Vivian Pacheco

English

Research Papers in Economics

16   Summer 2008
Environmental Justice 
In 2006, parents living the Addams community in Southwest Fresno launched a campaign to protect the health of their 
children by drawing attention to the links between industrial pollution and the high rates of asthma in their community. A 
poor, predominately Latino and African American community, the Addams neighborhood has to contend not only with the 
poor air quality of the Central Valley as a whole, but also with the pollution from the nearby freeway, industrial plants, and 
military airport. Citing their concerns that additional industrial sites would lead to more pollution and increase the already 
high childhood asthma rate, Addams residents advocated for a moratorium against additional industrial development in the 
neighborhood. Although the moratorium ultimately didn’t pass, the campaign did help to establish resident leaders who 
have gone on to advocate for community necessities such as sidewalks, youth centers, parks, clinics, and supermarkets. 
The Addams community’s efforts to organize around environmental health concerns is reflective of a broader environmen-
tal justice movement.  Environmental justice demands that everyone is “entitled to equal protection and equal enforcement 
of our environmental, health, housing, land use, transportation, energy, and civil rights laws and regulations.”1
Although the principles underlying environmental justice have a much longer history, the impetus for the modern envi-
ronmental justice movement came in 1987, when the United Church of Christ’s (UCC) Commission for Racial Justice 
published Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. This landmark study highlighted the disproportionate environ-
mental burdens facing people of color and low-income communities, and found that race was the most important vari-
able predicting where hazardous waste facilities were located. Subsequent research has sought to measure the negative 
effects of environmental pollutants on human health. Although causal relationships between pollution and human health 
are difficult to prove, researchers have begun to document the extent to which communities of color and low-income 
people are at increased risk for illnesses such as asthma, cancer, diabetes, and birth defects as the result of exposure 
to environmental pollutants.2 The UCC report and subsequent community organization also spurred significant policy 
reform, and in 1994, President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898 which requires the “fair treatment and meaningful 
involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implemen-
tation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”3 
While recognition of the problems of environmental justice have grown over the last twenty years, low-income people 
and communities of color continue to bear the brunt of environmental pollution, whether due to the siting of hazardous 
waste facilities in their neighborhoods, the legacy of industrial development and its attendant brownfields and contami-
nated land, freeway noise and pollution, or lead exposure from paint in older housing stock. For example, a recent study 
found that California, Nevada, Washington and Arizona all had large racial disparities where hazardous waste sites were 
located, with the majority of waste facilities located in neighborhoods with people of color representing the majority 
population.4 The same study found that in states including Arizona and Nevada, poverty rates in neighborhoods with 
hazardous waste facilities were more than two times greater than in neighborhoods without hazardous waste facilities.
Overcoming the disproportionate burden of pollution and envi-
ronmental hazards in these communities will require the active 
engagement of the community development field, since de-
cisions regarding land use, housing, economic development, 
and  neighborhood  revitalization  can  all  influence  the  envi-
ronmental quality within a community. Increasingly, land use 
planners are encouraging more efficient land development, 
mixed-use and mixed-income developments, and the reuse 
of  brownfields  and  former  industrial  sites.  Comprehensive 
community  development  initiatives—which  often  incorporate 
considerations for open space, habitat preservation, and rec-
reation facilities, as well as for urban agriculture and commu-
nity food security—can further promote environmental justice. 
Perhaps most importantly, most planning processes require 
community outreach and public participation in land use de-
cisions to ensure in principle, if not always in practice, that 
low-income communities have a voice in the decisions affect-
ing their communities. As in the Addams neighborhood, where 
residents had the opportunity to become active participants 
in re-envisioning their neighborhood’s future, it is this kind of 
political empowerment that may have the most lasting impact 
on low-income communities.
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Figure 1.  Populations residing in areas within 1.8 
miles of hazardous waste treatment, storage and 
disposal facilities (“Host Sites”) in the U.S. are 
disproportionately composed of people of color.  12th 
District states California and Nevada are among the 
states where hazardous waste facilities are most 
concentrated in minority neighborhoods. 5
By Vivian PachecoCI Notebook
1   Alex Williams (2008). “That Buzz in Your Ear May Be Green Noise.”  
New York Times,  June 15, 2008.
It’s Getting Easier to be Green
1   Commission for Environmental Cooperation, http://www.cec.org/
greenbuilding/
2   National Geographic CO2 Calculator, http://www.thegreenguide.
com/tips_tools/ 
3   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, http://www.epa.gov
4   U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of 
Energy, www.energystar.gov
5   Joel Makower, Ron Pernick, and Clint Wilder (2008). “Clean Energy 
Trends 2008.” Clean Edge : http://www.cleanedge.com/reports/
reports-trends2008.php
6   Roger Bezdek (2007). “Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency: 
Economic Drivers for the 21st Century.”  Management Information 
Services, Inc. for the American Solar Energy Society. 
  Bryan Walsh (2008).  “What Is a Green-Collar Job, Exactly?” Time 
Magazine, May 26, 2008.
7   Sarah White & Jason Walsh (2008). “Greener Pathways: Jobs and 
Workforce Development in the Clean Energy Economy.” Center 
on Wisconsin Strategy, The Workforce Alliance, and The Apollo 
Alliance; Apollo Alliance and Green For All (2008). “Green collar 
Jobs in America’s Cities”; Robert Pollin & Jeannette Wicks-Lim 
(2008) “Job Opportunities For The Green Economy:  A State-By-
State Picture of Occupations That Gain From Green Investments. ” 
Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, 
Amherst.
8   City of Richmond, http://www.ci.richmond.ca.us/DocumentView.
asp?DID=3060
9   Thomas L. Friedman (2007). “The Green-Collar Solution.” New York 
Times, October 17, 2007.
Industrial Decline and the Opportunities and 
Challenges of Brownfields and Community 
Redevelopment
1   Greenberg M. and J. Hollander, Neighborhood Stigma Twenty 
Years Later: Revisiting Superfund Sites in Suburban New Jersey.  
Appraisal Journal. Spring 2006, 161-173.
2   Greenberg, M., D. Downton, and H. Mayer, “Are mothballed 
brownfields sites a major problem?”  Public Management, 85(5), 
2003, 12-17.  
3   Lowrie, K., M. Greenberg, and D. Knee, Turning brownfields into 
ballfields, New Jersey Municipalities, 79 (6), 2002, 608
4   Bell, R. Real Estate Damages. Chicago: Appraisal Institute, 1999. 
5   National Governors Association. (2000) “Where Do We Go from 
Here? New Mission for Brownfields: Attack Sprawl by Revitalizing 
Older Communities.” Washington, DC. 
6   U.S. Conference of Mayors. (2000) “Recycling America’s Land.” 
Washington, DC., and U.S. Conference of Mayors. (2003) “Recycling 
America’s Land, A National Report on Brownfields Redevelopment,” 
vol. IV. Washington, DC. Available at: http://www.usmayors.org.
7   Simons, R. (1998) Turning Brownfields into Greenbacks: Devel­
oping and Financing Environmentally Contaminated Real Estate. 
Washington, DC: Urban Land Institute. 
8   De Sousa, C. 2002. Measuring the public costs and benefits of 
brownfield versus greenfield development in the greater Toronto 
area, Environment and Planning B, 29(2), 2002, 251-280.  Meyer 
P., and H. VanLandingham. 2000. Reclamation and economic 
regeneration of brownfields. Louisville, KY: Report for EDA.  
Powers C, F. Hoffman, D. Brown, and C. Conner. 2000. Experiment: 
brownfields pilots catalyze revitalization.  New Brunswick, NJ: 
Institute for Responsible Management, Inc.  Van Horn C., K. Dixon, G. 
Lawler, and D. Segal. 1999. Turning brownfields into jobfields. New 
Brunswick, NJ: John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development.
Environmental Justice
1   Robert Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha, and Beverly Wright (2008). 
“Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty: Why Race Still Matters After All 
of These Years,” Environmental Law 38(2): 371-411.
2   Adrianna Quintero-Somaini, Mayra Quirindongo, et al. Hidden 
Danger: Environmental Health Threats in the Latino Community. 
National Resources Defense Council. October 2004. 
3   Since then, criticisms have emerged about the degree to which this 
Executive Order has been implemented, and in September 2006 
the Office of the Inspector General of the Environmental Protection 
Agency issues a report chastising the agency for failing to meet 
its mandate of implementing environmental justice reviews.  (U.S. 
Office of the Inspector General (2006). EPA Needs to Conduct 
Environmental Justice Reviews of Its Programs, Policies and 
Activities.)
4   Bullard et al. (2008). 
5  Ibid. 
Triple Bottom Line Investing
1   This article is based upon a larger report titled: Where Money Meets 
Mission: Creating a Unified Investment Strategy published in May 
2007 by the same authors.  The larger report is available at www.
blendedvalue.org.
2   United Nations Environmental Programme Finance Initiative.  
Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI).
3  The term “Unified Investment Strategy” was first presented in 
A Capital Idea: The Unified Investment Strategy and Total 
Foundation Asset Management and explored in related papers the 
reader may find at www.blendedvalue.org.
4   Friedman, M. 1970, “Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase 
Its Profits.” The New York Times Magazine.
5   ‘Market rate’ is defined as a return on investment that matches 
generally accepted principles of risk and return at any given time 
for an investment in the financial markets. This is representative of 
Conventional Wisdom, and is not embraced but duly noted by the 
authors.
6   2005 Report on Socially Responsible Investing Trends in the 
United States, Social Investment Forum, January 2006. The private 
equity figure comes from the RISE Report of 2003.
7   For an expanded discussion of the array of assets available to 
organizations, please see both The 21st Century Foundation: 
Building Upon the Past, Creating for the Future and An Essay 
in Two Parts: Total Foundation Asset Management—Exploring 
Elements of Engagement within Philanthropic Practice, both of 
which are available at www.blendedvalue.org. The reader may also 
find Blended Value Investing, which provides case examples of 
alternative investment approaches and was published by the World 
Economic Forum, of interest. That paper is also available at the 
Blended Value web site.
Endnotes
20 Summer 2008

Environmental justice

http://www.frbsf.org/publications/community/investments/0808/env_justice.pdf

Environmental justice

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