A First Step Toward Environmental Justice
James S. Hoyte and Jim Gomes

What would you do if you learned that someone was planning to site an environmental health hazard in your neighborhood? Maybe it would be a transfer station where trash is stored before it goes to a landfill, or a factory with chemical emissions from its smokestacks.

In many cities and towns, such news would be a call to action. Citizens would talk to their neighbors, organize a community meeting, call their elected officials, hire a lawyer.

Other places don't ever have to worry about this problem. Residents would say, quite accurately, "No one would even think about putting something like that here in our town."

Many of Massachusetts' poorer communities and communities of color, however, have had environmental insults imposed upon them time and time again. Consider some of the findings of a study released earlier this year by Northeastern University Professor Daniel Faber. Lower-income communities in Massachusetts have five times as much toxic chemical air emissions as upper income communities. Municipalities with a high proportion of people of color face a cumulative exposure rate to hazardous facilities nearly nine times greater than the exposure rate in communities with few people of color.

Southeastern Massachusetts has suffered more environmental injustices than most areas of the state. New Bedford and Fall River rank among the twenty most environmentally overburdened communities in the state. According to Department of Environmental Protection statistics, those same two cities rank in the top ten in the state for use of cancer-causing chemicals. Southeastern Massachusetts also hosts two of the state's dirtiest power plants, at Brayton Point and Sandwich.

Yes, life is unfair. But this degree of unfairness in our state is simply unacceptable. At some point, when environmental and health threats have been repeatedly thrust upon the same people and communities, justice requires that we say, "Enough."

Senator Dianne Wilkerson has introduced a bill that, if enacted, will begin to address this pattern of unfairness. The Environmental Justice Designation Bill, SB 1145, would require the state to "develop policies regarding . . . areas of critical environmental justice concern to the commonwealth."

The bill is modeled after the state's existing Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) program, which affords a higher level of protection to pristine natural and wildlife habitat areas. The logic of Senator Wilkerson's bill is that if the state can provide special protection for these places, it can and should do no less when people's very health and the well-being of their neighborhoods are what needs protecting.

The characteristics that would qualify an area for the environmental justice designation, the process for making the designation, and the specific protections that would result will be left for state agencies to determine by regulation. We hope that places designated as Areas of Critical Environmental Justice Concern (ACEJCs) would be made off limits to especially noxious uses, such as toxic chemical plants or waste incinerators.

We would also urge that, as is the case under the current ACEC program, the designation process begin with a petition of ten citizens of a neighborhood or region to the Secretary of Environmental Affairs. Such a process would give the people with the greatest stake the impetus to organize and work together to protect their community from future harms.

Some spokesmen for business and real estate interests are taking aim at the bill, which is currently being considered by the legislature's Natural Resources Committee. The siting disparities found by Professor Faber are just the result of "the market," they say, as if that makes them acceptable. When markets result in chronic, systemic injustice, the rules of the marketplace must be superseded by the rule of fairness.

Critics have also argued that creating environmental justice areas will make it more difficult to rehabilitate urban "brownfields"-the abandoned hazardous waste sites that are a blight on so many neighborhoods. If "rehabilitate" means turning the site into a trash transfer station or a facility that emits harmful air pollution, already overburdened neighborhoods should be protected from such uses. On the other hand, ACEJCs could be expected to welcome clean industries or office or apartment buildings.

Our state should take several other actions in the months ahead-in addition to establishing ACEJCs-to reverse many decades of environmental unfairness. The state's "Brownfields" program, which provides money to clean up and redevelop waste sites, should target much more of its efforts on depressed urban areas rather than subsidizing suburban cleanups that would take place without public assistance. The Department of Environmental Protection should enforce the laws just as strenuously in poorer urban neighborhoods as it does in other parts of the state, and DEP and the Department of Public Health need to step up their work to assess the cumulative impacts of multiple sources of pollution. Massachusetts needs to invest more resources in understanding the environmental links to such conditions as asthma and lupus, which affect many people but strike much harder in the poorer areas of our cities.

But our legislators must act now to protect those of our neighbors who have already suffered the most from environmental harms. Enacting the Environmental Justice Bill is the critical first step.

James S. Hoyte is an Associate Vice President of Harvard University and a former Secretary of Environmental Affairs. Jim Gomes is President of the Environmental League of Massachusetts.