Christopher Foreman, Chair of the University of Maryland's Social Policy Program and author of a book titled
The Promise and Peril of Environmental Justice, gave a lecture of the same name as part of the Levitt Center's 2003-2004 Series, "Environment, Public Policy and Social Responsibility." Foreman spoke about the movement known as "environmental justice," which seeks fair treatment and involvement for all groups of people in relation to negative environmental consequences. In other words, environmental justice seeks to ensure that disadvantaged or minority communities do not bear the brunt of environmental risk: a combination of civil rights and environmentalism. Foreman's lecture addressed both the positive and negative aspects of this movement.
Foreman became interested in environmental justice in 1993 when he was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and heard about the Clinton administration's executive order mandating that federal agencies develop environmental justice strategies. After reading more about the history of environmental justice, Foreman began attending the meetings of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), part of the Environmental Protection Agency. Government entities such as NEJAC, he said, are excellent at creating inclusion, in that they serve as a public forum for environmental justice concerns. However, it is exactly this open quality of these governmental institutions that allows them to become easily derailed by individual's grievances.
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Christopher Foreman (right)
and Professor of Government Peter Cannavo
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The environmental justice movement has been based largely on research studies done in the 80s and 90s showing injustice in the distribution of environmental risk. Foreman said, however, that many of these studies were poorly conducted, and even those that were well conducted don't give a great handle on to what extent racism is at work in the distribution of risk. In his research, Foreman also found that some things that are often cited as examples of environmental injustice, such as the "petrochemical corridor" in southern Louisiana, have never been formally studied. He attributes this sort of non-scientific approach to the subject to the fact that people often respond to health problems intuitively. Even scientific study may not be conclusive, since, as Foreman said, "epidemiology is a blunt instrument," and cannot definitively connect health problems with environmental injustice.
While Foreman agrees that environmental injustice does exist, he said that much of what the movement has done is questionable in its actual impact on quality of life issues for underprivileged people. The movement has had some achievements, however, including getting people to start thinking about environmental justice and stopping unfair siting of individual environmental risks. Thus, as the title of the lecture suggested, there is both promise and peril in environmental justice. Foreman concluded that the environmental justice movement needs to set its priorities, focusing on the biggest risks and on improving quality of life issues.
Story and pictures by Caroline O'Shea '07.
