Administration Joins Fight for ‘Environmental Justice’ : Pollution: Minority communities are armed with new tools from capital. Use of Civil Rights Act encouraged.

Her neighborhood is not a very friendly place, especially if you like to breathe.

Even on brisk, breezy days, the fumes from more than a dozen major factories ringing Florence Robinson’s middle-class subdivision burn the sinuses and tickle the throat and sometime sicken the stomach. On still, sultry days--and there are many of those--the fumes darken the air and cause respiratory problems for Robinson and many others who live nearby.

Like most of her neighbors in this stretch of America called “Cancer Alley,” Florence Robinson is African American. A biology professor at Southern University, she sees a connection between the color of her skin and the degraded state of the air she breathes.

“We couldn’t even vote when the planning for most of this was taking place,” said Robinson as she drove past the fuming industrial hulks that line Baton Rouge’s curiously named Scenic Highway. “Those decisions were made when we were disenfranchised. And we were deliberately denied the opportunity to voice our opinions. That’s environmental racism.”

Now, Robinson and minority communities throughout the nation are fighting back. And they have found an ally in the Clinton Administration, which has embraced the issue officials call “environmental justice.”

In October, the Administration quietly handed minority communities a potentially powerful new tool to fight the introduction of hazardous materials sites in their neighborhoods. Breaking new legal ground, the Administration agreed to investigate two civil rights complaints from largely minority communities in Louisiana and Mississippi, which charged that the proposed siting of new plants in their midst was racially biased.

The decision marks the first time that the federal government has encouraged the use of the 1964 Civil Rights Act in community environmental battles, although the nation’s courts traditionally have been wary of such efforts. Administration officials said that the move is a measure of their commitment to rectifying environmental injustices.

The White House is also preparing an executive order, expected to be signed by President Clinton next month, that would make the issue of environmental justice a factor in all federal decisions. The Environmental Protection Agency, where “environmental equity” initiatives simmered at a low level during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, has seized upon the issue with a combination of religious zeal and bureaucratic attention to detail.

“It’s clear that low-income and minority communities have been asked to bear a disproportionate burden of this country’s industrial lifestyle,” EPA Administrator Carol Browner said in an interview. “They’re angry and rightfully so. To solve this, we have got to incorporate environmental justice concerns into everything we do.”

Pressed by Browner, who invokes the environmental justice issue on virtually all of her nationwide stops, the EPA is preparing initiatives that would attack the issue by refining its rhetoric, its enforcement mechanisms and its technical regulations.

The EPA is expected to review its regulations so that they better protect minorities from exposure to potentially harmful substances such as cancer-causing PCBs found in fish. Current EPA standards typically use white men as the models for studies that establish a population’s average exposure to such hazards. The agency now wants to take account of how much fish is consumed by minority populations, including poor blacks living in the rural South.

The Administration’s fervor has heartened minority leaders such as Benjamin Chavis, head of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, who first chronicled the issue in a 1987 study titled “Toxic Wastes and Race.”

That nationwide survey of census and federal environmental data established for the first time that communities with large minority populations--even relatively prosperous ones--were far more likely to have hazardous waste facilities and other pollution-producing industries in their midst than were communities where minorities were not overrepresented.

A more recent investigation published by the National Law Journal in 1992 concluded that polluters based in minority areas were fined less stiffly than those in communities with the greatest white populations. It also found that clean-ups of toxic waste sites took longer and were less thorough for dumps in minority areas than in heavily white communities.

Some of the nation’s traditional environmental groups, whose overwhelmingly white leaders and membership have been seen as distant from the concerns of poor and urban minorities, are starting to take notice. The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, in particular, have begun to address the problem. But for most other groups, the inclusion of minorities and their concerns has been a fitful process.

The Clinton Administration, by comparison, is making a determined effort. In a speech last week, Vice President Al Gore made clear that the Administration saw a clear pattern of race discrimination in the distribution of American environmental hazards ranging from air and water pollution to lead paint to Superfund clean-up sites.

“Those who are less able to defend themselves, those who have less economic and political power within the larger community are those most often taken advantage of and victimized with a disproportionate quantity of hazardous waste and pollution and the harmful and unwanted byproducts of production,” Gore told African American church leaders in Washington. “It is time for this nation to respond to this crisis . . . and we are beginning to respond.”

The Administration’s newfound concern is likely to make its earliest and most dramatic impact in legislative efforts to reform the clean-up of Superfund sites, many of which are in the heart of urban neighborhoods with large minority populations. At a Superfund site in Cleveland last month, Browner told city leaders that the Administration wanted to open the process by which abandoned toxic waste sites are identified and cleaned, allowing communities to help shape the course of the clean-ups.

Drawing from a recurrent Clinton Administration theme, Browner added that future Superfund clean-ups should aim to return contaminated sites to productive uses and train local community members in environmental clean-up techniques, putting them to work in their neighborhoods. Administration officials are promising that minority communities near Superfund sites in places such as Cleveland, Chicago and Detroit soon will begin to see the employment benefits of the program’s $1.5-billion pool of federal funding.

Those principles are also getting a test in Washington, where lead paint in crumbling inner-city buildings has become a hot environmental justice issue.

Lead poisoning from pipes, paints and soil affects 44% of urban black children in the nation. It can cause brain damage and nervous system disorders. In a predominantly black Washington neighborhood, the EPA--working with the Housing and Urban Development Department--is funding a pilot program in which unemployed residents have been trained in lead abatement.

“You’re talking about giving people access to the decision-making process about what happens in their communities and neighborhoods, bringing them in on the front end, giving them significant information,” said Browner.

Clinton Administration officials contend that they are hobbled in dealing with one of the other central complaints of environmental justice activists--the concentration of dangerous industries in and around neighborhoods of color.

In communities such as Baton Rouge, EPA officials said, they have scant legal right to intervene because individual plants operate overwhelmingly within federal standards for pollution emissions--even though collectively, the plants can cause serious pollution problems. Moreover, granting of industrial sites is largely the responsibility of states and localities.

Several miles to the south of Baton Rouge, the tiny towns of Carville and St. Gabriel are charging environmental racism in the proposed siting of a new hazardous waste facility in their midst. Carville and St. Gabriel, low-income communities founded by freed slaves and still more than three-quarters black, sit in the shadows of 10 major chemical facilities, most of which belch fumes and handle hazardous materials every day.

The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, which must grant the new facility a license to operate there, has indicated that it favors the idea. When the state office called a public hearing at which hundreds of citizens passionately opposed the plant, the official running the meeting sought the help of state troopers to shut it down.

“The personnel of the state of Louisiana are disproportionately white men and they’re operating like a giant Ku Klux Klan,” said Pat Bryant, who heads the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization. “We had qualified people to put into Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality, but they put the white men in charge. And white men consistently make the decision to put the poisons on us. The environment is just a new lynch-post for them.”

EPA regulations being drafted would press state agencies to consider the environmental impact of high concentrations of industries or “multiple contaminant loading”--in deciding whether to grant operating licenses to companies seeking to locate plants in minority communities.

But Clinton Administration officials conceded that their most effective course may be coaxing states and industries to cooperate voluntarily. The EPA in the past has collected no data that would allow federal or state governments to recognize when the concentration of potential sources of pollution in a given community has reached unfair and potentially dangerous levels. Officials said the agency is seeking such data.

“Frequently it is enough to say, ‘Hey, this is going on,’ and try to encourage voluntary efforts that will address the problem,” said one Clinton environmental adviser. “It may well be that--by sensitizing companies to the issue of multiple-contaminant loading and letting them know that the government takes this seriously and wants it addressed--we might be able to accomplish this voluntarily.”

The Administration’s willingness to broker voluntary measures with industry has not pleased traditional environmental groups and it is not clear that the increasingly active environmental justice community will be satisfied with a policy of exhortation and rhetoric. Bryant, of the Gulf Coast Tenants Organization, is wary, saying that new laws as well as new attention will be necessary to reverse decades of environmental racism.

“We’ve had far more contact at a policy level with the EPA than we had under the last two Administrations,” she said. “But the fruit of that is not quite clear. We see the possibilities of some changes but we’re not quite sure what that means.”