When the System Fosters Racial Injustice

摘要

By the time the environmental justice movement began taking shape in the 1980s, communities of color had already been suffering from the disproportionate burdens of pollution for decades. Since then, evidence of racially discriminatory patterns in the distribution of environmental harms has only continued to mount.Researchers from the universities of Michigan and Montana empirically documented in a pair of 2015 studies the phenomenon of "sacrifice zones," finding that industrial facilities associated with high levels of pollution are disproportionately sited in low-income communities and communities of color. A 2019 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science found that while White people in the United States are disproportionately responsible for paniculate matter pollution - which is linked to heart disease, permanent lung damage, and premature death - Black people and Latinos endure significantly greater exposure to this pollution.But even as environmental justice has grown in prominence, early policy responses in its support have been lackluster, undermined by tepid commitment from political leaders, inadequate resources, and feeble accountability measures. Executive Order 12898, which was first issued in 1994, directs that "each federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission," but compliance has largely remained an afterthought. In 2018, a federal court held EPA in violation of Title Ⅵ of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for persistendy failing to address communities' environmental justice complaints for more than a decade. In 2019, the Government Accountability Office found a systematic failure by key federal agencies to fulfill their responsibilities under the directive. So it is unsurprising that among President Biden's first acts in office was an executive order that includes some promising updates and reforms to EO 12898. An early mark of his administration will be how well those reforms are implemented on the ground.