2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

Negotiating Absences of Data and Publics: Implications for Translating Environmental Justice into Superfund Policy

Jennifer Liss Ohayon

The last two decades have seen a growth in federal initiatives to integrate environmental justice (EJ) principles into agency programs and practices. Employing a case study of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and drawing from semi-structured interviews and analysis of environmental assessment documents, health reports, and meeting transcripts, I discuss how Superfund policy conceptualizes and translates EJ concerns into cleanup programs. From 1941-2003, the U.S. military used the small, populated island of Vieques, Puerto Rico for training purposes, including intensive bombing from land, sea, and air. I argue that the Vieques case study demonstrates that the current Superfund policy approach falls short of addressing grassroots environmental justice concerns by equating EJ with undertaking a remedial program of hazardous waste removal and containment rather than also tackling the residual health effects of past and persistent exposures to military waste and weaponry testing. Moreover, controversy over the responsibility of federal agencies for addressing elevated rates of illnesses in Vieques is compounded by the impossibility of reconstructing past exposures due to limited data on military activities and environmental conditions. This paper expands on the implications for environmental justice in Superfund policymaking given how regulatory science addresses 1) Insufficient knowledge on past and present health exposures 2) The limits in modeling the risk of long-term, cumulative, and synergistic exposures to contaminants 3) How to account for illnesses in small and mobile populations.

Trying to Solve the Environmental Justice Problem: Insight from Agent-Based Modeling

Prof. Heather E Campbell, PhDSince the 1987 United Church of Christ report on Environmental Justice (EJ), significant empirical work has supported the concern that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by environmental bads, including new ones, even when controlling for other factors such as income. Given that several meta-analyses show that evidence preponderantly confirms this finding, we argue it is important to turn from the question of whether race-and-ethnicity-based environmental injustice exists to questions of how society may solve the EJ problem.
We take the novel methodological approach of using agent-based modeling (ABM) to simulate environmentally unjust outcomes and then test solutions. ABM is a method for simulating complex phenomena on the computer; it is akin to the game SimCity for researchers. Using ABM, we have analyzed several competing causes for the EJ problem (Authors 2012; Authors 2014). In the proposed paper presentation we will present the results of two different possible policy solutions to the EJ problem: zoning and cleanup. Our findings indicate that zoning may be of value, but is difficult to design correctly and may take a long time before benefits are obtained. On the other hand, cleanup of polluted sites appears to be a win-win policy since we find it improves overall environmental quality for both the minority and the majority while also reducing the environmental quality gap. Even better, this policy is robust to different decision rules. We model three routinely proposed decision rules: (1) focusing cleanup on the most valuable sites, (2) focusing cleanup on the most polluted sites, and (3) focusing cleanup on sites in minority communities. The third option most reduces the environmental quality gap, but all three are found to reduce the gap while also improving overall quality. Thus, our policy recommendation: begin solving the EJ problem by cleaning up polluted sites.

Superfunding Silicon Valley: Anti-Toxics Activism, Technical Expertise, and the Politics of Remediation

Dr. Travis L. Williams, PhD

This paper examines the mobilization and exploitation of technical expertise by anti-toxics activists in Silicon Valley during the Superfund cleanup effort in the wake of the Silicon Valley groundwater crisis.  I draw from historical archives and semi-structured interviews with activists, experts, government officials, former high-tech workers, and current and former Silicon valley residents to argue that anti-toxics social movement organizations in Silicon Valley helped to enhance and expand public perceptions of complex environmental issues by mobilizing and exploiting technical expertise.  In the wake of the public discovery of widespread groundwater contamination in Silicon Valley, a grassroots anti-toxics coalition emerged to help organize community participation in local environmental remediation efforts.  One of their primary strategies was to mobilize and exploit technical expertise in the service of providing directly impacted communities with more meaningfully engaged oversight of the remediation process.  The article examines toxic contamination of soil and groundwater in Silicon Valley by the local high tech industry, official actions taken to document and remediate that contamination, and the efforts of local grassroots anti-toxics organizations to enhance public oversight of the remediation process for the largest toxic plume in the region.  I show how grassroots anti-toxics activists strengthened public oversight of the official remediation effort in Silicon Valley and made technically complex environmental issues more legible to the local community by mobilizing and exploiting technical expertise.   However, I also explain how specific forms of social privilege enjoyed by the anti-toxics movement in Silicon Valley provided activists with access to political resources for mobilizing technical support that are not equally accessible across all contaminated communities.  I then relate this disparity to the problem of participatory parity highlighted by the Environmental Justice Movement and discuss its wider implications.

Local Environmental Resistance Movements in Turkey: The Case of Rize

Ayse Nai

In the last decade people in different parts of Turkey have been putting themselves in front of bulldozers quite frequently in order to stop various construction projects. A very common type of resistance is against the numerous hydroelectric power plants (HEPP) that are being planned and constructed without taking the ecological and social impacts of them. There are almost no limits where HEPPs can be constructed. In this paper I analyze the HEPP projects in Turkey and the resistance of the local people with a focus on the province of Rize in the Eastern Black Sea region from the perspective of how the local people react to changing involvement of state in their lives. Rize is selected as the research focus of this paper since the Turkish state played a significant role especially starting in the 1950s and 1960s in promoting the emerging tea industry, increasing the economic development and shaping the employment structure in the region through the state owned tea company Cay Kurumu. However, since the 80s, this traditional emphasis on agriculture and the state’s direct involvement with the people has gradually changed. The change has been especially stark in the last decade under the government of Justice and Development Party (AKP). The emphasis on state-led agriculture was replaced with an emphasis on privatization, urbanization and energy development. The valleys and the rivers in Rize have attracted the attention of national and multinational companies quickly because of the topography of the region which is mountainous and rich in water resources and therefore, energy potential. In the case of Rize, this paper analyzes how the resistance movements of local people changes the relationship between the state and local people in terms of having access to representation in environmental policy making.