Federal Environmental Citizen Provisions: Obstacles and Incentives on the Road to Environmental Justice

This article attempts to examine the special problems that community-based groups in low income and minority communities might encounter in prosecuting citizen suits under highly technical environmental statutes. To set the context for this inquiry, part II of this article describes the environmental justice movement and investigates the charge that communities of color are disproportionately and unjustly burdened with environmental hazards. Part II also explores the differences in perspective that underlie much of the conflict among environmental justice activists, mainstream environmental organizations, and EPA. Part II concludes with a look at social forces that have contributed to environmental inequities and that might influence environmental enforcement efforts. Part III examines the current scheme of private enforcement of selected, major federal environmental laws through citizen lawsuitprovisions. Existing citizen suit provisions contain limitations that create incentives for private citizens to prosecute certain types of actions and disincentives to prosecute other actions. Part III addresses the possibility that these incentives and disincentives result in an unequal playing field for enforcement by low income communities and communities of color, which in turn exacerbates the disparity in environmental protection of these communities. Common types of environmental citizen suits are examined to determine whether they have the potential to address environmental problems prevalent in low income and minority communities, and, if so, whether community-based groups might be at a disadvantage in prosecuting such lawsuits because of underfunding. In conclusion, part IV suggests amendments to environmental laws that might more directly address disparity in environmental protection. It also suggests alternative interpretations of federal citizen suit provisions that might facilitate the use of private enforcement to promote environmental justice

American Bar Association Section of Environment, Energy, and Resources Symposium: Selected Addresses [comments]

Opening remarks for Environmental Justice conference that reviews the growth and efforts made for environmental justice

Environmental Law, Civil Rights and Sustainability: Three Frameworks for Environmental Justice

This article focuses on the domestic context, where the issues have more concretely crystallized around viewing environmental justice issues from a civil rights framework, and also from a competing environmental law framework. The article will begin with a discussion of the limitations of each of these frameworks, and will then explore the current disconnect between these two models, ending with an exploration of how the principles of sustainability fit into the picture. As to the latter point, sustainability is a double-edged sword. It might be used to maintain the inequity of the status quo; and, particularly in light of climate change, sustainability might be used to unintentionally create a new kind of inequity. On the more positive side, a framework oriented towards sustainability, if coupled with sensitivity towards environmental justice concerns, might help bridge the chasm in the current discourse about environmental justice, and provide the space, in a manner of speaking, where more common ground can be meaningfully explored

El Dia de los Muertos, the Death and Rebirth of the Environment Movement

In 2004, in response to an article titled Death of Environmentalism, many in the environmental community engaged in a debate about whether the environmental movement was capable of adequately inspiring the public to effectively respond to climate change. This Article examines the strand of this debate that centered upon responses from environmental justice actors to the larger environmental community. Specifically, the ensuing conversations raised questions about who, precisely, is the environmental community, what is its historical legacy, how should the environment be conceptualized to promote more effective climate policy, the role of technocratic solutions, and the need for transformative coalition building. This Article argues that there is much to draw upon from the experience of the environmental justice community in the project of building a more inclusive and coherent response to climate change. The Article concludes with the need to focus upon methods for building stable coalitions of diverse constituencies, a focus that requires an examination of privilege, diversity, interdependency, and distributional concerns

LNG Facility Siting and Environmental (In)Justice: Is it Time for a National Siting Scheme?

This Article examines the distributional and other environmental justice issues arising from the current initiative to rapidly site multiple LNG import facilities in order to increase the supply of natural gas into the continental United States. This Article further examines the necessity of creating a national siting scheme to avoid exacerbating existing racial disparities in risk-producing land use practices

EPA at Thirty: Fairness in Environmental Protection

This Article looks at how EPA is managing the fairness issue in a discrete but highly charged context: permit issuances that affect heavily impacted communities. This Article first provides a discussion of how fairness-oriented reform might evolve within the permit process. This section also examines permit issuances that were appealed to the U.S. Environmental Appeals Board (EAB) on environmental justice grounds. Proceeding one step beyond environmental law, the Article looks at how EPA is responding to claims of disparate impact under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. However, rather than focus on the intricacies of legal doctrine under Title VI law, this Article instead examines the analytical framework that the Agency devised to investigate disparate impact claims. This Article briefly examines brownfield initiatives, the Tier 2 refinery proposal, which is an aspect of implementing the Clean Air Act (CAA) mobile source provisions that necessitate new air permits at refineries, and White Paper Number 3, a recently proposed guidance that pertains to efforts to reform new source permitting under the CAA.13. This Article examines the Agency\u27s response to this potential conflict and, ultimately, how its guidance for investigating Title VI claims reveals in part the resolution of this conflict. The Article then concludes with exploratory suggestions for alternative approaches to fairness-oriented reform in permitting

The Environmental Justice Misfit: Public Participation and the Paradigm Paradox

This Article argues that current administrative processes fail to effectively incorporate an important form of public participation in decision-making -- the participation by communities bearing the greatest environmental risks. This Article advocates an environmental justice style public participation model as a more promising approach because it calls for a recasting of the role of community participation in environmental decision-making -- a recasting which transcends traditional, modern, and proposed decision-making paradigms.Part II of this Article provides a brief history of the environmental justice movement. Part III addresses the role of the public under three models of administrative policy and decision-making: the traditional expertise-oriented model, the modern pluralistic model, and the recently proposed civic republican model. In particular, Part III examines the foundational beliefs and regulatory ideals that dominate each model. Part IV explores environmental justice advocacy under each model and concludes that such advocacy defies the structure of all models, rendering the environmental justice position a misfit within the. current system. Part IV addresses the misfit status and advances an alternative approach that might prove more successful in integrating environmental justice into environmental regulation. Part V contemplates this alternative approach and the limitations of traditional approaches in the context of three conventional public participation avenues in agency proceedings: advisory groups, notice and comment, and informal participation. Last, the Article suggests that taking the environmental justice challenge seriously and confronting the paradigm paradox could mark a fundamental shift in environmental regulation

Environmental Justice

This white paper describes briefly the remarkable journey of community-based environmental justice advocates over the last 15 years and their impact on environmental regulation. It will also describe some of the empirical evidence of disparities and the regulatory dynamics that make these inequities an intractable problem, despite the collective efforts of grassroots leaders, environmental justice organizations, public interest law firms, and governmental officials. The paper then focuses on one important set of issues that must be tackled in order to achieve environmental justice: those involving injustice in risk regulation. We strive in this white paper, as allies in this collective undertaking, to analyze and discuss some of the troubling regulatory processes and methodologies that bedevil attempts to reduce risk and eliminate disparities. We close with seven recommendations for agencies

Environmental Justice: Law, Policy & Regulation

Environmental Justice: Law, Policy, & Regulation explores theory and practice in this dynamic subject, which fuses environmental law and civil rights enforcement. From early concerns over toxic waste in minority communities, environmental justice expanded to consider the range of environmental threats facing poor, immigrant, and indigenous communities; women, children, and seniors; and other vulnerable populations. This third edition provides extensively updated materials to address environmental justice concerns today, including oil drilling in the Arctic, the Dakota Access Pipeline, drinking water contamination in Flint, and the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Featuring new chapters addressing disaster justice and food justice, this new edition also expands coverage of environmental enforcement, contaminated sites, climate justice, and environmental justice in Indian country, all with an eye towards identifying modern challenges and available tools for the continuing pursuit of environmental justice.https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/law_facbookdisplay/1202/thumbnail.jp