Environmentalism for All in Seattle?

This article comes to us from InvestigateWest, a journalistic nonprofit working to build an informed and powerful citizenry. Follow them on Facebook for more stories like this.  

When
Seattle was named
the most sustainable city in the country in 2014, Mayor Ed Murray
expressed delight, saying “This five-star rating is just the latest example of
Seattle’s deep-seated environmental consciousness.”

What
went unsaid was that Seattle failed badly in the ratings by the Star
Communities program when it comes to environmental justice, the concept that
environmental protection should apply equally to everyone no matter their
ethnic background, age, gender or station in life.

The
rating followed a report revealing that
residents of the disproportionately minority and low-income Duwamish River
Valley, between Beacon Hill and West Seattle, are subject to a high degree of
environmental health threats and are likely to live sicker and die younger than
residents of other Seattle neighborhoods.

But
the real reason Star Communities dinged Seattle in its rating wasn’t because of
what’s actually happening to poor people on the ground in Seattle. No, it was
because the city had never adopted a formal environmental justice plan aimed at
reducing polluted and toxic environments in its jurisdiction.

On
Friday Murray heads to the Duwamish Valley to announce in honor of Earth Day
that he is fixing that shortcoming. A Murray-appointed stakeholder group has
spent the last year producing the plan to be announced on the banks of the
Duwamish River, a Superfund site.

“We
talked to more than 800 people, most of them people of color, immigrants, along
with refugees, in coming up with this plan,” said Sudha Nandagopal, Equity and
Environment Initiative program manager at the Seattle Office of Sustainability
and Environment.

It was
a year ago, on Earth Day 2015, that Murray announced Nandagopal’s hiring and
the appointment of a 16-member Community Partners Steering Committee composed
of local environmental and community leaders, including representatives of
Solid Ground, Got Green, and the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition.

Only
one other city in the country — Northampton, Mass., population 30,000 — has
matched Seattle’s five-star ranking under the STAR Communities rating system.
Since 2012, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit has given sustainability
grades to 51 cities, towns and municipalities. The process takes nearly a year,
evaluating such areas as economy and jobs, transportation options, green energy
supply, and health and safety.

STAR
Communities’ executive director Hilari Varnadore said in an interview that at
the time Seattle was rated, “There was a lot of focus on Seattle’s inability to
rectify the problems with the Duwamish River [Superfund] site.”

Seattle
received a score of just 5.3 out of a possible 15 points in the area of
environmental justice. It was the lowest mark earned by the Emerald City in 48
measures of sustainability.

While
the plan to be announced on Friday will not end environmental inequities in
Seattle, it’s more than most cities are doing. Of the 51 community
sustainability evaluations conducted by STAR over the past four years, 46 chose
not to submit any environmental justice plan, while the other five that did so
were rejected as unacceptable. Louisville, Kentucky, for example, didn’t meet
STAR muster because the plan the city adopted was defunded in 2013, said Kristi
Wamstad-Evans, STAR’s technical director.

Sam
Wicks of the Natural Resources Defense Council said it is not known how many
cities and towns have environmental justice plans on the books.

“EJ issues are usually
handled by community groups in many cities and are not typically run by the
city governments,” Wicks said in an interview.

In an
email earlier this week, Wamstad-Evans
explained why Seattle fared poorly. “Seattle was denied,” she wrote, “as the
plan had not been adopted at the time of submittal. However, there was also a
comment that the plan should be more comprehensive, including all sites in the
community while delving deeper into specific site areas (like the Duwamish
Waterway Superfund Site).”

In the late fall of 2014,
recounted Varnadore, Mayor Murray and staff met with STAR representatives to
sift through the full evaluation report and determine a course of action to
improve the city’s environmental justice record.

The meeting was the driving force
behind Murray’s Earth Day 2015 announcement of the Equity and Environment
Initiative (EEI). Its purpose: to make sure people of color, immigrants and
refugees, too, might also benefit from environmental progress, and that communities,
such as South Park, who are most impacted by environmental injustice are given
the opportunity to set environmental priorities.

What
will the mayor will announce Friday at a 10
a.m. news event at Duwamish Waterway Park in South Park? Hard to say. Members
of the Murray-appointed steering committee are keeping mum.

“The Steering Committee decided a
while back that we are not going to publicly talk about our work or the Action
Agenda until it’s released OR until we are asked by Sudha Nandagopal who’s
managing the process [for the OSE],” Alberto Rodriguez of the Duwamish River
Cleanup Coalition said in an email, responding to a request for comment.

Murray and company are also being
tight-lipped on what to expect Friday, perhaps mindful of the firestorm that
ensued following the dismal rollout of the mayor’s housing task force (HALA)
recommendations last July, when a draft of the work was leaked, revealing that
the city was considering doing away with single-family zoning.

Jason Kelly, the mayor’s interim
communications director, would not say whether the mayor’s office or
Nandagopal, the EEI’s program manager, had instructed the Steering Committee to
steer clear of news media inquiries.

“We just want to make sure
everyone gets the good news at the same time,” Kelly said.

“We are not going to give out any
details of the initiative worked out by the Steering Committee,” Nangapopal
said earlier this week.

It is a widely held view that the
environmental justice movement began in Washington, D.C., in late October of
1991. For three days, delegates to the First National People of Color
Environmental Leadership Summit adopted the 17 Principles of Environmental
Justice. The first principle states: “Environmental Justice affirms the
sacredness of Mother Earth, ecological unity and the interdependence of all
species, and the right to be free of ecological destruction.”

Asked what seminal environmental
event or catastrophe may have led to the EJ summit, Matthew Tejada, EPA’s
director of the Office of Environmental Justice replied in an email, “There
were a number of moments that precipitated and catalyzed the environmental
justice movement. The national protests against the siting of a PCB landfill in
Warren County [North Carolina, in 1982], the discovery of the ‘toxic doughnut’
in Altgeld Gardens in Chicago, Illinois, and the [1987] publication of the
United Church of Christ’s ‘Toxic Waste and Race’ are commonly cited as critical
moments in the environmental justice movement.”

Perhaps that next moment will
belong to Seattle.

This article was originally reported and published by InvestigateWest, a nonprofit investigative newsroom in the Pacific Northwest, which you can follow on Facebook or Twitter.