Environmental Justice Context for Sustainable Development

Introduction

For development without degradation, place matters. When development models exclude social and cultural constructs of a community, the results over time cannot generate sustainability, which requires alignment of ecosystems as well as human communities along with their economic activities. Only cultural constructs can ensure intergenerational commitments to the values and practices that respect the limits of local environments and natural resources, especially when compared to the abbreviated time frames on which business operates, such as quarterly reports, annual statements and audits, and the limited political time frames of most democratically elected leaders.

Problems of Exclusion

The role of culture and respect for culture is embedded in the fundamental philosophy defining sustainable development. Gro Harlem Brundtland's original definition of sustainable development frames a dimension of intergenerational care as an essential constituent of sustainable development. ¹ The functionality of the element of culture serves to internalize comprehensive guidance of daily life choices and activities, ² which are carried by generations across generations, without the need for writing or enforcement agencies. Cultural messages have the power to transcend changing political, economic, and legal systems offering potent support for change. ³

Many people now understand the relationship between ecosystem resources and business at an intuitive level. What the environmentalists and business people often overlook is the importance of the social constructs in which people live, work, recreate, and worship. The point about life as the context for economics is addressed by social equity and culture. Oregon's Environmental Justice Task Force defines environmental justice (EJ) as “equal protection from environmental and health hazards and meaningful public participation in decisions that affect the environment in which people live, work, learn, practice spirituality, and play. EJ communities include minority and low‐income communities, tribal communities, and other communities traditionally underrepresented in the public process. Underrepresented communities may include those with significant populations of youth, the elderly, or those with physical or mental disabilities.” ⁴

The Social Pillar paradigm ⁵ would logically require connecting development to social conditions that exist in the place of development, including local culture and current social and environmental conditions that are dynamic and change over time. Such local conditions may themselves challenge the values and assumptions of development funders whose world views may contradict local values and conditions. The consequences of exclusion of this aspect of sustainable development include dissonance between stated values and implementation, failed local policy, and lost investment or lost return on investment.

Exclusion continues to flaw the processes of conceptualizing and implementing development because it excludes culture—a primary tool of implementing change in a system. The consequences of exclusion are visibly written into the landscape of a place, regardless of human rationalizations about them, because the postindustrial challenges created by the development model of the colonial age affect all life.

Environmental Justice: How Racism Is Written into the Landscape

While the historical explanation has been that America's cities came to be racially divided through private choices and private institutions like banks and real estate agencies, Richard Rothstein meticulously traces a history of segregation by law policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments. ⁶ Environmental justice as a movement uses both empiricism and case study methodologies to establish the fact that contemporary economic and development practices have used race to continue these systematic practices of discrimination, ⁶ disproportionately targeting the lives and property of people of color. Land‐use regulation, public health regulation, and economic development models have embraced multiple decisions that involve sacrificing the health and well‐being of African Americans and other people of color, and to discount the value of their futures by subjecting these communities to disproportionate risks from waste and pollution. This subordination was not the result of homeownership rates, geography, or hydrology, or any other factor that might go into the consideration of where to locate use of toxic and hazardous materials. What the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice (UCC‐CRJ) study established empirically is that race was the driver for these decisions. Rare anecdotal evidence of this point emerged when a California consultant paid $500,000.00 to identify communities that would be receptive to the siting of toxic and hazardous wastes and explicitly recommended targeting poor, black, Hispanic, Appalachian, and Native American communities. ⁷

Regardless of the rationalizations offered, the consequences of these policies for people in these communities is now written on landscapes of the toxic drinking water in Flint, Michigan, now a well‐chronicled story of deliberate public policy poisoning of a predominantly African American community, with criminal prosecutions following those responsible; ⁸ and the poisoned lands of the Superfund sites, contaminated and left abandoned by previous owners. Under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, the federal government cleans up these sites and seeks reimbursement of its costs from the responsible parties. These cleanup projects are a significant factor in the development and redevelopment of these poisoned lands. And so, it is written into the health of the people who remain in these environments, afflicted with higher than normal rates of cancer, asthma, and other chronic diseases. ⁹ These health effects become intergenerational, lingering as epigenetic markers of toxic exposures^10,11 long after development decisions have changed. The effects on childhood health are especially alarming, ¹² and the incidence of childhood cancer is steadily increasing regardless of race.

Environmental Justice explores how land, air, and water in communities of color became toxic to human inhabitants, by design. Lands within these communities continue to host disproportionately more toxic and hazardous waste when compared to comparable communities of whites. ¹³ Lead pollution of land and water from older housing and other public construction continues to inflict tolls on children in these communities, raising fresh consternation when these neighborhoods are gentrified. When the public schools in Portland, Oregon, discovered alarmingly high levels of arsenic and cadmium (known carcinogens) in the air near their schools, neighbors were angered to learn that environmental laws did not protect them or their children. This episode prompted new, human health‐based standards in the state's environmental regulation, Cleaner Air Oregon, adopted in 2018. ¹⁴ Water contaminated by lead and other toxins continue to inflict terrible tolls, primarily on communities of color, like Flint, Michigan. ⁸ Air toxins such as particulate matter from diesel engines, as well as other toxins distributed by air, affect communities of color with public health consequences such as asthma, low birth‐weight syndromes, cancers, and premature deaths of aging populations. The pervasive nature of these multiple toxic assaults can only be fully appreciated by a cumulative measure of body loading,^15,16 a measure steadfastly resisted by most safety protocols in favor of single pathway risk assessments. ¹⁷

These cumulative risks were not the result of singular laws or policies, but the consequences of multiple and interlocking actions that isolated and devalued the lives and property of people of color, their children, and women's health. Housing policies that determined where people of color could live, including private and public banking and insurance policies, in turn affected zoning laws, construction of public infrastructure including schools, and the money spent on infrastructure. The costs of developing roads must include the cost of placing exhaust and particulate matter into neighborhoods divided by highways and road construction. The savings realized from placement of such highways were not invested in remediation to nature or neighborhoods.

Sustainable Development and Radical Inclusion as Praxis

Inclusion must move from theory to praxis in development projects. Radical inclusion requires community knowledge and inclusion of stakeholders at every stage of development, ¹⁵ from conceptualization, implementation, and accounting for results. ¹⁸ At each stage, important observations and innovations can emerge by the facilitated inclusion of community stakeholders reflecting the full range of lived experience in that place. ¹⁹ Including stakeholders is an experiment in reframing governmental regulations by the stakeholders affected by regulation with the goal of ‘cleaner, cheaper, smarter’ regulation by those who live with it. Some of these innovations are critical to local acceptance (for example, including the women who actually cook traditional foods in the beta‐testing of solar cookers), and some are critical to community self‐enforcement (for example, Grameen Banking and the requirements of accountability within intimately known small groups of neighbors for repayment of loans). ²⁰ Place‐based praxis illustrates local‐centered development that understands and respects the autonomy of its communities. A comprehensive approach incorporating locally‐centered development at each stage of development is an organically grown approach that commits to such inclusion as a matter of process.

Interpreting Meaning and Defining Success as an Inclusive Praxis for Sustainable Development

Expertise, represented by advanced educational degrees and professional practice, has come to dominate the interpretation of data. Yet, when human, lived experience is excluded from the process of interpretation of data, common sense, daily life understanding can be lost. When observable data is gathered, the determination of what it means must be an inclusive process that ensures community voices are heard. Attribution of meaning is both a scientific and human, lived experience.

Often, late in the process of development, projects are asked to define success in measurable terms. Defining outcomes for success and benchmarks along the way must also be a part of inclusive praxis. The people who must live with a decision are important stakeholders to include in determining what success looks like and how to measure it. When lived experience is excluded, important and strategic indicators can be marginalized or overlooked. The inclusion of community voices helps to lift up these indicators, enabling them to be counted and taken seriously in the process.

Conclusion: The Challenges of Intersectionality to Inclusive Sustainable Development

A commitment to inclusivity must expect to encounter resistance to previously excluded stakeholders when development projects intersect the lives of women and children, or sexual or reproductive identity and function. This resistance may be expressed openly or covertly, often with the added weight of religious beliefs and practices. Other areas of great sensitivity may include reverence for secret and sacred sites. Yet, exclusion of these uncomfortable areas can be injurious or even fatal to the stakeholders most affected by these concerns. These areas arise across many different cultures and places with practical and theoretical ramifications. Radical inclusion will require the next generation of sustainable development to address the challenges of cultural relativism, especially when doing so is contrary to cultural norms.