A Darker Shade of Green

A political firestorm is brewing in California, one with potentially great consequences for the state. It pits grass-roots inner-city groups responsibly addressing environmental concerns while pursuing community needs like schools, housing and jobs against well-funded, privileged activists exploiting eco-issues for their own private ends. At stake is whether the state’s increasingly wealthy and influential elites can honestly work with people of lesser means.

None of this was conceivable as recently as six months ago, when the Democrats rang up smashing statewide victories. Buoyed by that political sea change, the Greenlining Institute, a multiethnic advocacy group representing nearly 40 community-based church, consumer, civil-rights and minority-business groups, and the nonprofit California Center for Land Recycling eagerly put forth a new approach for inner-city redevelopment.

Abandoned gas stations, dry cleaners and factories pockmark low-income neighborhoods, but few of the sites can be redeveloped because of uncertainties about cleanup standards and costs. Whenever potentially contaminated sites are considered for reuse, cleanup requirements--the amount of dirt removed, water treated or “hot spots” capped, for instance--almost completely depend on which activists or bureaucrats take an interest. It can take years to define environmental requirements for one location but as little as a phone call for another property with similar problems.

Following the example of other states, the coalition drafted a bill establishing clear remediation requirements for inner-city sites at levels much tougher than those typically imposed elsewhere. Under the legislation, a state panel of experts would be appointed to specify the cleanup standards for the most common types of contamination and desired uses. For example, if oil-polluted land were destined to become a paved parking lot, its cleanup would be less rigorous than if the site were to be used for a school or housing. Standards would apply everywhere, subject to such safeguards as preventing unauthorized land-use changes. Earlier this year, state Sen. Martha M. Escutia (D-Whittier) agreed to introduce the measure.

With antisprawl and community-empowerment sentiment at fever pitch, the Greenlining coalition expected widespread support for its proposals. How could anyone oppose environmentally sensitive development in urbanized, heavily minority and neglected neighborhoods?

To the coalition’s dismay, mainstream environmentalists do. From the outset, they have worked behind the scenes to thwart the legislation.

Among the first hints of trouble was state Sen. Byron D. Sher’s (D-Stanford) declaration that he would kill the bill. The chairman of the Environmental Quality Committee offered no explanation. When pressed for one, he said that groups with which he is associated, like the Sierra Club, implacably oppose the measure.

Sher was right. Greenlining and its allies, it turned out, had become the target of a venomous whispering campaign spearheaded by some of the state’s top environmental activists. The Greenlining coalition was said to be composed of the “wrong kind” of community groups, whose members were duped or co-opted by developers and business interests. A Sierra Club lobbyist dismissed Greenlining’s members, who have successfully battled bank, insurer and developer discrimination for more than a decade, as “Astroturf” radicals. Many of the coalition’s Anglo partners were pressured to abandon the cause or suffer career-damaging retribution.

The Greenlining proposals have exposed one of the most virulent and unpublicized class fault lines in U.S. environmental politics. By calling for stringent, yet clearly defined cleanup requirements, the bill directly challenges the current case-by-case, emotionally charged and technically unsound treatment of eco-risks.

Uncertainty over cleanup standards and what constitutes real eco-risks is the scourge of inner-city development, but it’s the lifeblood of mainstream environmentalists. Generally wealthy, foundation-supported and overwhelmingly white, they exploit vaguely defined but media-grabbing risks to intervene in public debate, override other interests and block decisions of which they disapprove.

This strategy can shut down development in NIMBY-infested rich communities. It also can block remediation and reuse of existing hazardous sites in poor, underprivileged neighborhoods. Unclear standards and ill-defined risks make investment in such already disfavored locations even more unlikely.

There are fundamental class-based differences in the way environmental concerns are, and should be, evaluated, says Christopher Foreman, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and author of a recent book on race and environmental policy. “Technical facts and real health issues,” he says, “don’t matter as much to California cliff dwellers who want to protect their views and congratulate themselves for fighting the good fight. Other, less privileged communities must balance ecological and health issues with more pressing concerns.”

Foreman is especially critical of the way eco-risk exaggeration squanders community energies. Well-heeled environmentalists, he contends, want to enlist ethnic communities in what he calls “racialized NIMBYism,” adding the power of antidiscrimination rhetoric to a political agenda only they control. In contrast, they resist any effort to scale their own preoccupations against those of the poor and underprivileged. “Priorities and trade-offs,” he notes, “are essential, but mainstream environmental advocates simply don’t want to go there.”

These realities became painfully evident to the Greenlining coalition as it pursued its legislative effort. Many professional environmental lobbyists, they discovered, live in Sacramento’s Curtis Park district, a pleasant southwestern suburb where local politicians want to locate a retail center on an old industrial site. These lobbyists adamantly oppose Greenlining’s bill because it defines cleanup standards in ways that restrict their ability to manipulate eco-themes, like toxic risks, to stop local political decisions they dislike.

In pursuit of such narrow objectives, mainstream environmentalists have even been willing to join forces with the hazardous-waste industry, a big Democratic Party contributor also working hard against the Greenlining bill. Waste operators fear the bill because it greatly increases fines for illegal toxic dumping and provides fiscal incentives for local officials to identify and prosecute offenders. They also want to increase the total volume of contaminated dirt that poor communities would be forced to move and pay to burn or bury at facilities they own in other poor areas.

All this adds up to powerful political incentives for doing nothing. “They’d rather let these [inner-city] sites sit than use a different approach to fix problems,” says a disappointed John Gamboa, Greenlining Institute’s executive director. “Controlling the decision-making process is apparently more important.”

The overt class conflict embodied in the Greenlining-environmentalist fight is increasingly shaping California politics. Some observers believe Greenlining’s bill amounts to a day of reckoning for mainstream environmentalists, who have mistrusted politics because they believe that special interests always prevail over community concerns. But now that authentic grass-roots activists have come forth with an initiative shaped by local needs, it’s the environmental groups that are opposing change with the same antidemocratic intensity they so often impute to their corporate, big-moneyed antagonists.

The bill is also shaping up as a key test for California’s Latino leaders, many of whom are reportedly shocked by the environmentalists’ behavior. It offers them a clear choice between acquiescing to the demands of the state’s entrenched liberal elite or equitably applying the same eco-risk standards to both wealthy and poor communities.

California’s Democrats recaptured the statehouse after 16 years with the promise of more responsive government. The Greenlining bill offers a chance to deliver on that vow, even as it measures the honesty and integrity of the state’s increasingly aging, intolerant activists. It’s possible to imagine that community groups like the Greenlining coalition can reinvigorate the environmentalists’ tired dogma and generate a truly effective brand of environmental justice. If they fail, however, the result will be neither ecologically sound nor equitable, but, sadly, just another environment for class conflict to take root.*