Use Federal Funds and Standards to End Environmental Racism and Sacrifice Zones
Using Strategic Investment to Build the New Economy
This is the tenth in an 11-part series on labor policy for the Green New Deal. As a trade union lawyer and climate activist, I believe we need to have a bold plan for climate action coupled with rewriting the rules governing our economy. In the spirit of Bernie’s Green New Deal policy (although written independently and before its release), this series proposes specific policy solutions to advance worker power alongside environmental stewardship.
(4) to achieve the Green New Deal goals and mobilization, a Green New Deal will require the following goals and projects— . . .
(F) ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal mobilization at the local level;
(G) ensuring that the Green New Deal mobilization creates high-quality union jobs that pay prevailing wages, hires local workers, offers training and advancement opportunities, and guarantees wage and benefit parity for workers affected by the transition[.]
Use Federal Funds and Standards to End Environmental Racism and Sacrifice Zones
This project must also specifically confront environmental racism and sacrifice zones. The GND should fight environmental racism in two big ways: 1) by empowering and funding communities of color and other frontline communities to organize and solve the problems in their communities, and 2) by using investment and structural requirements as strong tools.
A. Fund Organizing and Solutions from Impacted Communities Directly
Community members know what they need better than those in Washington, so the GND should focus on giving communities of color and communities in sacrifice zones the resources they need to solve their own problems. I see this as a two-prong effort: funding tribal nations, and funding community self-organizing and advocacy in other disenfranchised and marginalized communities.
Because most native communities are also sovereign nations, self-organized with their own governments, the GND should commit to funding a GND in native communities through large, multi-year grants to tribal governments. We often forget, but native communities are some of the poorest and most disenfranchised communities in the country, faced with decades of forced removal, land theft, police violence, and predatory economic policy. Too many native people live without running water, for instance, and in many communities, schools are crumbling and healthcare facilities are bare or nonexistent. They are also often on land with significant fossil fuel resources, and face a corresponding devils bargain. Finally, native communities are ironically often the most disenfranchised from access to the land, because of colonialist and economic barriers to access. The GND should allocate billions to tribal nations and communities to use for infrastructure improvements, energy programs, environmental remediation, treaty enforcement, or other projects which advance the broad, intersectional goals of the GND. This grant money should be subject to the above federal subsidy requirements, but those requirements should be minimum standards. Native governments of course could go further, particularly with local hire provisions, minority-owned business preferences, and targeted hire requirements (which adopt hiring preferences based on worker characteristics, such as membership in a tribal nation).
With communities that do not have self-government—communities of color (including native communities outside sovereign tribal nations), other oppressed communities, and communities in sacrifice zones—the GND should facilitate community self-organization and fund community projects. Specifically, the GND should fund community organizing in those communities through a large grant-giving program. Groups representing the interests of marginalized communities would be eligible for community organizing funds, and could be formed by community members, existing organizations or coalitions of existing organizations.
Then, the GND should either directly fund those community organizations to fix problems in their communities, or should allocate a large amount of federal funding to a grant program where community organizations and state, tribal, and local governments apply for funding together. These groups would identify issues in their communities and then work with stakeholders to fix then—such as by replacing playgrounds and upgrading parks, buying housing stock to put in a community land-trust, installing solar panels on residents’ homes, or starting new cooperative businesses. Whether funded directly or funded by applying for grants in partnership with local government, these community organizations would have the resources to fix the specific issues they identify in their community.
And since community organizations would oversee the process, they could set specific contracting rules supplementing the federal subsidy standards above. For instance, they might want a stronger local hire requirement, or a stronger minority and women owned business contracting requirement.
By funding oppressed communities’ self-organization, the GND can give them the resources they need to confront environmental racism and inequity. That is a powerful promise, and would create significant change in this country.
B. Use Investment and Structural Reforms to Confront Environmental Racism
Along with funding community organizing directly, the GND should provide significant money earmarked for specific projects directly tied to environmental racism and exclusion, and should implement specific structural legal reforms to empower communities of color on the ground. The impacted communities will surely have far more examples of such reforms, but here are three.
First, the GND should include a commitment to remove lead from our communities within 10 years, pursuing nationwide lead-paint removal, municipal water pipe replacement, soil remediation programs and other lead removal programs.
It should require all EPA permits to receive community consent after an environmental justice review process, including the free, prior and informed consent of all native tribes and communities; require polluters to retrofit to minimize or eliminate air pollution; and fund a robust inspection program of resource extraction and polluting industry sites (such as regularly inspecting retaining walls containing coal slurry and testing air emissions of industrial facilities). By modernizing dirty industry, we can protect human health while creating good jobs.
Finally, the GND should require every large state, tribal, and local government to conduct a comprehensive analysis of equity and inclusion issues in their jurisdiction, with meaningful input and control from disenfranchised communities, and should provide billions in grant funding to correct those problems. Governments would be required to act promptly to correct all issues identified and would need to regularly update their comprehensive analysis. The whole process would be subject to judicial review. This would create a permanent, structural requirement that government fix inequities, and a process and the resources to make that happen. Since that grant funding would be subject to the same contracting requirements, it would also create high-quality union jobs across the country while solving enduring problems of environmental racism and community disenfranchisement.
By specifically and concretely tackling these issues of environmental racism, and by creating structural reforms that empower and fund communities of color and other disenfranchised communities to solve the problems themselves, we can create lasting and meaningful change. Voices of communities of color should be centered in the Green New Deal, and the GND should create mechanisms through which they can exercise meaningful power in shaping federal, state and local policy.
If you have thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear them. Hit me up on Twitter or email.