by Willy Blackmore
Ryan Hathaway describes his work on environmental justice in the federal government as similar to steering aircraft carriers: due to their size, it takes a long time to turn them before you can get them moving in a better direction.
Until earlier this year, Hathaway worked in the Biden White House as both the director of environmental justice and director of the White House Interagency Council on Environmental Justice.
As he puts it, IAC is “the main body through which the entire federal government coordinated environmental justice efforts,” including every department and agency — each its own giant Navy ship that Hathaway and others were trying to steer toward environmental justice. To perhaps over-extend the metaphor, those ships are now adrift, if not worse, as the Trump Administration has not only abandoned environmental justice as a guiding principle, but is also working to excise it from the federal government altogether.
Hathaway doesn’t think it can be done. “They’re never going to wipe out environmental justice,” he says. “They can try to scrub the government websites of it, but it’s going to be thrown in their face every public-comment session that they ever have.”
Hathaway’s roles were career positions, not political appointments, so his job carried over after Biden left office on January 20.
“Technically, I worked on EJ for three hours under the Trump Administration,” Hathaway says, laughing.
With the signing of Trump’s executive order on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion on January 20 — which includes a provision about cutting both positions and programs related to Environmental Justice — Hathaway’s career position in the White House for all intents and purposes no longer existed.
Now, in his new position as the director of environment and climate justice at Lawyers for Good Government, Hathaway is part of a growing legal and political pushback against the Trump Administration’s aggressive dismantling of environmental justice programs. The organization is working with hundreds of nonprofits that received federal grants, many of them funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, that the Environmental Protection Agency is now trying to claw back.
Through the sweeping conservative campaign against environmental justice, framed by some on the right as woke climate policy, Republican lawmakers have increasingly targeted initiatives addressing pollution disparities in low-income and minority communities, dismissing them as wasteful or racially divisive.
But Hathaway believes the backlash will fail both in front of judges and in the court of public opinion.
“What we’ve seen in the past two months is that, once people lift up the hood, a lot of members of the public, a lot of the members of Congress — even in both parties — are saying, a lot of these grants are actually really good,” he says. “They’re starting to go back to the administration and being like, hey, idiots, why are we doing it this way? Unfreeze this program.”
But even if every grant is ultimately left alone and there continues to be some kind of environmental justice infrastructure across the federal government (a big if), this moment will bear a cost, and it may be a significant one.
“We will be much less equipped to act in the future — it’s just more wasted time,” Hathaway says.
“They’re holding up money that’s going to save people’s lives,” he continued. “A lot of this money in environmental justice work is just reducing future suffering. It’s sad to me that just for some political battles and to make some waves and some headlines, they’re risking children getting cancer.”
Source: Seattle Medium
