“The federal government pointed with pride to a sweeping national database that identifies pollution-stricken poor and minority neighborhoods to help officials better target billions of economic recovery dollars.”
The system is called the Environmental Justice Strategic Enforcement Assessment Tool (EJSEAT). EJSEAT scores combine data such as cancer rates, poverty levels, child mortality, toxic emissions, education and racial characteristics, and density of industrial facilities. This allows for the environmental justice tool to service minority and poverty stricken stakeholders more efficiently and target economic recovery dollars more efficiently.
The system began as a vision after a 1994 presidential order urging government agencies to address the issues of identifying minority and poor neighborhoods with disproportionate pollution and environmental health issues. There were also concerns that many of the United States’ toxic and industrial sites are located in minority areas thereby increasing their risk to exposure. This environmental justice tool directly addresses the needs of the poor and minority groups across the nation.
Joel Rast’s article Environmental Justice and the New Regionalism regarding the smart growth policies talks about how a strategy for reframing the new regionalist debate is needed which, in a way, may resonate more with minority stakeholders. He further goes on the state that while the new regionalism calls for policies benefiting low-income, inner-city residents, in practice, it contains a profound suburban, middle-class bias. For the most part, inner-city minorities have not been provided with compelling reasons to engage in the new regionalist dialogue. This lack of engagement, in turn, perpetuates the failure of new regionalist initiatives to seriously confront the problem of inner-city poverty. The article directly addresses the author’s concerns of addressing the needs of the minority.
A second relevant reading is David M. Konisky’s article Inequities in Enforcement? Environmental Justice and Government Performance, talks about mass mobilization of minority groups in the 1980s protesting the siting of hazardous waste and unwanted land uses in low income and minority communities. Additionally, a nationwide study by the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice (CRJ) brought further awareness to possible environmental inequalities. The CRJ study investigated the relationship between the location of hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities (TSDFs) and poor and minority communities, and demonstrated that as the percentage of these groups increased, so too did the probability of there being a hazardous waste facility in their area.
Reference:
"Environmental Justice" Tool in the Works
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/24/tech/main5186668.shtml
Hi Farhan,
ReplyDeleteThe environmental justice tool, so called the Environmental Justice Strategic Enforcement Assessment Tool (EJSEAT) is interesting to me. I am looking forward the result of the “environmental justice” scores by Census tract. According to the article, the scores combine various data such as “cancer rates, poverty levels, child mortality, toxic emissions, education and racial characteristics and density of industrial facilities.” It reminds me what President Clinton said in 1994, “each federal agency make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income population” (cited by Rast, 2009, p. 254).
Hi Farhan,
ReplyDeleteI was also interested in this artcle, you beat me to it. The ability to track this type of data within the cencsus would be great, but why should we only track it every 5 to 10 years? My second question is why is this tool not ready? What technology do they need to keep this data relative that does not already exist?