionate impacts are intertwined with the distribution of environmental and social impacts. He highlights structural and procedural issues with environmental agencies and the EPA, along with other issues of data injustice, where agencies were sometimes characterized as “black boxes,” closed off from population scrutiny and  from learning of the actual narratives in these communities. 

“Not only are we now able to construct inarguable empirical statements that are commensurate with the deep historical and systemic drivers of environmental racism and injustice, but mainstream leaders and the general public are finally listening. Indeed, new tools for operationalizing the consideration of disproportionate impacts are emerging, not the least of which is New Jersey’s recent landmark EJ legislation (S.232/A.B.2212). Hence, we can now discuss what some building blocks of a second generation of EJ practice may look like.”

Lee uses CalEPA’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee definition and recognition of “cumulative effects,” or the public health effects of combined exposure of environmental pollutants and toxins with other stressors that impacts people of a lower socio-economic status in accordance with existing research. This led to the development of the CalEnviroScreen

The article focuses on creating definitions and clarifying concepts while analyzing the impact of a disproportionate distribution of resources in a way that clearly shows the link to systemic racism and the “inequitable distribution of environmental burdens and benefits” (Lee 2021). It develops a framework for integrating concepts of environmental injustice with environmental policy-making in an effort to overcome the inaction of environmental justice (EJ) practice to address the EJ Executive Order No. 12898 by President Clinton in 1994. A mandate that addressed “disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects” of its operation population of lower socio-economic status. The issue being these agencies did not know how to define the term “disproportionate effect” leading to the immense challenge of holding agencies to an environmental justice standard. 

The article also discusses future EJ practice that addresses systemic racism using empirical data in the context of programmatic decision-making to visualize public health impacts which recognizes that as the demand of governmental regulation of “disproportionate impacts” increases the need for greater resources, scale of analysis, and level of quantification increases.

Lee contextualizes his argument in the era of March 2021 when discussing how current conditions are optimal for making progress in reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has uplifted black voices and brought visibility to black discrimination and the environmenatal, social, economic, health outcome, and cultural effects of systemic racism.

Lee uses “second-generation EJ mapping tools that have cumulative impacts as their core organizing principle,” this tool goes beyond demographic indicators, it spatially array the factors EJ researchers identified and contributors to the cumulative impacts affecting communities of colors. It was created by EJ researchers Manuel Pastor, Rachel Morello-Frosch, and James Sadd officially developing an EJ Screening Method (EJSM) - which laid the foundation for CalEnviroScreen. These tools are used to study cumulative effects, a combination of environmental pollutants and socio-economic factors that leave communities of people-of-color vulnerable to adverse health outcomes. Other modern technological and statistical tools include modern geographic information system (GIS) technology.

“Virtually all EJ practice has been con- fined to the procedural justice element, with EJ defined as solely consisting of more community involvement. This is inevitable if there is no understanding of the substantive core of such concerns speaking to the need for a systematic and rigorous way to operationalize the concept of dispro- portionate impacts.” (10209)
“The following is a first cut at a working definition of “disproportionate impacts”32: Disproportionate environmental and/or public health impacts are combinations of demonstrably greater pollu- tion burden and population vulnerability associated with socially and/or economically disadvantaged communities and populations. Disproportionate impacts may often reflect consistent patterns in the distribution of pollution and vulnerability, and are often a function of historical trends and policy decisions.” (10212)

“To be sure, anecdotal descriptions represent very compelling information, as countless community mem- bers testify at public hearings every day to express their concerns about their communities’ well-being. How- ever, we all know from bitter experience how they are often ignored, criticized, or marginalized. Having peer- reviewed, government-sanctioned, and quantitative data changed the terms of the conversation and went a long way toward ensuring that the data are taken seriously. It provided a basis by which we can define and discuss the concept of disproportionate impacts in analytically rigor- ous terms.” (10213)

The primary argument of the text is that an understanding of disproportionate impacts is needed for systemic environmental justice (EJ) changes to take place (particularly, in government programs). The author notes that the EPA has, along with other government agencies, been unable to move past a “procedural justice” version of EJ, in which it is defined only as consisting of further community involvement (10209). EPA’s definition of EJ, which includes tenets of both fair treatment meaningful involvement, is not fully possible without, as the author notes, “an analytical framework rooted in an understanding of disproportionate impacts” (10218): this includes not only the procedural justice listed above, but also the distributive corrective, social, recognitional, and structural justice cited in EJ literature. The author puts this in the context of the national reckoning with systemic racism in summer 2020 (which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic), citing these concurrent events as catalysts for major improvements to programs that affect environmental and human health (10218).

This article got me thinking about the difficulty in teaching concepts and examples of cumulative impacts, disproportionate burdens, and different forms of injustices, a challenge that I have encountered in co-teaching the Environmental Injustice course at UCI, which is built around these concepts. Early on in the course, students are often shocked at how government and corporate institutions are implicated in producing environmental injustice. The organized abandonment (RW Gilmore’s concept) of communities is a source of further government mistrust, inaction, and paralysis. We then ask students to imagine next-generation environmental governance with the help of reports and studies conducted by community-based organizations, and mapping/visualization tools mentioned in Lee’s article. They come up with nuanced case studies of environmental justice in California communities using a toolkit of concepts and rapid research design. I am interested in learning more about this shift in analytical and learning capacity of both educators and learners that occurs during this course. It connects to my broader concern of characterizing and mobilizing educators as environmental justice practitioners. 

Disproportionate impacts, cumulative impacts, symbolic politics, structural justice, recognitional justice, syndemics, social determinants of health, redlining