An EPA rule flagged tribal benefit rather than tribal harm as its injustice concern

Evidence

Nor did the EPA add much moral texture in its “environmental justice” analysis of the fi nal mercury rule: Rather than truly acknowledge that monetized costs and benefi ts cannot exhaust the normativity of policy making— rather than engage in a thorough inquiry into what it means, in moral and historical terms, to force Native American subsistence fi shers to choose between their health and a cultural practice that is signifi cantly constitutive of their identity— the EPA instead reported with apparent relief that the emissions limits it chose were not so stringent that tribes would be disproportionately benefi ted by the rule. This passing moment in the EPA rulemaking betrayed the depth of ideological capture that costbenefi t analysis has wrought: Only an overextended form of welfareeconomic reasoning— one that sees disembodied welfare impacts to the exclusion of the lives, communities, and histories that are visited by those impacts— would have identifi ed unfair benefi ts to Native Americans as the chief environmental justice concern at issue for mercury. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 608

Categorization

• XREF: This EPA baseline-shifting example directly parallels the harm-vs-benefit frame turning victims into beneficiaries seen in the reader’s polyad environmental-justice material; also connects to Catherine O’Neill’s racial-baseline critique implicit in ch14 disaggregation discussion. — connects to: Disaggregated life valuations would embed racial discrimination while denying it — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 304; Academics’ 1990 lobbying directly created the EPA’s environmental equity bureaucracy — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 144; Chronic federal underfunding of tribal environmental programs is deliberate, not accidental — Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental…, 629
• ADDENDUM: Fits article 3 (On Sacrifice) thematically only loosely; stronger fit would be an environmental-justice angle — the Native American subsistence-fishing framing here could seed follow-up to the reader’s environmental-justice coursework: how regulatory ‘benefit’ neutrality erases historical colonization.