A model for teaching environmental justice in a planning curriculum

This article describes a new course (Environmental Justice Movement) initiated at the College of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 1995. It was designed as a companion to another course, Environmental Planning. The course objectives are to prepare planning students to engage in the environmental policy debate by exposing them to its historical, moral, and technical dimensions, and by examining strategies and tactics of planning practice that would enable them to apply their analytic and research skills to appropriate roles of advocacy and mediation and community planing. It is argued that if planning educators are to prepare students to perform planning roles appropriately in the environmental justice struggle, then we have the responsibility to ensure that they have the opportunity to consider the issues deemed essential for the performance of those roles. The course seeks to connect the environmental justice movement with social movement theory (organizing for social justice), concepts of procedural justice, social justice and advocacy and equity planning. It integrates propositions and concepts about the politics of planning, land use policies and practices with political philosophy, populist beliefs, and what Perry (1995) calls “the street-level Rawlsian approach.” INTRODUCTION One of the responses to the increasing polarization of power and wealth and the rising intensity of social, ethnic, and gender conflicts in the United States is the re-emergence of social justice activism (Kling and Posner, 1990) and the revival of grass roots organizing, championing causes on behalf of populations-at-risk. Parallel with this trend has been the formation of a new social movement made up of social activists, environmentalists and civil rights advocates coalescing to find ways to translate the tactics learned during the civil rights, anti-war, and antinuclear movements into strategies to address environmental contamination in predominately African-American, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian, and poor white communities. The disproportionate siting of these environmental threats in disadvantaged communities has raised volatile race, class, and equity issues and created a specter of oppression and victimization. Protests have included language framed variously in the context of environmental equity, environmental racism, and environmental justice. In many respects the environmental justice movement is the 1990s version of the “explosion of protest and community activism” (Mollenkopf 1983) that accompanied the progrowth activities, i.e., urban renewal and downtown redevelopment schemes of the 1960s and early 1970s. Environmental justice (the preferred term of these authors) has to do with the rights of all people to benefit equitably from the environment and to be equally protected from the effects of toxic poisons and ecological degradation resulting from human exploitation of the environment. It also implies the right to good health, the right to have viable communities free from environmental risks and the right to social and psychological well-being. The environmental justice struggle has evolved into a legitimate social movement; social movements by their very nature focus upon organizing group action against maldistribution of rights, resources, and privileges and toward seeking redistribution of power and influence, as well as creating new institutional structures and belief systems. In other words, the general theme of social movements is organizing for social justice. The five implicit aims of this movement are: (1) to prevent the proliferation of such unwanted locations in minority and poor areas where residents are disenfranchised by the lack of economic power and political influence, (2) to force states and the federal government to regulate and manage more effectively and efficiently existing hazardous sites, (3) to force immediate cleanups of abandoned dump sites, (4) to coerce the EPA to perform competent and reliable risk assessments in communities exposed to toxic pollution and wastes, and (5) to cultivate a more sensitive climate of public opinion conducive to communicating reliable risk data, passing and enforcing laws and other remedies that will enable victims to receive equitable compensation for medical costs, along with punitive damages for illness and diseases resulting from environmental harm. The irony of this resurgence in advocacy for social justice is that, despite a history of involvement in environmental issues along with an understanding and expertise in local land use policy, advocacy planning, and procedural justice, planners have played a marginal role in the environmental justice movement. History reminds us that advocacy planning was in some respects a response to the urban crisis of the 1960s and gained much of its legitimacy from the failures of urban renewal and the growing popularity of citizen participation (Heskin 1986). Some critics have suggested that any apparent lapse may be another example of the profession’s declining interest in issues of poverty, and its retreat from advocacy on behalf of the poor and the minorities (Krumholz, 1990; Mier, 1994; Angotti, 1995; Thomas, 1995). Another explanation might be hidden in Feldman’s (1994) suggestion that the political context of planning practice often results in “... planners being called upon to perform new tasks for which they have little training or aptitude.” In other words, does the environmental justice movement present a challenge to planning graduates for which we in planning education have not prepared them? Planners can not ignore their professional responsibility to the issues that the environmental justice movement raises; their participation in zoning, land use, siting and permitting policies—all of which influence decisions about the location of environmental hazards, transportation routes for emergency evacuation and pollution reduction programs—place them in the vortex of the environmental justice struggle. Yet neither planning history nor planning education gives adequate attention to the relationship between racial injustice and current urban planning practices (Hall, 1989 cited in Thomas, 1994). Peterson (1985) frames this omission by asking: “ [Has] America’s peculiar problem, the question of race, affected land use decisions in major metropolitan areas?” The environmental justice movement presents the challenge to planners, particularly environmental planners, to face up to the racial and political conflicts generated by locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), rather than merely “focusing on apparently technocratic concerns, such as waste water treatment” (Feldman, 1994). Planning education must provide students with an understanding of the planner’s role in developing and implementing appropriate policy and professional responses. This paper describes how the College of Urban and Public Affairs at the University of New Orleans implemented a graduate level course in environmental justice during the spring semester of 1995 (It was taught for the second time in the Spring of 1996 with some revisions). The educational objectives are to prepare planning students to engage in the environmental policy debate by exposing them to its historical, moral, and technical dimensions, and by examining strategies and tactics of planning practice that would enable them to apply their analytic and research skills to appropriate roles of advocacy, negotiation and mediation and community planning. This course is undergirded by the pedagogical proposition that if planning educators are to prepare students to preform appropriately many of the planning roles, then we obviously have the responsibility to ensure that they have the opportunity to consider the issues deemed essential for the performance of those roles. This paper also examines how the course integrated content designed to illustrate why environmental justice is indeed a fundamental planning issue, and how it incorporated the Friedmann-Kuester (1995) notion that “planning is no longer seen as being exclusively concerned with advanced decision-making...[but rather that] more and more emphasis appears to be placed on diversity than on a consensual public or collective interest that, on most issues, seems impossible to define.” DEVELOPING THE SYLLABUS Integrating Themes The course The Environmental Justice Movement, was conceived as a companion to an existing course, Environmental Planning, which focuses on the impact of public and private planning, policies, and programs on the natural and man-made environments of urban regions. Its content includes environmental law, environmental impact statements, environmental politics, land use policy, air and water resources, energy policy, and solid wastes. The Environmental Justice Movement course uses the heuristic devise of connecting social movement theory (organizing for social justice) with concepts of justice, social justice, and environmental justice. It integrates propositions and concepts about the politics of planning, land use policies and practices with political philosophy, populist beliefs, and what Perry (1995) calls “the street-level Rawlsian approach.” Blumer (1939) characterized social movements as having two distinctive organizing phases: (a) general — “rather formless in organization and inarticulate in explanation,” rejecting the historic emergence of new values, and (b) specific — “[having] a well defined objective or goal...[and developing] a recognized and acceptable leadership and a definite membership characterized by a ‘we-consciousness’.” The course presumes that the emerging environmental justice movement is clearly in a “specific” social movement phase in which collective action has moved beyond the stage of merely protesting the proximity of residential areas to commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) or preventing LULUs. It also addresses the larger issue of who benefits from and who carries the major burden of negative consequences of economic and industrial land-use policies. This expansion of the concept of environmental justice has elevated the intellectual discourse to a level which raises the question “How safe is safe enough, and how fair is safe enough?”(Raynor and Cantor 1987). The essence of the Environmental Justice Movement is equity and fairness — concepts that philosophers have examined since the days of Plato’s Republic. Some writers suggest that the concept of justice was perhaps argued even before Plato by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians. (Kruegal, et al, 1995). Discussions of justice often begin with discussions of criminal or retributive justice-the question of how and why those who violate the law are to be punished. The more common and familiar questions, however, are those of distributive justicethe fair and equitable distribution of benefits and obligations to everyone in society. Both sets of questions come down to a single common query: What do we deserve? “Justice thus concerns the basic workings of society, that is, the organizations of its institutions so that goods are fairly distributed and obligations and duties are fairly assigned. It concerns the punishment of the guilty, but also the reward of the meritorious, fair pay is for good work, and appropriate power in determining how things are done.” (Bowie, et al, 1992, p. 728). Another way to think about the concept of justice is to think, contextually, about why some people are treated differently, particularly when differential treatment is predicated on group differences. Young (1990) contends that in these situations and as a result of which, some groups are privileged while others are oppressed, social justice requires that we explicitly acknowledge and attend to those groups’ differences in order to understand oppression. The terms “equity” and “fairness” focus attention on the underlying principle that fairness and equity are inherent in society’s efforts to protect the health of all citizens from the adverse effects of environmental agents. (Cable and Cable, 1995). Crowfoot, et al. (1983) suggested that “social justice” involves particular structural arrangements in the social order that can be described on three interrelated levels. At the societal level, it involves equal access to basic resources, and equal access to the levels of power guiding the allocation of resources. This presumes participatory structures in both economic and political institutions and policies. At the organizational level, it involves arrangements of work, play, and daily life that serve the needs of different groups of people, those with power and affluence, and those without. Moreover, it requires organizational goals, membership patterns, and social structures — particularly regarding decision making and rewards — that are responsive to groups from different social-economic strata, racial and sexual status, and so on. At the personal level, social justice involves the consciousness of one’s group and personal interests, and the freedom to act on them. This includes understanding the ways in which one’s personal and group interests relate to the common good of an organization, society or global system, and continuing individual action to affect the world in line with social justice objectives. Social justice at this level also includes a moral and active commitment to realizing one’s humanity in relationship to self and others. Connections between societal, organizational, and personal levels do not occur in the abstract; they occur as a result of actions various groups take to articulate their needs and achieve their goals. As people participate in the macroeconomic and political order, as they participate in informal organizations throughout society, and as they join with other individuals in pursuit of cherished ends, they mobilize information and influence to achieve social justice ends. Environmental justice proponents argue that most communities of color and poor communities have been unsuccessful in mobilizing collectively for environmental justice. Hird (1993) in his review of geographical distribution of Superfund sites found that the likely beneficiaries of Superfund expenditures are in counties that are on the average both wealthier and more highly educated than the rest, and have lower rates of poverty. Bullard (1992) reiterated this argument by drawing a “power”connection between communities at risk and those that have been successful in fending off a threat. He noted that the extent to which sites on the National Priorities List (NPL) are representative of the nation’s total hazardous waste sites is a reflection of power arrangements. Thus, communities that are more knowledgeable and resourceful are more likely to receive assistance through EPA Technical Assistance Grants thereby perpetuating the institutional inequalities that exist in the larger society. “Current institutional arrangements enhance the status quo-providing privileges for the affluent while disadvantaging the less affluent. Studies of distributive and disparate impact ultimately must deal with social inequality. Current institutional arrangements create and maintain inequality.” Young (1990) elucidated the discussion of social justice by suggesting that such discourse should begin with a paradigm of domination and oppression. Such a paradigm brings out issues of decision making, division of labor, and culture that bear on social justice, but are often ignored. Moreover, such a paradigm also illustrates the importance of social group differences in structuring social relations and oppression. The imperative of social justice for her is the elimination of institutionalized domination and oppression. Moreover, she contends, the concept of social justice must extend beyond the usual philosophical theories which merely emphasize the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens among society’s members. While distribution issues are crucial to a satisfactory conception of justice, Young suggests that it is a mistake to reduce social justice to distribution alone because that tends to focus thinking about social justice on the allocation of material goods such as things, resources, income, and wealth, or on distribution of social positions, especially jobs, rather than on social structures and institutional contexts that often help determine distributive patterns, on the one hand, and ignore issues of decision-making power and procedures, division of labor, and culture, on the other. Young suggested that since the 1960s, the definitions of oppression in the United States have shifted from injustices imposed by tyrannical power to the structural, systematic constraints on groups that are not necessarily the result of the intentions of a tyrant. They are, rather, constraints embedded in unquestioned norms, habits and symbols, and have become structuralunderlying institutional rules and the collective consequences of these rules. These forms of oppression may be classified as follows: C Exploitation: The Marxist notion that oppression occurs through a steady process of the transfer of the results of the labor of one social group to benefit another. C Marginalization: Marginals are people the system of labor cannot or will not use. This may be the most dangerous type of oppression. A whole category of people are expelled from useful participation in social life, and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination. C Powerlessness: Designates a position in the division of labor and the concomitant social position that allows persons little opportunity to develop and exercise skills. The powerless are those who lack authority or power, those over whom power is exercised without their exercising it. The powerless are situated so that they must take orders and rarely have the right to give them. C Violence: Members of some groups live with the knowledge that they must fear random, unprovoked attacks on their person or property, which have no motive but to damage, humiliate or destroy the person. What makes violence a category of oppression is less the particular acts themselves, than the social context surrounding them, which makes them possible and even acceptable. (pp. 48-62). Rawls’s Notions of Equality, Distribution and Liberty Modern day treatment of the subject of fairness often refers to the works of John Rawls. Crowfoot, et al.’s, ideas of social justice are rooted essentially in Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). However, Young rejects the Rawlsian distributive paradigm on several grounds, but principally because it “. . . may have a bias towards focusing on easily identifiable distributions, such as distributions of things, income, and jobs.” It is precisely this notion of social justice that makes the Rawlsian distributive paradigm relevant to a course on environmental justice. Beginning from the premise that justice is fairness helps to place in context the question: Who benefits and who bears the burden? He noted: “. . . Justice denies that loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many.”(pp 3-4). In other words, Rawls would temper the utilitarian notion of the “greater good” with justice, liberty, and equality. He argued that if a group of people were developing a social contract for a society and, “behind a veil of ignorance,” they had no knowledge of what social or economic positions they would hold in that society, they would choose to organize institutions that would maximize benefits to the least advantaged group since some of them might end up in that position. They would allow absolute inequalities to exist only if those inequalities maximized benefits to the least advantaged (p.83). Moreover, such inequalities would be constrained by the “principle of fair equality of opportunity” which would require access for all basic primary goods such as education, jobs, health care, and a minimum income. Framing environmental justice in the context of fairness and distributive justice makes a direct connection between the movement and planning. McConnell (1995) suggests that while Rawls did not refer to urban or related forms of planning, his principles are directly applicable to the illumination of the sorts of value-laden decisions that planners have to make. His ethical theory of justice, for example, can be translated into an ethical theory for planning in which the moral question “Who will gain and who will lose?” can be refined by asking “Would social justice result from a particular decision?” (p.33). Meir (1990) in a similar view summed up the connection by admonishing us: My own point of departure in everyday public policy debate ...has been to pose the question of who the least advantaged are in this issue and what would generally enhance their life circumstances.