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This article was published in 2022 in England. This is amid the coronavirus pandemic and after the populist influence of Trump’s fake news politics around the world. With populist leaders propagating their own version of post-truths in India, Russia, Turkey, and Brazil. These leaders have incited a new wave of climate change deniers while political conflicts and environmental vulnerabilities worsen worldwide. 

At the time of the article, Trump had defunded environmental protection and pulled the USA from the Paris agreement - although, since then, Biden has proposed other plans on environmental justice, and the US has rejoined the Paris agreement -, Brexit had threatened to derail  environmental regulation - still remains an issue -, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro had opened vast tracts of Amozonian forest for permanent exploitation - still remains an issue. 

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.