Michael Livermore 0:10
Welcome to the Free Range Podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. This episode is sponsored by the Program on Law Communities and the Environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Kimberly Fields, a professor at UVA’s Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. Her work focuses on inequality, environmental policy, race, and environmental justice. And recently, she’s been examining these issues in the US at the state level. Kim, thanks for joining me today.
Kimberly Fields 0:38
Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Michael Livermore 0:42
So there’s been a lot of focus on environmental justice at the federal level recently, or a lot more focus anyway than there has been in the past. And we may end up talking a bit about that. But your recent research focuses on states and state environmental justice policy, the role that advocacy organizations play in the in shaping state policy, what’s your view to that forum, why are states an important zone for, for for policy in the environmental justice area?
Kimberly Fields 1:14
Yeah, this is interesting. I mean, so states, just in environmental policy, in general have been kind of delegated the role of implementation of some of the larger federal policies. So like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, it’s super fun, those kinds of federal policies, a lot of the decisions around how to implement the mandate, or rules in those larger pieces of federal legislation, have fallen to the states. And so this means that they have a lot of latitude and discretion for deciding how they’re going to achieve those goals and meet those requirements or mandates. And so there’s a lot of variation. And that variation, in some instances can can make a lot of sense, like, there might be a need to be more aggressive than like the the federal floor in some states, because of the legacy of the different types of pollution that exist in those areas. And so, you might see more robust kinds of efforts in states, but in other areas, there might not be the need to have that kind of aggressive implementation or strategies. But that, so on the one hand, it can be good. On the other hand, it can be problematic, because states have different resources, they have different kinds of political contexts. And environments, that mean, they are more vulnerable to influence or they buy like regulated industries, or they have a small population that could be politically, socially or economically marginalized and not have the kind of influence that on on decision makers that would allow their interest to get reflected in implementation strategies or efforts. And so you, we might see less robust or aggressive efforts in those areas, even though they might need to be more aggressive. So it’s really been an interesting kind of education for me to see how important states are in achieving not just environmental justice, but environmental quality. So that’s kind of what drew me to the state as a unit of analysis. Yeah,
Michael Livermore 4:17
and it’s fascinating in some ways, just how central states are to environmental law in the US and, and the huge amount of yeah, just as you said, discretion and authority they have in a lot of areas, you mentioned variation. And you know, that that’s interesting, that’s interesting to a social scientist, right? That’s that’s how you can get started and get some traction on on studying something. So, you know, what, what are the what are the kind of dimensions of variation that you see as important in the environmental justice space, both as like an input, you know, the kind of variation the characteristics of states that lead to different outcomes and and then presumably, Really, there’s multiple dimensions of outputs that are also, you know, kind of worth worth studying and worth recognizing.
Kimberly Fields 5:08
Yeah, so some of the inputs that are important, are like the level of grassroots activism. And I kind of measure that in terms of the number of environmental justice kind of focused organizations. That can be really important and play a significant role in shaping the development of state’s environmental justice policies, particularly if they are permitted to participate in the policymaking process. So that’s, that’s one input variable that’s been helpful for me to try to understand some of the variation that I was observing the the political context can matter to and some of the history of politics in a state in general, but particularly around environmental protection and natural resource conservation, as well as how it has handled issues around the racial dimensions of inequality and other arenas. So like, how does it how has it handled racial inequality in things like education or incarceration, that history is often useful in understanding the strategies and tactics that they use to address the racial dimensions of environmental inequality. So those have been two big, two big ones. Additionally, the the political and economic autonomy of the regulatory agencies, the environmental regulatory agencies that get tasked with developing environmental justice policies, that has been a variable that helps explain some variation to like the more resources that an organization has, the more likely they are to be able to do things like say, hire staff, people who are focused primarily or solely on environmental justice related issues, or missions. So those are some of the input variables that have been helpful and understanding variation. In terms of outputs, some of the variation I’m interested in, are the strategies and tools that states have developed to help achieve their environmental justice goals. So do they focus on prioritizing and targeting areas of environmental justice concern or populations of environmental justice concern? Or do they take an approach that is more universalistic? Like, we want to make sure that all our procedures and processes are open to everyone equally? Those are two really different strategies. And they produce different outcomes.
Michael Livermore 8:44
Yeah, this is all like, super, super, super interesting. And, you know, one question that that springs to mind and is based on some some of your earlier writing is this idea that environmental justice policies are, as you say, in in a paper, a blend between environmental policies and civil rights policies, and that, you know, as you said, the history of a state of political history of a state in dealing with inequality in other contexts, housing, policing, education, whatever is, is illustrative or illuminating. One question. I’m curious about your thoughts on our how much is, you know, if we think of environmental injustice, or environmental justice issues, environmental racism, that that kind of cluster of concerns, you know, kind of a manifestation of these, these broader forces about race and inequality, more generally, versus Is there something kind of special or unique or different about the about the environmental justice context that sets it apart? Apart from from housing or education other than obviously it deals with a distinct set of issues. But is there something about it that kind of conceptually distinguishes the environmental contexts from other domains where inequality and race intersect?
Kimberly Fields 10:16
Is it? Yeah, so I think about this in a couple of ways. On the one hand, it’s not very distinct in terms of the causes. So like some of the same undergirding systems and relationships and distributions of power, help explain why we see disparities and exposure to environmental risks. So those same kinds of factors that we see in other issues like incarceration, and education, or drought are some of the drivers for the racialized distinctions in exposure to environmental risks. So that’s on the one hand, but one of the reasons I focused on environmental justice policies was because I did see this kind of distinction that I thought was important with that with the environment that I didn’t see as much with at least the rhetoric around policy interventions with other kinds of inequalities, and that is that there seems to be this acceptance, that there isn’t a personal responsibility dimension to environmental inequality. So that kind of opens up some political space. In my opinion, that is foreclosed in, in some of the conversations you observe around how to address disparities in education, or disparities in incarceration rates, like there’s more space in those kinds of issues to blame the, the individuals, it’s not that that doesn’t happen in in some discussions around environmental racism, but it’s very different. In that, like they, you’ll see discourse around this, it’s like, Well, why don’t they move? Right? Right, but not like, they created this. Right, right. You can’t really blame the people living there.
Michael Livermore 12:38
It’s not their factory typically.
Kimberly Fields 12:41
And I thought that was, that was interesting, because it for me, it helped me really point out and clarify the kind of political policy decision making dimensions that it gets, it was a little murkier in some of the other issue domains, not because the blaming was legitimate, right, because it gave this kind of political cover that could be used in ways that made it difficult to build coalition and enough consensus and political consensus to get some kind of intervention. developed and implemented.
Michael Livermore 13:28
Yeah, that’s, that’s super interesting. I’ve never actually thought about that dimension of kind of maybe say, inequality discourse, where, you know, maybe on one side of the, let’s call it like, ability to attribute bad outcomes to individuals, or desire or willingness to do so anyway. And, you know, on one side of the extreme, we might say, policing and incarceration actually is, is one, where people will, obviously will blame people that are on the receiving end of those. And there’s a whole moral discourse around that and etc, etc. And then maybe on the other side of the spectrum is some space like environmental justice, where that same instinct, or kind of political, a kind of rhetorical device is less available or less attractive for whatever reason. It’s illuminating, because I think there’s other you know, there are other, these other issues that we could place on the spectrum, like education is probably less controversial, like, concern about educational inequality there was for whatever we think about its merits, the No Child Left Behind Bill was highly bipartisan, you know, Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush, you know, agreed on it. Again, putting aside whether it was a good idea the policies were good, there was some bipartisan notion that educational inequalities are bad And then it’s not kind of attributable because of kids obviously. And so it’s less obvious to attribute people will still blame parents, they’ll, they will blame, they’ll find somebody to blame but but it’s less obvious or less easy than, you know, maybe in other contexts where like, say inequality in terms of just socioeconomic status, or poverty or homelessness or some other kind of economic issue, people say, you know, folks should pull themselves up by their bootstraps or whatever else. So that that is. That is really, that is a really interesting dimension. And what do you do you think that it has that was born out? You said that was what drew you to the area due in an actual practice, as you’ve studied? This issue? Is that is that a distinction that you’ve continued to feel confident in?
Kimberly Fields 15:45
It is I don’t see it in the, you know, I look at a lot of meeting minutes and different kinds of transcripts, where you have decision makers kind of talking about what they that what they think needs to happen. And I was coding those transcripts for things like, you know, what was the causal narrative here? Where Where do Where are people placing responsibility? And I was not seeing a lot of discourse around. You know, well, it’s the people here contributing to it. So it does kind of hold up in that way.
Michael Livermore 16:29
Yeah, that’s really that’s really interesting. Another difference that, I think is, is interesting, I’d be curious your thoughts on as the advocacy context on environmental issues, you know, versus say, housing or education or policing, where you have these big, traditional environmental organizations, right, your Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, environmental NRDC, kind of whatever the the big, the big groups, well funded organizations, which has existed for a long time. And then, of course, you have the environmental justice movement, movement, and community based organizations kind of starting up, I don’t know if an alternative is the right word, but it kind of in this in a similar space, whereas in, say, housing, or, you know, criminal justice or other domains, there just isn’t that same dynamic where there’s not clearly a big traditional advocacy context, that then the inequality issues, issues around inequality and race come up, you know, in a sense, with it within that environment, right. Whereas in the in the environmental space, you have the big green groups, and then, you know, environmental juice justice groups kind of raise a critique about the advocacy that’s happening by the traditional groups and is, you know, insufficiently sensitive to issues of inequality and race and, you know, kind of the, there’s a whole conversation about that happens in the 90s. All the way up to today. So what I’m curious, your thoughts on that? Like, how does how does that dynamic where you have, you know, this just this different context of advocacy happening around environmental issues versus housing or crime or, or other issues, criminal justice,
Kimberly Fields 18:24
I think once that critique was, was made and really absorbed by mainstream environmental organizations, it became very useful in kind of like the coalition politics that you know, needed to happen in order to get this push further through the political or the policymaking process. So on the on their own environmental justice community organizations, were able to get the topic out there and put the issue on the national agenda, which was really, really important and compelling, you know, like Executive Order, 12898, etcetera. But it takes a whole lot to get past just being on the agenda, to push something all the way through the federal legislative process, as well as like the state and local level. the legislative process requires a lot of resources. You know, Beast, it’s sustaining it over time. And I think that the environmental, the mainstream environmental organizations, once they got on board, played a role in helping the issue, stay on the agenda longer and make more profit. Whereas through the legislative processes at both the federal and the state level, it’s still really, really hard. And, you know, at the federal level, I think every year since 92, maybe I think it’s 19922, there’s been an Environmental Justice Act proposed. So just to give some context to how difficult it is to, to get something, actually, through that entire process. You know, I often direct students to that, and I think about that too. But even just to keep it on Congress, people’s agenda requires constant lobbying, and the environment, the mainstream environmental organizations have played a role in that.
Michael Livermore 21:01
Yeah, that yeah, that, you know, it’s almost as they’re kind of like, the environmental justice organizations who, especially in the early days, and still to a very large extent, today, you know, our don’t have the kind of resources that we’re that we’re talking about with the mainstream groups, but if in as much as they can leverage the mainstream groups and hold their feet to the fire, on issues around inequality, and then and yeah, leverage them into into playing a more active role that frees up at least some part of a whole world of relationships and resources that can be really useful. Is that another? I guess, that leads to kind of a question, which is, you know, in thinking about kind of, I don’t know if successes is the right word, but the kind of differences between states with respect to their their environmental justice policies, is the existence and strength of a traditional traditional environmental organizations an important component, just think of California where there’s a lot of precedents of environmental groups, you know, the big amount with the cursor there, there’s, it’s a huge environmental movement. And I feel as though that in my with suggested groups have been relatively successful in a state like California compared to other places where there’s not as robust of a traditional environmental community.
Kimberly Fields 22:25
Yeah, I think in a, in a lot of ways, the presence of a robust environmental advocacy environment within states has been useful for the reasons we just talked about, they can be harnessed to help provide resources and other kinds of supports for environmental justice organizations and groups. So I do think it plays a role. But I think what I’ve learned is that there’s almost kind of like this special sauce that has to exist, right? You can have that robust context or advocacy environment. But if there is a really resistant political culture, or if you’re in an economic context, where the regulatory the regulated industries are playing an outsized role in something like employment, within a state that even that robust advocacy environment isn’t enough.
Michael Livermore 23:45
Yeah, that’s kind of the stars have to align. There’s there’s multiple, necessary causes that kind of have to come into play.
Kimberly Fields 23:51
Yeah, lots of conditions have to be aligned. And I think California is one of those rare places where that exists more often than not, this alignment.
Michael Livermore 24:05
Yeah, and the California example, and so I, long time ago, before I went to law school, I worked in New York state environmental politics for several years. And it’s another example where there is a strong environmental justice community and the any case my my perception has always been that they’ve been pretty successful at getting their issues on the agenda and winning, at least, you know, some of the time, which is often with progressive politics, all you can hope for. That’s pretty darn good if you win some of the time. But, but one other you raise coalitional politics and one issue that struck me with that, and I think it’s very, very interested in environmental politics these days, especially as we have this deep partisan polarization over environmental issues. And one of the features Here’s what I always thought was an interesting component of the interaction of environmental justice organizations with the mainstream environmental organizations is that, especially these days, but, but even you know, going, going back, there was a way in which these are the coalitional politics within the Democratic Party. And that, you know, these are both constituencies that are important to the Democratic politicians. And at some level, you know, people in the same coalition have to figure out how to get along with each other, they have to care about each other’s issues, they work together, they’re, they’re in a coalition together. And, you know, a place like California and a place like New York, you know, that are mostly dominated by by Democrats, or even successful Republicans need to be concerned about democratic constituencies. You know, that just creates a particular kind of dynamic, whereas, you know, I wonder in basically in, in different partisan contexts, where you don’t you don’t see that happening. And there’s just doesn’t need to be the same level of responsiveness. Basically, just because of those coalitional. Politics, were the groups that were talking about environmental justice, traditional environmental groups are kind of outside the dominant party coalition.
Kimberly Fields 26:21
Yeah, this is an interesting question. So are you asking if there’s, there’s more room for success? If the partisan composition within a state is skewed more towards the Democrats? Because then it’s just them coming to a consensus about how to move forward?
Michael Livermore 26:50
Yeah. And so that’s one, one version. So I’ve got I think, maybe two questions. So the one is that is, you know, just basically, how does partisan composition affect, you know, this, you know, the environmental justice outcomes that you’re studying? Then I guess the second question is maybe more about mechanism, or kind of the why of that, or what the consequence of it’s maybe not the sharpest question in the world. But basically, what I’m thinking about is, you know, you know, environmental justice organizations, civil rights organizations, environmental groups, teachers, unions, labor unions, you know, more generally, they’re all, you know, these are the groups that make up the Democratic Party and some general sets. And I just wonder if the fact that you’ve, you have groups in the same party coalition create space, for a kind of compromise and mentality, like, oh, let’s work together mentality. When, you know, you might not see that if if, you know, if we imagine, like an alternative world, where the mainstream environmental organizations were mostly, you know, part of the Republican constituency, right, or just Oregon, or just interest that find themselves in that Republican cold party coalition, that, you know, they’re just not inclined to hear the concerns about, you know, coming out of environmental justice organizations, in part just because they’re sitting in this other party coalition, and therefore, you don’t have to work with them.
Kimberly Fields 28:29
Yeah, that is, so that’s a good question. Um, what I have found around partisan composition is that there’s a kind of loose relationship between it when I when I’m looking at, like the robustness of the policies, or like the content, the substance of the policy. But it’s not a very good predictor of robustness. And it doesn’t tell you anything about what types of issues get put into those policies. So, it is true that in the places that have some of the most aggressive environmental justice policies, they are more, they tend to be more democratic, you know, they, they are adopted under Democratic administrations. But the better predictor is the concentration of minority populations. And, you know, we know that’s related to, particularly with African Americans with partisan identity. So you can have a democratic of majority democratics company Who’s a state that doesn’t produce a robust environmental justice policy? If it’s predominantly white? So, you know, partisan, that’s more the relationship that I’ve been seen. You know, and you know, it makes sense because environmental justice has this focus on the racial dimension. And so people who are categorized racially or fall into those categories of racial populations that have been historically marginalized, take up this issue. And so that’s kind of driving that part of it. The other part of your question about does it create space? Um, I don’t know that I can answer that. I haven’t looked at that in a way that makes me feel like I can answer it. But that is what I can say about the relationship between partisanship and policy outputs.
Michael Livermore 31:15
Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting, you know, just in maybe this is a the kind of multi causality and multiple conditions that you were mentioning earlier, because, you know, I’m thinking of, uh, you know, places like Mississippi, right, where they’re at. And these are states that have substantial populations that are not white. In Mississippi. I just just quickly Googled it, nearly 40% of the population is black or African American. And, you know, that’s a substantial percentage of folks, but they’re, like, out of power, because of the I mean, for many for many, many, many reasons. But, you know, the, the most obvious kind of surface reason is there outside of the governing party coalition. And I would, now this I just don’t know the answer to and you’ll have more insights on this. I my naive assumption would be that Mississippi is not a leader when it comes to having good environmental justice policies on the books. That actually might be wrong. But I would, I would be happy to hear that that was wrong. But but as soon if so, so, so maybe I just throw this to is like, what are we to make of a state like Mississippi, and the interaction of demographic composition and partisan composition? As kind of explanatory variables?
Kimberly Fields 32:42
Yeah, um, so one thing is there is this kind of regional distinction in terms of the robustness of environmental justice policies, and the Delta South is one of the places where we do see more environmental justice efforts that are more or relatively more robust. And so it the partisan kind of composition, there hasn’t met that environmental justice policies with some teeth, weren’t able to develop their some of this is just a result of how the environmental justice movement itself emerged. And so it, you know, the Warren County moment in 1982, and North Carolina is kind of what is considered to be like the start of the environmental justice movement in some ways in the United States. And as a result of that protest moment, there was a GAO report that was commissioned, and it looks specifically at the South , the Delta, the Delta South, and it focused attention on disparities in that region, in particular way before executive order 12898. So in some ways, they’ve been looking at environmental justice for a longer period of time, almost in some cases, by decade by a decade. And so that explains the kind of further along in development of some of these policies in the south, even though they have not been part of the parties that have been in power. So it is kind of complex in that way. I think there was a second part to what you asked me, but I got lost.
Michael Livermore 34:49
That’s, I mean, that is just very interesting. And I guess the question that just bounces back is like, what’s the what is the political story? There are so partially is it like you have these political leaders? For the most part, they’re on top of parties that are just highly, highly dominated, if not exclusively by the white population of the states. And so that’s just kind of the their political reality, what is the what is the kind of political case or political situation that leads them to Nevertheless, you know, reach out essentially to, you know, concern themselves with these environmental justice issues that are, you know, primarily focusing on on folks that are outside their party coalition. I mean, frankly, I think this is a very positive, potentially at least positive story of, you know, you know, one very optimistic version would be that political leaders are acting on behalf of all of the people of their state, and not just the people that are part of their political coalition. I normally don’t think of politicians as operating that way. But you know, maybe maybe I’m maybe I’m overly jaundiced in my, in my review of, of, you know, what, what goes on.
Kimberly Fields 36:08
So some of it is, again, a reflection of the history of the movement itself. So, leaders like Robert Bullard and Beverly right, if they have focused specifically on environmental inequality and injustice in the south, and so some of their, I don’t want to call it star power. But that’s kind of what I think of that’s, that’s how it comes to me right now. Explain some of this, like, they’re very visible. And they have made it a point to locate themselves and the focus of their work on the south. And so even when we look at like the development of scholarship in what we might call environmental justice studies, a lot of it focuses on the south is not until the like really late 90s and early 2000s, that we start to see research on, like case study level research on on states outside of the self. So a lot of this is just like a testament to the sustained agitation, that environmental justice communities in that region, and some of the key kind of figures and actors played, keeping, like the microscope and attention on that region. For and for a lot longer than EJ has been on the radar in some in other states in other parts of the country. So I think that’s a big part of the explanation I get. I do think it deserves some more digging know, the kind of deep, rich, historical descriptive analysis, I think would reveal other dimensions that explain this, but I think that is a big part of it.
Michael Livermore 38:20
Yeah, yeah. And in a way, it speaks to alternative pathways to power and social change beyond just the ballot box, in some ways, that even if you’re not going to be successful at dislodging the people from power, and even if you’re outside of the, you know, essentially the the constituencies of the dominant political parties, there are still ways that you can, you can persuade and influence and ultimately be successful. Yeah. So, actually, I feel like we could keep talking about it’s really interesting, because now my way I want to say is like, how, what is it? But, but maybe we could move on a little bit. And I mean, one, one of the pieces of your work that I think is really interesting is that often when people think of environmental justice, policy debates, they’re focused on individual, like, we don’t cause like, local fights, right? Like, there’s an incinerator that’s, you know, going to be sited in a particular community and like, there’s a there’s a struggle that we’ll often think of as being an environmental justice struggle to stop it, or there are communities that have there these days, we we call them fenceline communities is a term that’s that’s been introduced in game currency, right? But these are folks that live close to often multiple hazards. And then there’s, it’s very local, right? It’s very kind of site specific or community specific. And a lot of work has been has been done not enough of course, but you know, folks that Have have thought about those those local environmental justice fights as I think of your work seems to be oriented towards kind of more overarching policies about environmental justice, not whether some particular facility gets cited or shut down. But how does the state in general deal with environmental justice? So one, maybe initial questions, is that a fair characterization to the second question would be, what are some of the policy levers? Like, you know, we talked about variation between the states? Like, how do states actually defer at that at this high level of, you know, how environmental justice is kind of formalized into state decision making processes?
Kimberly Fields 40:46
Yeah. So, to your first question, um, the local kind of the local fights, I think, show up in the state approaches. So one, yeah, that the characterization is true. I’m looking at like, how do states in general approach addressing the racial dimensions of environmental inequality? So yeah, I am interested in that. i But I, in doing that kind of that level of analysis, what I find is that their general approaches are oftentimes reflective of the, the local fights, maybe they’re a conglomeration of them, or they reflect a really potent one. So I think about Pennsylvania, for example, that it a big part of its environmental justice approach is around permitting of facilities that produce hazardous waste. And that is a reflection of the the activism in Chester, Pennsylvania. And so those local fights do kind of help explain, you know, higher level state level approaches to environmental justice in general. The in terms of like, the different the variations and the general approaches, I’ve focused on a couple dimensions that seemed, that stood out to me. One was that I have found that some states will really focus almost narrowly on eliminating or reducing the racial dimensions of environmental inequality. They embrace this kind of conception of environmental justice as a remedy for environmental racism and the legacies of environmental racism, whether intentional or not. And so their approaches are about identifying these areas, and targeting resources to them that are designed to eliminate or reduce the, the degradation. And so that’s, that’s one kind of thing that I found that was kind of surprising to me. In contrast to that I’ve seen other states take or I call more race neutral approach, and instead of focusing on directly eliminating or remediating environmental degradation in areas of environmental justice, concern, they are, they focus more broadly on making sure that their procedures and practices are equally accessible to people and applied equally across the population. So those are two kind of distinctions.
Michael Livermore 44:18
Yeah, it’s so what what question what that is, and this has been a clarification question is, are these approaches actually in opposition to each other in some sense, like you could you have to go one route or the other? Or is it just kind of in a practical matter? What we see is, you know, some states go down one path, some states go down another path, although in theory, you could take both so maybe just to be sure being somewhat clear here is like it’s impossible to have affirmative action and race blind admission simultaneously at like a university. It’s just like Really they those are the opposites from each other. Whereas I’m just I’m not sure if these are opposites from each other, or they’re just like, yeah, like I said, kind of different paths, somewhat different paths that you often see taken. But like in theory they could be complements, or could operate at the same time.
Kimberly Fields 45:17
Yeah, I don’t see them as being incompatible with each other. And in fact, there are some states that have a race conscious focus, but also include these more race neutral kind of efforts. So no, they’re not incompatible with each other. And yeah, I do see it as these kind of different pathways that an examination of state environmental justice efforts revealed. Good. Okay, that’s, that’s interesting. Some states are really intentional about identifying areas of concern by some kind of measure of race. And there, they express their priorities and goals as eliminating any disparities that come up with that dimension to them. Whereas other states, you just don’t see the language just isn’t there. There’s no focus on the racial dimension is almost not even acknowledged is, you know, it’s kind of like, the environment is different in different places. And that shouldn’t be the case. And so everybody should be able to participate in decision making, and have access to information. And, you know, so it really prompted me to think well, why would they drop the racial dimension?
Michael Livermore 46:54
Yeah, I suppose I have to work hard to talk around the issue at some level. Yeah. I guess this is a is a directly follows on that is, so the, you know, what can think of this race neutral approaches are making some of which maybe could be okay, you know, like, say, is like improving your process in some general sense to make sure that it’s available to everybody, probably admirable, or at least potentially admirable? And yeah, as you were saying, it doesn’t have to be incompatible with targeted efforts to remedy prior injustice. But I guess one question is almost like this. The first thing doesn’t sound like environmental justice, almost. It sounds like something someone might say, if they wanted to, it almost just doesn’t seem responsive to the, to the concerns raised by the environmental justice community, I guess is, and I’m curious how they, it might just be my misreading that or is it? Like, I’m curious how it just, it’s like, if someone were to say, you know, there’s prior racism, and then just talk about something else? It sounds like what there was, that strikes me that that’s what’s going on to a certain extent. So I’m just wondering if, if I’m being overly unsympathetic or if, yeah, like, is the quote unquote, race neutral approach more? It’s, in some sense, responsive, but maybe not adequate?
Kimberly Fields 48:20
Yeah. So this is where it kind of the examination of the conversations that led up to the development of state’s environmental justice policies was really helpful for me. So in a couple of my case studies, I saw the particular moments where race as a consideration was, was dropped out. And they, you know, there were people on these advisory committees that said, we’re not going to be able to, to get politicians to do anything, if we frame it in this way, like as a racial issue. So we need to rethink how we’re defining environmental justice. And so you see this redefinition this kind of rewriting of what environmental justice means. And these committee in committee groups that often didn’t include members of the of the communities that were impacted. And so it’s not responsive because they weren’t there. And, again, this kind of goes back to like my thinking about a lot of the policymaking process that’s used to develop these efforts, is something we really need to pay attention to. Because if it’s a top down process, where like the governor is like, oh, we have to do something about environmental justice. How about you pulled together five or six people from the Department of Environmental Protection, and you guys come up with a plan for me. There’s a lot of other research by people like Joe Harrison. And I think her name is Joanna Harper, who look at the how much people in these environmental regulatory agencies actually even know about environmental justice, like some of them had never heard of it before others of them were like, outright hostile to the idea of it. And if that’s the you’ve got on this committee and who’s responsible for developing the plan, then it’s not surprising that what they will come up with wouldn’t look anything like what people in impacted communities would be wanting or asking for, or even defining environmental justice as so that some of you know, the explanation. On the other hand, there are, you know, cases that I looked at where the process was was very open from the beginning, like, we’re going to take a pulse of the community, and we want to see what issues they they want to see addressed, what solutions would satisfy them, what you know, what their demands are. And, and that looks, the outcome, the outputs from that process looks, you know, very different.
Michael Livermore 51:32
Yeah. It’s this that makes that makes perfect sense. And, you know, one question, as you were kind of talking through the, you know, how the conversation kind of morphs where some somebody and some processes, oh, well, we can’t frame this in explicitly racial terms. You know, it’s just not going to fly with our politicians or whatever. You might not have a view about this. But I’m curious, just, you know, presumably, that person, maybe we can even assume good faith that there were they were right, that wasn’t going to fly with with the relevant politicians, you know, because of, you know, we can imagine how there would be politicians like that. And what do we think of that move? Is it Does that just mean that the state’s not ready to really move forward with environmental justice? Is it better to just wait and continue the conversation in the terms that maybe it should be continued in? Or, you know, is it is it A, is it a plausible and maybe temporarily, okay, compromise to move away from, you know, an explicitly kind of racially oriented and remedy oriented approach? That just strikes me as a hard question at but maybe one that is it context? So I think there’s kind of two ways to think about this. This could either be like, maybe this is the kind of compromise that could be made, sometimes, under certain circumstances, or the view could be No, that’s like literally doing something else, that it’s not addressing the thing that we’re worried about. And so it’s, it’s not a compromise that would ever make sense to make?
Kimberly Fields 53:06
Yeah, I think that, under certain conditions, if you’ve got another type of alternative that directly address the concerns, and you think that is viable to get it through that process, then maybe it makes sense. In general, and this is tricky for me, because as a researcher like it’s sometimes I struggle with stepping outside of, and my own kind of thinking about politics is you have to worry, you have to think about or be concerned about the effects that it has on constituent groups. Would that be demobilizing? Right? If people have been active around environmental justice and ask for very specific things, and what they get is something that doesn’t look anything like what they’ve asked for, what kind of interpretive message is that going to send? And what will that do in terms of their participation? The research around this is in other contexts is kind of mixed. So sometimes it demobilizes, it sends the messages about their worth, and it, you know, kind of decreases their feelings of political efficacy. And other times it makes people really mad and can and can mobilize. So I think it’s a tough call to make. I think you have to be really clear and this is, in part a problem with where they decide to delegate this issue for development. Regulatory agencies are always super concerned about the political life of have an issue. And and that can be problematic with with something like environmental justice as an issue. So I kind of lost my train of thought with.
Michael Livermore 55:16
Yeah, no, I mean, I think that I mean I agree it seems like you mentioned that there’s like a range of issues that, you know, that are just practical political leaders face. Like, one of the hardest choices is when do you know when making a compromise, and everything’s always going to be a compromise, what kinds of compromises are going to be demobilizing, where versus what kinds of compromises are going to be mobilized, because you have to win sometimes. Also, right, if you just lose and lose and lose and lose forever, people will, they will lose interest as well. So it is a super, super tricky and very practical, pragmatic kind of judgment. One thought that you had maybe just to continue in the last thing that you were saying is, you know, it matters which kinds of institutions that we put these decisions in, when we’re constructing these policies, it strikes me that, you know, part of, you know, the, the second here might just be about, like, kind of risk aversion. And, and, and kind of the, how different people view the risk of what you might call, like, at least temporary failure, right. So a state employee who’s been charged by a political leader, with, you know, can build me a policy that I can live with, and, you know, we, I want to address this environmental justice issue, but then like, everyone knows that I don’t want to see something that sucks, has explicit, and you know, remedy, you know, race kind of component to it, like, so that sounds like an impossible task. But but the state, you know, official might be very risk averse to then delivering something to the, you know, the, the higher up to the higher up doesn’t want to see. Whereas if it’s in a, you know, say a more open process, and maybe we could just talk about what a more open process looks like, you know, the folks in the mental justice community might just be willing to take a temporary loss and say, Look, this process just failed. Like it didn’t come up with something useful, we would rather kind of just continue the fight, then sign off on, you know, a quote unquote, environmental justice policy that doesn’t actually address our issues.
Kimberly Fields 57:28
Yeah, I mean, I’m, I kind of remembered where I was going with the last part of that. And I think this kind of helps, or feeds into the, to the discussion, we were just having a question we’re just proposing. So on the one hand, there is some value and kind of forcing people, particularly elected officials to take a position on something, even if it’s not going, even if you know, they’re not going to produce exactly what you want, right? It’s if you have this long game, this kind of long political game, you might want to expose them, right, if this constituent base is important to them. And then you’ve gone through this process, you were explicit about your ask, and what developed was something that doesn’t look anything like what you asked for, or what you need, that can be really valuable information for people to use when making kind of their decisions about who to support. So there’s kind of that dimension to it. And then the other part about institutions like where these things live institutionally? The resources of different institutions, even if they’re the same type of institution, like a regulatory agency across in different states, if one has, you know, kind of tests, environmental justice to staff members on top of their other duties, you might get environmental justice efforts that are the easiest for them to do.
Michael Livermore 59:24
Yeah, yeah, that’s just like the kind of, in some ways this is the classic problem of policymaking, right, as if you’ve just under resource people producing not altogether satisfying, satisfying results. So maybe it might take just take a final question for you. And this takes maybe this a little bit outside of your research area, but I’m just gonna be curious what your thoughts are, or you’re not your research area, but, you know, specific research that you’ve done, you know, I kind of think of states as, you know, like many people that they’re like, they’re not laboratories, but they’re, as you said, there’s lots of variation. And they’re a place where different types of politics can get tried out, in addition to different policies. And, you know, I really, personally think these days, and I think a lot of people are just extremely frustrated with the extreme partisan polarization that we see on environmental issues. And, you know, which is just really a big roadblock to to, you know, additional progress and meaningful improvement on issues like climate change. And I’m wondering if you just have any thoughts just broadly on how environmental justice maps onto the partisan polarization dynamic is there in particular, what I be really hoping that you might have some insight on is whether there have been places where environmental justice issues have been a way around the partisan or they have helped to alleviate some of the partisanship that we see are there some way of environmental justice concerns or groups or institutions have short circuited some of the mechanisms that have led us to this really bad place on polarization at the national level?
Kimberly Fields 1:01:12
So what comes to mind, again, would be something I observed in Pennsylvania, where the environmental justice activism kind of started around what was going on in Chester, Pennsylvania with these incinerators. And, you know, they, the activists in Chester, were saying we’re targeted because we’re black, we’re targeted because we’re low income, and we’re bearing the burden of the not just the state, but the region’s trash. And that, and that’s unjust. And so they, you know, they sued the state of Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and had kind of a partial victory there. But what came out of it was the governor put together the council, an advisory council, and included those members, those activists on that council, they created these really robust recommendations that were focused on eliminating and reducing the racial dimension of environmental inequality, particularly around permitting and the siting of hazardous waste producing facilities. But they decided to kind of reach out more broadly, they they understood that this was kind of a moment that they could take advantage of, and do more to kind of protect the environment in general. And at that time, fracking was starting to become a really big thing and different, totally different part of the state, the central and northwest part of Pennsylvania, where Chester is kind of near Philadelphia and Monaco. And so they had these conversations about how do we incorporate both have our concerns, and in the in our recommendations, so that we develop, or at least help shape the development of whatever the state is going to do to address environmental justice. And so there was a lot of debate about whether they should just focus on race, if EJ should be defined just solely in terms of race or whether or not, it should be expanded to include income, and that would bring in the people living in the areas where fracking was starting to take root. And so they combined their kind of demographics to come up with a way of identifying areas of environmental justice concern, as have having a percentage, like I think at the time, it was 30%, minority and or 20%, low income. And so they were very different in terms of their political identities. And so out in the northwest and central part of Pennsylvania, mostly Republican, very conservative, and then the eastern part along the seaboard predominantly democratic, but they came together to kind of help develop an intervention that would protect both of the groups that were participating. In this process, so for me that was an instance where and environmental justice as the issue help transcend what we might normally see as being. contention.
Michael Livermore 1:05:20
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great, very concrete and very hopeful fulfill case. So I’m glad that that we talked about it. Well, this has been a really, really interesting conversation. I’ve learned a lot. So thanks so much, Kim, for joining me today.
Kimberly Fields 1:05:37
Yeah, thanks for the invitation.
Free Range Podcast 