"For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground. And tell sad stories of the death of kings..." Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2.
Being closer to the end of my journey than the beginning, I often try to imagine what the world will be like after I leave. Will the U.S. be as free or freer than it is today?
I am usually in a doubting mood when I think of the future. Since 1776, the forces of oppression and control have been fighting back against the victory won by the British colonists in North America. Slowly, inexorably, and sometimes with the best of intentions, the individual rights that those colonists bled and died for are disappearing.
For our own good, of course.
We convince ourselves we need a bigger government because we're a bigger country. That's true, but only to a point. If Congress and the president actually stopped to consider the consequences of growing the government instead of how many votes they were going to get for passing out more government goodies, history might have taken a slightly different trajectory.
This century has seen government goodies handed out for reasons of "justice." "Social" justice, "environmental" justice, and "restorative" justice are three major sources of "justice," and are all part of the government lexicon of this century of "justice."
Whose justice? There it gets a little murky. "Underrepresented communities" (somewhere), which are more polluted than other communities that presumably are well represented (somewhere), is how "environmental justice" is described.
But with armies of nonprofits and NGOs swarming all over these "underrepresented" neighborhoods, begging them to sue large corporations to get them to clean up (and provide work for environmental lawyers), how can they be considered "underrepresented"? You don't see these non-profits and NGOs in my neighborhood, even though the old coal mine that runs underneath my street is a toxic soup.
The whole idea of "environmental justice" has little to do with justice. A User's Guide to Environmental Justice: Theory, Policy, & Practice by Ken Kimmell, Alaina Boyle, Yutong Si, and Marisa Sotolongo explains what this "justice" actually is.
"The demand for 'environmental justice' (EJ) has gained substantial traction in the last few years, as well it should," the authors wrote in their introduction. "A key pillar in EJ will be widespread, community-designed and community-supported investment in neighborhoods that have been economically and environmentally burdened by a long history of racist government and industry decisions."
The biggest problem is that there are just too many white people in the environmental movement.
The authors summarize the history of the movement, writing, "The environmental justice movement has evolved in parallel with and in response to traditional environmentalism to focus on the unequal distribution of environmental harms among different people and communities. Research revealing the whiteness of the environmental community elevated concerns that social justice and racial justice were not prioritized in mainstream environmentalism."
Essentially, "environmental justice" is another component of racialist dogma that states that whites can't understand minorities, and any programs affecting minority communities must be administered by a POC (person of color).
So, environmental justice is an ideology that infuses concerns about identity—especially race—into the preexisting ideology of environmentalism, which is empowered in the case of the EPA by government. Regulators then enforce environmental laws with an eye not just to pollution and other damage, real or potential, to the environment, but also with a strong focus on the racial identity of those affected.
That doesn't sound like much equal protection of the law (whether or not the laws are good), because it's not. What it does sound like is a patchwork of ideological considerations piggybacking on an already established environmental movement to gain access to political power. What results is more than a little incoherent, held together by a shared willingness to ignore its own contradictions.
This is radical crap, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin did this country an enormous service in getting rid of all the environmental justice offices.
Christopher H. Foreman Jr. of the Brookings Institution wrote in 1996, "The movement presumes that any person of color voicing any environmental-related anxiety or aspiration represents a genuine environmental justice problem. Indeed, a broader redistributive and cultural agenda, as well as a profound discomfort with industrial capitalism generally, lurks just behind the concerns over unequal pollution impacts."
While we're giving the heave-ho to "environmental justice," perhaps we can throw the whole EPA kit and kaboodle out at the same time. They are arrogant enemies of freedom and capitalism, and need to reform or exit the stage.
