This book provides the first comprehensive assessment of the federal government’s implementation of environmental justice policy. Decades of scholarly research has demonstrated that low-income and minority communities experience disproportionate environmental burdens. During the mid-1990s, the federal government initiated several policies to address these environmental inequalities, including an executive order signed by President Clinton in 1994 (Executive Order 12898) that called on federal agencies to consider environmental justice concerns in its programs, policies, and activities. Yet, tw ... More

This book provides the first comprehensive assessment of the federal government’s implementation of environmental justice policy. Decades of scholarly research has demonstrated that low-income and minority communities experience disproportionate environmental burdens. During the mid-1990s, the federal government initiated several policies to address these environmental inequalities, including an executive order signed by President Clinton in 1994 (Executive Order 12898) that called on federal agencies to consider environmental justice concerns in its programs, policies, and activities. Yet, twenty years later, there has been not been a systematic evaluation of the implementation of the executive order or the other environmental justice policy commitments made by the Environmental Protection Agency. This book provides such an evaluation. The chapters in this book carefully examine federal environmental justice policy as it has been carried out over the past two decades, with an emphasis on the performance of the Environmental Protection Agency. The contributing authors focus on different aspects of environmental decision-making, including permitting, standard-setting, economic analysis, public participation, enforcement, and use of the courts, but reach a similar general conclusion: the federal government, and the EPA in particular, has generally failed to deliver on the promises articulated in Executive Order 12898 and in subsequent policy commitments. Although the conclusion is a disappointing one, the authors also share optimism that progress can be made, and they each provide recommendations for improving policy moving forward.