6.3.04

Environmental Justice

I'm working my way through a report (pdf) by the Inspector-General reviewing the EPA's commitment to implementing the idea of environmental justice as ordered by President Clinton in 1994. The findings are rather startling -- despite the fact that Clinton's executive order was titled "Federal Actions To Address Environmental Justice In Minority Populations And Low-Income Populations," the current EPA maintains that it is aiming at "environmental justice for all," i.e. without special emphasis on disproportionately impacted minority or poor people. That position is consistent with the general Republican philosophy of willful colorblindness when it comes to racial matters, but it's pretty obviously inconsistent with the law on the books.

So should the law on the books be changed? There's a certain agreeableness to the idea of environmental justice for all. After all, a given exposure to PCBs will give a white person cancer at just the same rate that it will give a Native American cancer, so why should the latter get special protection? The report's rationale is:

Based on concerns raised in the early 1990s, these segments of the population were found not to be benefitting from the Agency's overall mission, and the Executive Order was issued in an attempt to draw more attention to this specific part of the population. The Administrator's August 2001 memorandum and the Office of Environmental Justices actions, returns the Agency to pre-Executive Order status, where everyone is assumed to be afforded protection under the environmental laws and regulations. It does not address the need to ensure that minority and low-income populations are protected from disproportionate environmental risks.

In other words, before the executive order the EPA thought it was providing environmental justice for all, but in actuality wasn't. The order is a corrective, pointing out a failing and urging the EPA to take especial care that it doesn't fall into that particular pitfall on the road to environmental justice for all. There's certainly some truth to that. For the reasons that I'll refer to momentarily in the context of a wider justification of environmental justice, it's easy for a mostly white middle-class group of bureaucrats in Washington to falsely imagine that their programs are providing equal protection to socially disadvantaged populations. Further, there's a real danger of discrimination by those bureaucrats (since in America the poor and minorities are the traditional targets of discrimination) that justifies taking explicit additional steps to guard against.

However, I think a justification of an environmental justice program explicitly targeting the poor and minorities can go farther. In the context of a society in which those groups are also disadvantaged in non-environmental ways, poor and minority populations have a special need for extra attention and extra protection.

The main issue is vulnerability. The impact of an environmental hazard is a combination of exposure (how much hazard you encountered) and vulnerability (how well you can cope with a given level of exposure). Disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards on the part of minorities and the poor is well documented (at least in the classic case of toxic chemical hazards -- in the US I'm not so certain about "natural" hazards like floods and wildfire). However, this disproportionate impact is accounted for under the rubric of "environmental justice for all," as there's no reason in terms of exposure why having four coal fired power plants in your neighborhood is worse if you're black than if you're white.

Where environmental justice needs to focus on the poor and minorities is the question of vulnerability. In general*, minorities and poor people are much more vulnerable to hazards. Because of a history and continuing condition of social disadvantage they lack the resources -- wealth, education, political clout, mobility, useful social networks, etc. -- that would enable them to rebound from environmental hazards. Thus, the impact of a given hazard exposure will likely be greater on a minority or poor community than on an affluent white one. The EPA's ability to affect the vulnerability side of the equation is limited (though the executive order does require cooperation with other agencies like HHS and HUD that could help with that -- indeed should help with that as a side effect of their non-environmental programs). So insofar as the EPA's mission is to achieve acceptable standards of environmental impact for everyone, it should take especial care with the exposure of disadvantaged groups to environmental hazards**.

As part of a liberal political system, the EPA shares in the government's joint mission of realizing substantive equality of opportunity for all its citizens. Thus, the EPA must confront the question of compounding, of which vulnerability is an example. Various forms of disadvantage (or advantage), both social and environmental, do not operate independently. They compound each other, potentially dragging people down by more than the sum of their disadvantages. An elevated exposure to an environmental hazard will thus not only disproportionately impact a poor Puerto Rican's environmental health as compared to an affluent white's, it will also disproportionately impact her overall achievement of social equality. Given that the EPA's ability to affect prejudice, the class structure, etc. is limited, it is irresponsible of the agency to allow exposure to environmental hazards to compound the factors holding poor and minority people back.

With each step toward substantive equality on the part of poor and minority Americans, the need to take specific account of environmental impacts on disadvantaged populations decreases. A successful environmental justice program would make itself obsolete. A concerted long-term effort by all government agencies as well as all non-government portions of society could concievably eliminate disadvantage, thus allowing the EPA to engage in a straightforward pursuit of "environmental justice for all."

*To avoid tempting the ecological fallacy, a more sensitive measure of actual social disadvantage than "minorities and the poor are disadvantaged, affluent whites aren't" would be useful, but the crude distinction drawn in the Executive Order is a good start and potentially less susceptible to opportunistic manipulation.

**The EPA's emphasis on the exposure side may explain why gender is not included among the categories of disadvantage that must be taken into account. Hazard exposures are geographically located, thus affecting communities, but the population is pretty evenly mixed-gender. Widespread heterosexuality and the random sex of children ensures there's no residential gender segregation on the level observed for racial and income-based residential segregation. Thus it's easy to think there are no "female communities" that must be especially protected, since for any given hazard men and women will be exposed more or less equally. This assessment, while intuitive, is probably not exactly true -- gendered social roles likely expose women to a different suite of environmental hazards than men experience. But I don't know enough about the issue to say what would be "women's hazards" that, by the logic laid out in this post, ought to have special attention given to them.
Stentor Danielson, 21:36,

Default Donation

Via this interesting paper, it comes to my attention that there are people pushing for organ donation in the US to become an opt-out, rather than opt-in, system. Based on the experience of numerous European countries who do it the other way, it looks like opt-in greatly increases the number of organ donors by influencing people who don't have a strong preference or just go with whatever sounds normal. On that basis I entirely support the idea of switching to opt-out for the US. Of course, that's easy for me to say given my metaphysical belief that a corpse is just a wad of meat -- once consciousness is gone for good, there's no person there anymore. So the default seems naturally to fall on the side of donation, since the only harm that donation could cause would be the violation of a well-formed preference on the part of the deceased. If I held a belief that stated that the corpse was still a person in some respect (such as the injunction against corpse desecration held by many societies which has caused so much consternation to archaeologists), then the situation would be different. In that case it would make sense to want the default to be to not donate, preserving people's posthumous dignity unless they made a conscious and well-formed decision to damn themselves by donating their organs.
Stentor Danielson, 00:33,

5.3.04

Don't Rock The Methyl Bromide

U.S. Requests Exemptions To Ozone Pact For Chemical The United States is seeking to make more American farmers and industries exempt from an international ban on methyl bromide, a popular pesticide that damages Earth's protective ozone layer, Bush administration officials said yesterday. Last year, the administration sought to exclude a variety of farmers and food producers from the ban, which takes effect next year under a treaty outlawing substances that harm the ozone layer. The exempt businesses would be allowed 21.9 million pounds of methyl bromide next year and 20.8 million pounds in 2006 in uses like fumigating stored grain and treating golf-course sod and strawberry fields. ... Some American growers say methyl bromide remains vital to compete with countries where cheap laborers do weeding and pest control. Critics of the American requests said the exemptions could undermine the 1987 ozone treaty. Use of methyl bromide has been cut 70 percent in industrialized countries since 1999 under the treaty.

Ah, the threat of imported golf course sod.

I'm not a chemist or an economist, so I can't judge the accuracy of the US's claims (pdf) regarding how vital MeBr is to the various affected industries. What I can do is voice concern over the standards that the Protocol sets for MeBr exemptions. Unlike most chemicals that are being phased out, which have to be "critical to the health, safety, or functioning of society," MeBr uses can be continued if elimination would cause "a significant market disruption" (hence the golf sod). The standards go on to explicitly note that alternative agricultural chemicals may be toxic in their own way. While I'm glad the Protocol is thinking ahead to avoid an MBTE-like situation where one environmental regulation prompts a different environmental problem, there's a certain narrowness to the assumption that we must be using chemical fumigants.

The Montreal Protocol is often hailed as an example of how international cooperation to solve environmental problems can work. But the reason it's worked as well as it has is that it's a triumph of the "don't rock the boat" approach. The phasing out of CFCs in aerosol cans, for example, has been barely a blip on the public radar because we found a alternative technological solutions. On MeBr, the parties decided to make not rocking the boat a precondition of action, allowing only relatively costless solutions rather than sucking it up and letting the threat of market disruptions hang over industries that continued to practice ecological disruption.
Stentor Danielson, 01:01,

4.3.04

Fighting Blind

... is the title of my latest post on Open Source Politics. Unfortunately it may be some time before I can post my commentary and comics from this week's issue of The Scarlet, as I forgot to email them to myself while I was in the office.
Stentor Danielson, 17:32,

Wyoming Has Gas

Energy Boom Has Wyoming Coffers Overflowing ... While many other states are still struggling to find their financial footing after years of budget turmoil, Wyoming's tiny government is awash in cash. ... The tax transfusion is driven by the energy industry, as most things in Wyoming tend to be. Extraction of natural gas, especially through the process called coalbed methane mining, has boomed, and gas prices have surged at the same time. Wave has built upon wave, resulting in what budget officials now expect will be about $1.2 billion more in tax revenues over the next two years than the state had anticipated. ... [Governor Dave] Freudenthal, a Democrat, has argued that a structural change in the energy business, notably the recent completion of some big pipeline projects in Wyoming, creates at least the possibility of a long-term wave that could keep the tax money flowing for years. If that happens, the governor said in an interview, Wyoming will have an obligation to start thinking more broadly about the consequences and costs of the boom — and the energy extraction that produces it — in order to protect wildlife and environmental quality for generations. ... Republican leaders in the Legislature say the evidence is not convincing that this economic cycle will be different. High gas prices cannot last, they say, especially in a presidential election year, when pressures are likely to be intense from Washington to bolster the national economy, which is dominated by energy buyers, not sellers. -- via The Hamster

Now there's a new argument against environmental regulations -- "don't worry, the economy will collapse." But maybe that's Bush's devious strategy -- rather than going head-to-head with polluting industry, he gives them short-term favors that undermine the long-term economy of the nation. It worked splendidly for Russia, where the post-Soviet collapse allowed them to easily meet their Kyoto targets.
Stentor Danielson, 11:48,

3.3.04

Massachusetts, San Fransisco, Oregon ... Haiti?

Here's a screenshot from Yahoo! News today. Yes, that's a picture of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide next to the story about Dick Cheney's views on gay marriage.



Maybe Cheney is hoping that if the marriage amendment passes, he can talk his disappointed daughter into tying the knot with Aristide.
Stentor Danielson, 18:27,

Wildfire Challenges

It seems that some of the same issues are being raised in inquiries about wildfire all around the world (or at least around the English-speaking world). A recent report on fires in British Columbia says that two of the biggest issues are communication with the public and coordination among firefighting agencies. Meanwhile, hearings about the Canberra wildfires last year are raising complaints that residents weren't well-informed about the danger. The California fires, meanwhile, are being blamed in part on poor coordination among fire agencies, for example with some firefighters being deluged with so much data that they couldn't process it all and had to rely on their instincts.

That these are major issues shouldn't be a surprise, given that the fires in question occurred in the urban-wildland intermix area. People in this area have less "local knowledge" of their environment, given that they're often recent arrivals to their subdivisions and work in city offices rather than on the land. Therefore they're more dependent on the government and media to supply them with necessary information, and to serve a coordinating role by selecting and enforcing a fire policy (for example, during the California fires many people felt entitled to an exemption from evacuation orders and wanted to go home before fire officials felt their area was safe). The urban-wildland location presents a coordination problem because it mixes two styles of firefighting and fire management. Total suppression is necessary and feasible in the dense built environment of the city, whereas some burning is necessary and feasible on "natural" land. Suburban areas are built-up enough to make it unfeasible (or at least incredibly risky) to burn, while being "natural" enough to make it unfeasible (or at least incredibly risky) to attempt to not burn.

On a related note, it says something about my tendency to look at California through the lens of fire that, after reading the 11th paragraph of this article, I thought "what kind of idiot homeowners' association would mandate shake roofs?" Oh yeah, people have other values than fire safety. (Even so, making the option of fire-resistant roofing available to everyone seems eminently sensible to me.)
Stentor Danielson, 13:52,

1.3.04

An Advantage Of The Two Party System

Another thought on the "just trust the experts" thesis: It seems that the two-party system has the advantage of allowing one to be agnostic on more issues, in recognition of one's lack of competence to decide. For example, I remain deliberately agnostic on the question of abortion* -- I go out of my way to avoid arguments and information that could dispose me to feeling that we either should or should not ban the procedure (or that, given an unwanted pregnancy and access to legal abortion, a woman should or should not get one). This would be a tough position to maintain if there were political parties representing every different combination of policy views. I'd be confronted with a decision of voting for a party that agreed with me on all issues and was pro-life, and one that agreed with me on all issues and was pro-choice. I'd have to make some sort of decision on abortion, even if it was just to throw my lot in with some professional ethicist whose other views I agreed with. But with only the Democrats and Republicans to choose from, my decision is much easier. I would have to be consumed with passion for the pro-life cause before my views on abortion swayed me to vote for a Republican in most circumstances, because I align with the Democrats on so many more issues. The two-party system allows me to be pro-choice in practice while remaining philosophically agnostic. Of course, this situation wouldn't help if my political views were less liberal and so the Democrats' and Republicans' respective faults on all the issues I cared about evenly balanced, leaving abortion as the tiebreaker (the libertarian conundrum).

*Granted, my reasoning for this choice is more about efficient allocation of my intellectual resources than about my inability to achieve expertise -- indeed, it's the fear that I could easily come to a well-grounded opinion that makes me put forth effort to avoid the temptation to engage in the debate.
Stentor Danielson, 19:06,

Trust The Experts

Various blogs have been tossing around a draft paper by Neil Levy arguing that we shouldn't try to become more well-informed on complicated issues, and instead should defer to whatever experts share our political/ethical commitments (see this thread for a discussion in which Levy himself participates). There's certainly something to be said for deferring to people who have studied things more thoroughly (see Morat's comments on the futility of lay arguments against evolution), though there's likewise much to be said for John Stuart Mill's view that to hold an opinion obliges you to understand the other side's arguments. What caught my interest, though, was Levy's use of environmental issues as examples of controversies we should let the experts decide. For example, he says:

The problem, for the non-expert, in these environmental debates, is how to assess each side’s claim that the type-one evidence [basic facts] they cite better supports its case than that cited by the opposition. Reduction in forest cover worldwide has slowed to a near stand-still; that’s the good news. Tropical forests are shrinking faster than ever; that’s the bad. Does this add up to environmental degradation or improvement? It is extremely hard -- for the non-expert -- to say, even if we limit our attention to this single issue alone.

The thing is that environmental experts can't say whether it's degradation or improvement. That isn't an objective question. Expertise is certainly useful in informing the debate, but the answer is relative to the desires, interests, and acceptance of affected lay people. It's not just that the experts don't know enough and hence can't resolve the issue, it's that outsiders are incapable of making a justified decision.

It's increasingly the consensus among environmental experts that lay people should call the shots (witness the move toward participatory approaches). So if anyone is thinking of deferring to me as an expert on environmental issues, my expert judgement is that you should become as well-informed as you can and contribute to the debate.
Stentor Danielson, 18:32,

Crackpots

Kevin Drum points out that math professors are the recipients of crackpot theories about squaring the circle, physics professors have to deal with blueprints for perpetual motion machines, and economists get "free lunch" schemes. I'd add that biology professors probably hear from creationists all the time, and archaeologists get tracts about Atlantis and how aliens built the pyramids. But what do geography professors get? Are there crackpots out there working feverishly on half-baked theories about public participation in environmental planning or the influence of market penetration on agricultural intensification, waiting to send them to me as soon as I get tenure?
Stentor Danielson, 10:00,

29.2.04

More Than Marriage

This post by jasperboi is well worth reading. It puts the marriage fight in the context of the many other problems facing LGBTQ people and points out the downside of the normalization process I described in my most recent commentary.
Stentor Danielson, 18:07,

Habermas On Birth Control

Matthew Yglesias has a post up in praise of sex and describing birth control as a rational risk-reduction plan for people who want to have some. The conservative response is often that risk reduction is all fine and dandy, but the available birth control is still too risky. But I wonder whether conservatives might want sex to remain risky. It got me thinking about how Habermas (oh no! groans the audience, more Habermas!) might think about conservative opposition to birth control.

It seems potentially fruitful to think of opposition to birth control as a response to modernity. Habermas says that there are basically two types of action: communicative and strategic. Strategic action is action oriented toward achieving a goal. Communicative action is action oriented toward reaching a shared understanding. For example, if I write a post arguing for gay marriage, using logical arguments and linking my case into our American ideals, I'm engaging in communicative action, proposing and defending a proposition that I think is worth of being accepted as our shared understanding of the issue. If, however, I engage in name-calling and emotional blackmail in order to get you to acquiesce to my stance on gay marriage, I would be engaging in strategic action. Rather than respecting my readers as subjects capable of making rational agreements, I treat them as things in the objectiv world to be manipulated for my ends (much as I might use Pavlovian conditioning to train my dog). This is not to cast aspersions on all strategic action -- as we'll see, there are contexts designed for it, and if nothing else it may be necessary in our imperfect world -- its merely to illustrate the relation of the actor to others in each type of action.

Communicative action is rooted in a shared set of beliefs -- what Habermas calls the lifeworld. Much of the lifeworld is accepted out of habit, due to socialization or not thinking to question certain things. Communicative action works backward from a proposed idea to the shared lifeworld of the people involved, justifying it by showing how it arises out of claims they agree are valid by inferential processes they agree are valid. If agreement is achieved, this new idea becomes part of their shared lifeworld, a part accepted due to reason rather than habit.

Modernity, according to Habermas, is a breakdown in this naively shared part of the lifeworld. People question tradition. Lifeworlds have to be consciously built up through communicative action.

Communicative action can be hard work, especially when people's shared lifeworlds are small. So modern society has developed "media-steered subsystems" which allow people to act strategically in contexts defined so that a "steering medium" channels that strategic action in socially useful ways. The two important subsystems in existence today are the market economy, steered by money, and bureaucracy, steered by authority.*

There is no subsystem for sex. Sexual morality requires communicative agreement. Given the breakdown of the naively given lifeworld, the right answers can no longer simply be drawn from tradition. Some conservatives, I think, have lost hope that a communicative agreement about the morality of non-procreative and extramarital sex can be reached due to the fragmenting of lifeworlds (or at least, they've lost hope that the agreement that would be reached in the absense of a shared Judeo-Christian lifeworld would condemn the "right" behaviors). In part this discouragement may arise from a recognition that their justfications don't reach deeper than "that's the way it's always been" or "because the Bible says so," and thus they are unable to persuade those who don't share those assumptions. It may also arise from a pessimistic view of the spread of relativism. Extreme relativism can come off as a refusal to engage in communicative action, a rejection of the idea that an agreement on moral issues (or on factual ones) is either possible or desirable.

This loss of communicative action leaves only strategic action. To get people to behave, they have to appeal to the strategic utility of chastity, rather than to an agreement about its rightness. This is where the riskiness of sex comes into play. If kids won't accept that sex is wrong, perhaps they'll keep it in their pants out of fear of contracting STDs or of starting an unwanted pregnancy. Effective and available birth control reduces the usefulness of this strategic motive, allowing people to have sex while remaining healthy.

This strategic motive for chastity is promoted in two ways. Well, three, but I won't go into the straightforward option of passing a law against non-procreative sex and throwing violators in jail. One is through abstinence-focused sex education. Conservative educators remove the possibility of risk reduction through birth control by shaping kids' perceptions of the context in which they engage in sex, promoting -- through skewed emphasis or sometimes outright falsehoods -- an interpretation of the action context in which chastity is obviously prudent. This tactic does, of course, rely on communicative action -- you have to get the kids to agree that condoms don't work. But it's communicative action as a means to a strategic end. (Habermas argues that nearly all strategic action between people is parasitic on communicative action.**)

The other way to create a strategic motive for chastity is to reduce access to birth control. This can be done in a mild fashion, for example by opposing programs that hand out condoms. Some would like to take the extreme step of banning the manufacture, sale, or distribution of birth control (Edward Winkleman points to the (probably hyperbolic) view of one lawyer that the Federal Marriage Amendment may be designed to subtly undermine the Supreme Court decision that struck down bans on birth control).

*Adam Smith captured this idea in the case of the market with his comment that "Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

**This brings up a point that's somewhat tangential, but potentially relevant to my dissertation. The relation of the actual world to the agreement achieved through communicative action is weakly theorized by Habermas. It's true that believing in something can be greatly efficacious -- just because it's socially constructed doesn't mean it's not real. But there are things that are real beyond the agreement, and they can come back to hurt you, or at least confuse you, if they're too far out of whack with the agreement. Habermas admits a form of world-connection in describing how one justifies subjective claims -- i.e., claims to sincerely describe your inner world. He says that unlike objective claims (about facts) and intersubjective claims (about norms), which can be justified through giving reasons, subjective claims can only be justified by demonstrating consistency in your actions. This claim is too strong with regard to subjective claims -- you can offer reasons for believing in your sincerity -- but it is an option, and validtion by demonstration extends to objective claims as well. Perhaps Habermas's view of facts is influenced by his focus on and interest in norms, which have an inverse relationship to reality -- if the facts that you believe turn out not to agree with how the world is, you have to change what facts you believe. But if the norms you believe in disagree with how the world is, you change the world to conform to your norms (e.g., if you believe murder is wrong, then see someone being murdered, you would want to stop the act of murder, not reconsider your belief that murder is wrong in light of the fact that some people go ahead and murder anyway).
Stentor Danielson, 13:29,