Grading Environmental Justice

Under the best of circumstances, final presentations are nerve-wracking. But the last day of class for Bill Dennison’s Issue Study Group in the spring of 2021 added another layer of stress. Presentations for the course, called “Developing an environmental justice index for the Chesapeake watershed report card,” were not just learning exercises for fellow students. In the audience were the very policymakers and scientists who could someday use the students’ information to grade the Chesapeake Bay not just on nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations, but on racial disparities in health outcomes and access to clean drinking water.

Though the students’ final presentation was demanding, it wasn’t the first time they had introduced their findings to an influential audience; they’d already shared their ideas with leaders of the Chesapeake Bay Program, who could eventually implement them in assessing the health of the nation’s largest estuary.

“I’ve never had a class devoted to this issue, and I’ve never had a more challenging class,” said Dennison, vice president for science applications at University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) and coordinator of the  Integration and Application Network  (IAN), a group of data analysts and science integrators and communicators focused on working through environmental challenges using scientific synthesis, engagement, and communication. Integrating data and narrative, the IAN staff works with clients all over the world to tell environmental stories through statistical information and analysis. He co-taught with Vanessa Vargas-Nguyen, an IAN science integrator who wrote her PhD dissertation on environmental justice indicators.

“I found it really interesting,” Dennison said. “I learned a lot from the [students’] perspectives. I felt like we all really learned from each other.” 

The Chesapeake Bay & Watershed Report Card already uses a recognized suite of science parameters to assess progress. This class tasked students in the  Marine Estuarine and Environmental Science  (MEES) graduate program to research and determine the best way to add social indicators to the report card’s rubric. The course is part of the Environment and Society track at MEES; the students came to it from different perspectives. Some had a fair amount of social science experience, others little.

IAN Program Director Heath Kelsey acknowledged that the nationwide racial reckoning after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd pushed them to address environmental inequities.

“It used to be just habitat and water quality issues, but we realized that we can’t just ignore the societal connections between the environment, the economy, and culture,” he said. “Not only does looking at social indicators allow you to make a difference, but it lets you tell a richer story, because you see how people are dependent on these resources.”

When the class wrapped up, the IAN team had added two indicators to the 2020 Chesapeake Bay & Watershed Report Card, based on available data: walkability and a heat vulnerability index.

Those are good starts, but the students and those active in the environmental justice movement say they are only the beginning. The group chose those indicators because they could get the data before the course ended. The student researchers hope that other indicators will follow when the data have been collected and analyzed and are then ready to incorporate into the report card. Those other possible social indicators include a community’s proximity to wastewater treatment plants and hazardous sites, air pollution, and green space. Equity in which environmental projects are funded—things like shoreline protection and stormwater management practices—and where, is also at the top of Dennison’s list, as well as those of many in the advocacy community.

In some cases, it is a question of compiling data; in others, a question of finding it. Kristin Saunders, cross program coordinator for UMCES and the Chesapeake Bay Program, said educating more watershed residents about environmental financing opportunities like wetland restoration and living shoreline construction would ensure that those investments in protection don’t just go to the wealthier communities. Often times, she said, the loudest voices get the help, and wealthier communities know who to call to navigate the system. When the Bay Program spreads restoration efforts across communities of different means and backgrounds, it can draw more constituents and generate more political support for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup movement overall.

“A lot of this restoration work is opportunity driven. And when you don’t have people at the table who are most affected by the decisions, you are not going to be taking their ideas into consideration,” Saunders said. “It’s way overdue, but rather than complain it’s taken this long, I am just so thrilled we are actually doing it. It is going to be life-changing for people who have been affected by these things for a long time.”

Grading waterways is an inexact science. But for more than a decade, IAN has been  grading the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways ’ water quality using environmental indicators including nutrient levels, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, and chlorophyll a, which measures the amount of phytoplankton present. Grading the Chesapeake also looks at the health of living resources, such as submerged aquatic vegetation and benthic communities.

But MEES students had been clamoring for more environmental justice in their curriculum, and they weren’t alone. At IAN, Kelsey heard from his staff about the need to address environmental justice, a term that refers to ensuring equitable distribution of both environmental amenities and burdens so that all communities have the right to equal protection from environmental hazards. International clients, too, were asking for social indicators to become part of the report cards. Dennison and Kelsey had long wondered if available data could help develop social indicators to determine if all residents benefitted equally from the efforts to restore the Chesapeake.

The idea behind a set of indicators is to take real-time data, such as measurements at US Geological Survey stream gauges as well as water-quality data that state agencies in Maryland and Virginia collect, and analyze them to determine levels of pollutants. For living resources, the IAN researchers rely on an aerial sea grass survey that the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) conducts, and a benthic sample analysis from a private firm, Versar.

IAN uses the data to develop indicators; some, like water quality, are fairly straightforward. With a baseline from previous report cards, they can compare over time how much progress they’re making. They can also gauge factors such as rainfall and temperature; high heat may damage bay grasses, and increased rainfall often accounts for more nitrogen and less clarity. That may tell the Bay Program managers where they should direct cleanup and restoration money.

Social indicators, such as heat vulnerability and stewardship, rely on multiple data sets and are more difficult to measure than the traditional ecosystem indicators. Few questioned that the social indicators were worth including, though. Bay Program officials had emphasized environmental justice as early as the  2014 Chesapeake Bay Watershed Agreement , which commits to established goals and outcomes for restoration of the Bay by 2025. The agreement was signed by all states in the Bay watershed: Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, New York, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. It includes 14 core principles, including: “Promote environmental justice through the meaningful involvement and fair treatment of all people, regardless of race, color, national origin or income, in the implementation of this Agreement.”

Saunders acknowledged they haven’t done much to advance that principle to date. But assessing how the Bay Program could be more equitable with its resources would not be as easy as grabbing a sample of water and analyzing it in a lab.

For help with the class, Dennison turned to his colleague,  Sacoby Wilson , an associate professor and environmental justice scholar at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health. Wilson had published a paper in 2014 in Environmental Science & Policy titled “Environmental justice disparities in Maryland’s watershed restoration programs.” One of his co-authors on the paper was Fred Tutman, the Patuxent Riverkeeper. Tutman is the only Black Riverkeeper in the Chesapeake Bay as well as the United States. The paper, which the Issue Study Group students read, examined how two wetland restoration programs operating in Maryland—the state’s non-tidal wetlands mitigation program and the grants from the Federal Clean Water Act Section 319 (h)—were distributing resources. Wilson and his co-authors were curious to see whether these were being allocated “fairly and equitably with respect to environmental justice.”

The authors found that of the 75 wetlands projects that the state funded and undertook, only three occurred in census tracts where more than 50 percent of the population were people of color. Further, those three projects amounted to only 20.7 acres out of the 499.4 acres documented.

“It is clear predominantly non-white areas of the state received few to no wetlands projects, while predominantly white areas gained most of the wetlands,” the authors state.

They conclude: “In this study, we observed through our maps a racial/ethnic and to a lesser extent socioeconomic disparities in the spatial distribution of programmatic wetland funds and 319(h) funds in the state of Maryland. However, the only disparity that was determined to be statistically significant by a Kendall’s Tau test was the amount of 319(h) funds going to non-white areas of the state.”

Tutman was more blunt in a recent interview: “If you’re not working on environmental justice issues, you’re working on restoration in rich areas. That’s not cleaning up the Bay; it’s conferring benefits based on class.”

Another paper the Issue Study Group students read, titled “Just Transformations to Sustainability” and published in the journal Sustainability in 2019, concluded that a lack of consideration of local peoples’ voices can erode public support for restoration and sustainability efforts—the money the government spends rebuilding environmental infrastructure. The authors call this attention to underserved communities “just transformations” and contend that researchers need to engage more deeply with residents from underserved communities to ensure a more equitable distribution of funds. In this way, they say, lower-income communities will gain living shorelines and rain gardens, not just wealthy white communities.

A third piece the students read, titled “Environmental Justice” and published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources in 2009, discussed the early days of the environmental justice movement, when North Carolina activists in 1982 protested the state’s decision to dump 120 million pounds of contaminated soil in a mostly Black community. Benjamin Chavis, who was then executive director of United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, coined the term “environmental racism” to describe “racial discrimination in environmental policy making.” It meant putting everything undesirable, be it a highway project or a toxic waste dump, in the neighborhoods with the least political capital to protest.

Robert Bullard, an early leader in the environmental justice movement, focused his studies on such disparities in Houston, Texas, where a lack of zoning facilitated placing undesirable elements in Black and brown neighborhoods. In these situations, the lower-income communities of color are saddled with the ugly infrastructure of modern life (power plants, railyards) while not enjoying the amenities such as green space and restored wetlands. Bullard is now on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Closer to home, the Town of Eagle Harbor in Prince George’s County knows that situation well. The waterfront town was a haven for wealthy Black Marylanders who could not visit segregated beaches.

Frustrating as that is, Crudup knows his town is better off than its unincorporated neighbor, Cedar Haven. Without municipal staff, it can’t apply easily for grants to upgrade facilities. And without a mechanism to tax residents, Cedar Haven can’t collect trash that often blows from a community dumpster into the river, Crudup said.

As he does with many colleagues, Wilson encouraged Dennison to think beyond early definitions of environmental justice that looked at proximity to hazards and instead to focus on the policies of how those situations occurred. For Wilson, that means incorporation, zoning, and access to the political capital that makes decisions.

“There are numerous indicators that go beyond chemicals you can measure,” he said. “Look at planning and zoning. What is the representation of people of color in these decisions? Look at the public comments, the special exemptions, who gets zoned up or down, who gets a conditional use permit. There are all kinds of ways that zoning has been abused. Weaponized. It’s more of a planning and development issue, but it is absolutely an environmental justice issue.”

Measuring environmental justice is much harder than measuring phosphorus, but researchers like Wilson have figured out ways to do it. Wilson developed the  Maryland EJ Screen , which is modeled after the  Environmental Protection Agency’s EJ Screen . Among many other features, these mapping tools allow residents to type in their addresses and determine their risks from “pollution burden” hazards ranging from lead paint to air pollution from traffic.

Determining environmental justice risks, Dennison and Vargas-Nguyen say, requires overlaying various databases to find patterns in related items. For example, researchers can overlay tree canopy data with census tract data to determine the race of those who live in areas with fewer trees. Similarly, mapping technologies can plot hazardous waste facilities, and census data can tell researchers the demographics of who lives there. Databases can also reveal population change over time, so researchers can determine whether the hazardous waste plant existed before a large population of color settled there, or if the population of color came first.

Vargas-Nguyen said the limitation for environmental justice indicators comes down to data. Like Wilson, she’d like to look closer at zoning and study the difference between environmental justice concerns in incorporated communities versus unincorporated ones, the nexus between funding and governance. Robust data collection will require more outreach to communities. The environmental justice class was the first she was involved with as a researcher and educator; the next one, she said, will be more comprehensive.

“We really have to lay down that this is the research method we are using for the next class, that we are looking at human subjects, and that we need to interview people,” Vargas-Nguyen said. “We have to make sure we are already reaching out to people in the community so the students are not cold-calling. That kind of class needs more preparation than what we have initially done. And we know that now.”

Dennison didn’t set out to be the teacher for the Issue Study Group course.

“I’m an old white guy, talking about diversity,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m not the right messenger.’”

He and Michael Paolisso, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Maryland, were co-chairing the Environment and Society part of the MEES graduate program, which includes students from University of Maryland, College Park and UMCES. They won approval for a course, but could not find a teacher.

Then Wilson and Dennison got in touch. Wilson was already teaching an environmental justice course within the Maryland Institute for Applied Public Health, though UMCES students had a hard time registering for it because they were in a different school. Wilson agreed to accept UMCES students into his public health course who had a strong interest in learning the fundamentals of environmental justice.

When that left Dennison to teach the UMCES-MEES course with Vargas-Nguyen, he felt more comfortable focusing on indicators. This way, Dennison didn’t have to feel like the authoritative voice on environmental justice, and he could stay in an area he was known for developing but broaden it a bit. They made it an issues study group, which is a two-credit, discussion-based course and typically includes seven to eight students.

To Dennison’s surprise, 18 students signed up. Of those, 17 were women, several of them women of color. There was one man. It was the most diverse course he’d ever taught, he said. Student Katrina Kelly said he was exactly the right person to teach it, despite his insecurities.

“As a white male in his age group, (Dennison) literally sits in the seat of privilege,” said Kelly, who is studying for her PhD at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and is part of the MEES program. “He is going to have blind spots. His eyes were opened.”

There were some tense moments. Students were tough on guest speakers like Saunders, who admitted that the Chesapeake Bay Program had been remiss in its outreach to the Black and Hispanic communities, as well as lower-income white communities. And a mapmaker from the US Geological Survey acknowledged he wanted to help with the indicator projects, but he knew nothing about environmental justice and asked the students to teach him.

Those interactions led one student, Faith Taylor, to write in her class-required blog post that the government consider defunding the centralized Bay Program and give the funding to grassroots groups. Taylor published the post, with support from her classmates, and Dennison admitted it was awkward, as he works closely with the Bay Program and believes administrators have made progress, however slow.

Taylor, who is now pursuing a PhD in environmental science at Yale University, remained critical of the guest speakers.

“They come to these meetings to talk about the great work that they’re doing,” Taylor said. “They want people to buy into that, so they are not prepared for people to tell them, ‘That is inadequate.’”

Saunders shared that with Bay Program colleagues. “I was able to take this lesson back and deliver it in a slightly more tactful way than it was delivered to me,” she said. “I told everyone, ‘We have to rethink our whole plan, because we are guilty of doing just what she said.’”

Dennison, Vargas-Nguyen, and the students agree there is room for improvement, particularly in stakeholder engagement. Taylor said she wished the course had spent more time interviewing residents harmed by pollution or suffering from inequitable distribution of resources, such as those in treeless East Baltimore neighborhoods that are much hotter than the leafy northern parts. Taylor focused on such stakeholders for her master's thesis.

Amanda Rockler agreed. She is a PhD student in the MEES Environment and Society track and also a Maryland Sea Grant Extension water quality specialist. Though she has experience interacting with stakeholders, she said many of her fellow students did not. Some, she said, had not taken courses outside of the natural sciences and were unprepared to run focus groups.

“People are complicated, so working with them is more difficult than working with oysters,” Rockler said. “I think this work on the indicators is really important to do, but it’s also really important to get it right. It probably has to be different in every community.”

Those involved with environmental justice have a wish list of what they’d like to see incorporated into the next report card as well as the next class.

Saunders wants more emphasis on coastal flooding. Dennison and Tutman want to examine best management practices in environmental financing to make sure they’re spread more equitably. Wilson wants deeper dives into the correlation between green space, housing, and health outcomes for minority residents. Crudup wants a closer look at siting power plants in Black communities—it was the core of environmental justice in Chavis’ time, and it remains an issue today even as companies take some of their coal-fired plants offline.

Taylor, Rockler, and Kelly want more and earlier community engagement; Vargas-Nguyen would like better data from that engagement. Maybe the community will tell researchers that agriculture pollution is the most important issue; maybe it will be a lack of access to fishing areas. Maybe it will be something not yet on the list, a problem that has yet to be quantified and solved. 

Whatever the outcomes, most involved in the effort agree the class should be smoother for everyone next spring, when Dennison plans to teach it again. He and his team are still strategizing how to make it flow better and address concerns. But one thing is for sure; Dennison wants to teach with a person of color who can speak directly to the impact of these issues in the communities they know. He thinks this change will make the experience more relatable for the students.

“I felt a little uncomfortable leading the class, but I’m happy with my uncomfortableness,” Dennison said. “It was the right thing to do.”

Header image: Ecological indicators, such as water clarity, help measure the health of the Chesapeake. But social indicators also tell a story about the health of the estuary and the millions of people who live in the watershed. Some live in areas with trees and vast open space. Others, as shown here in the Curtis Bay area of Baltimore, must contend with impervious surfaces that lead to higher temperatures. Photo, Yazan Hasan