October 8, 2012

By Allie Goldstein

“To the advocates: keep us honest and hold our feet to the fire,” said Lisa F. Garcia, the U.S. Environmental Protections Agency’s senior advisor to the administrator for environmental justice, told a crowd of activists and academics in Ann Arbor Friday. The occasion of her keynote address was a conference to celebrate the life work of Bunyan Bryant, the co-founder of the Environmental Justice program at the School of Natural Resources and Environment and a beloved mentor to many alumni.

Rather than a traditional retirement party, Bryant wanted to end his career with a conference that also would chart the future of the movement and serve academics and activists alike.

“In my mind there is no doubt that Dr. Bryant has influenced the lives of thousands and thousands of students and people in many, many communities,” Garcia said. Her own position within the EPA is the direct result of the 1990 Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards, which Bryant co-organized and led to the formation of a “Michigan Coalition” that advised the EPA on environmental justice policy.

Conversations between the EPA and this coalition, which included Bryant and SNRE Professor Paul Mohai, eventually led to President Bill Clinton’s 1994 signing of an executive order that required all federal agencies to explicitly consider how their policies disproportionately affect the environment and health of minority and low-income communities. Garcia said that environmental justice has finally come to the forefront of the EPA’s attention under Administrator Lisa P. Jackson, appointed by President Obama.

“Environmental justice is the unfinished business of the EPA,” Garcia declared. “We’ve cleaned up air, water, contaminated sites. But we still see health disparities, environmentally burdened communities.”

To advance the environmental jutsice agenda within its daily operations, the EPA has developed “Plan EJ 2014.” The plan focuses on incorporating environmental justice considerations into lawmaking, particularly the industry-permitting process; enforcing environmental laws once facilities are built; supporting community-based actions, with the EPA continuing to go out and engage with communities; and reinvigorating the federal inter-agency working group on environmental justice.

Garcia orchestrated an engagement process within EPA to figure out what limitations and barriers her staff were experiencing in implementing environmental justice policies. She is now building the agency’s “toolbox” for environmental justice, which incorporates scientific tools—risk assessment, exposure rate data and cumulative impact studies, for example—with legal ones.

“What we’re talking about is improving communities, not changing communities,” Garcia said, responding to the phenomena of relocation as a “solution” for communities suffering health and blight impacts from industry. “The answer isn’t that the community needs to be changed or moved. We’re talking about listening to the residents of the community [to create] a healthy place to live, work and play.”

Garcia sees the future of the EPA’s environmental justice work as grounded in partnerships with other government agencies in order to diversify expertise and address the issues holistically as they are experienced by communities. She also deeply values the partnerships forged with environmental justice leaders across the country, many of whom were attending the conference.

“Every time I come to a meeting with these great environmental justice leaders, they really keep it fun,” Garcia said. “Even when you want to cry because of the work that you see ahead of us, you realize that they’re friends.”