Environmental Justice and Community Engagement
By Albert B. Kelly
Look up “environmental justice” and you will find variations on the theme. According to federal officials, specifically the Office of Legacy Management, environmental justice is “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”
If you check Wikipedia, environmental justice is “a social movement to address the unfair exposure of poor and marginalized communities to harms associated with resource extraction, hazardous waste, and other land uses”.
Depending on who you ask and their particular brand of politics, “environmental justice” is either one of those fuzzy woke terms that makes half the country roll their eyes or it’s a genuine effort to help those communities that got stuck with every lousy “not-in-my-backyard-project” that wealthier communities could afford to duck. Whatever it is, I hope it means more funding than symbolism.
But regardless of where you come down on environmental justice, each state has its own price to pay and its own sins to atone for whether we’re talking about the neighborhoods that got stuck with a nasty landfill, urban cities dealing with bad air quality and chemicals that got buried underground by companies that left years ago, or a cement landscape that’s 20 degrees hotter than its suburban neighbors because everything is paved and there are only a handful of trees remaining.
As far as the Garden State and our Department of Environmental Protection, their position is that all New Jersey residents deserve protection from pollution and equal access to nature, parks, and a clean environment, regardless of their race, income, or English proficiency. That is why they are inviting all residents of Cumberland County to join them on September 15th at the Alms Center so that residents can share their thoughts and concerns.
The most obvious area of focus is funding and technical assistance to clean up contaminated sites. I say that because the urban communities, including in our county, tend to have the higher proportion of African-American, Hispanic, and other minority peoples. These same communities also have the contaminated leftovers from an era when industry was largely unregulated.
Overall, Cumberland County doesn’t always fit neatly into those categories more easily applied to those in the northern part of the state. For example, we don’t have polluted air of the type that you can sample at about Exit 12 on the New Jersey Turnpike, but we do have our share of sites that need assessment and clean-up if these sites are to be safe and productive in the future.
But in thinking about environmental justice, there is one topic that doesn’t often come to mind but I think it should and that is the topic of an aging water and sewer infrastructure that is so common in older cities. The most recent example being in Jackson, Mississippi. While the most recent headlines out of Jackson is something the rest of the country just became aware of, the mess down there appears to have been years in the making.
I suspect that a lot of urban areas, many of which are now minority-majority, are just one main break or pump failure away from disaster. These communities have ever-shrinking tax bases as the wealth has fled to the suburbs. That flight has meant years of patching things that should have been replaced but wasn’t because there’s only so much you can ask from those left behind.
The recent infrastructure bill and the ability to utilize American Recovery Plan (ARP) funds is a start in the right direction, but the problem is huge. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, some 6 billion gallons of treated water is lost each day around the country and I suspect that much of that loss is in older cities with frail and brittle pipes.
As for sewage, the pipes are equally brittle and frail as are the pumps that move the sewage on to the treatment plants. We take it all for granted but much of what has allowed us to achieve a certain basic and decent standard of living has been through improvements in public health courtesy of clean water uncontaminated by our own waste.
If Environmental Justice can mean steady and consistent funding to begin replacing the aging and fragile water and sewer infrastructure in our urban communities hallowed out by the wealth flight to the suburbs, then it will be enough.