Academics’ 1990 lobbying directly created the EPA’s environmental equity bureaucracy

Evidence

In 1990, a group of academics convened at the University of Michigan to discuss their most recent findings. At that meeting, they decided that the energy and the momentum generated in their weekend together were too exciting to let dissipate in the usual academic papers. Instead, the group wrote letters to Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and to William Reilly, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In the letters, the professors, who came to be known as the Michigan Group, set out some of their findings of disproportionate impact and asked for a meeting with the officials to discuss a government response. As Bullard reports, the group never heard from Secretary Sullivan. William Reilly, however, agreed to meet with the Michigan Group, and, later in 1990, seven professors met with Reilly and EPA staffers in Washington, D.C. The result of the Michigan Group’s advocacy with Administrator Reilly was EPA’s creation of a Work Group on Environmental Equity. Reilly later created an Office of Environmental Equity, which newly appointed EPA Administrator Carol Browner renamed the Office of Environmental Justice in 1993. — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 144

Categorization

• XREF: The institutional genealogy of the EPA Office of Environmental Justice — useful counterpoint to the later chapters’ failure of the intent-based legal route; here executive-branch advocacy succeeded where courts failed. — connects to: Federal environmental justice institutions were built to institutionalize community participation procedures — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 245; An EPA rule flagged tribal benefit rather than tribal harm as its injustice concern — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 608

Broader Connections

• Federal environmental justice institutions were built to institutionalize community participation procedures #expands (0.82) — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 245
• An EPA rule flagged tribal benefit rather than tribal harm as its injustice concern #exemplifies (0.75) — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 608