As part of our Hot Topics in Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series, Marianne Engelman Lado, New York University School of Law and Vermont Law and Graduate School Distinguished Environmental Law Summer Scholar, talks about how to advance environmental justice in a chaotic time.
Narrator
This podcast is a production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment at Vermont Law and Graduate School.
Christophe Courchesne
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm Christoph Courchesne, associate professor of law and director of the Environmental Advocacy Clinic and associate dean for environmental and experiential programs here at Vermont Law and Graduate School. For today's episode, welcome to the 2025 Hot Topics and Environmental Law Summer Lecture Series. Today, we could not be more pleased to welcome Marion Ingham Lado. Marion's career has been devoted to civil rights and environmental justice.
She is currently serving as the director of a new Environmental Justice lab at New York University School of Law. During the Biden administration, she served in both the Office of General Counsel and the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights at the Environmental Protection Agency, where she focused on equity, environmental justice and civil rights enforcement and carrying out the agency's mission to protect public health and the environment.
She previously directed the Environmental Justice Clinic right here at Vermont Law School. So we're thrilled to have her back. And she is a lecturer at both the Yale University School of Public Health and the Yale School of the Environment, where she supervised interdisciplinary teams of law, environmental and public health students working on environmental justice issues. She has served as a senior staff attorney at Earthjustice, where she focused on civil rights enforcement, as well as related issues in the areas of toxic waste and agriculture in the effects of contamination on environmentally overburdened populations.
Her experience also includes ten years as general counsel at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights law firm where she directed a legal and advocacy program addressing racial and ethnic disparities in access to health care, environmental justice and disability rights. And she began her legal career as a staff attorney at the NAACP, Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where she represented clients attempting to break down barriers of access to health care and quality education.
We are delighted that she is here with us. As a distinguished environmental law scholar for our Hot Topics lecture series, she will present advancing environmental justice in a chaotic time. Oh, boy, is it? Is it ever? Please join me in welcoming Marion Engelman Lado.
Marianne Engelman Lado
Thanks so much, Christophe. And it's such an honor and I am so excited to be back. So we're a pivot point in the history of environmental justice. The movement absolutely came of age and now we're seeing a tremendous pushback at the federal level. We have to grapple with where we are and what it means for the future. We have to advance environmental justice.
There's not a question about that. It is fundamentally about ensuring that all people have access to clean water, clean air and a safe place for their children to play. And and also, it's about having a say in the future of people's health and environment. So the question is, how do we advance environmental justice in this chaotic time? I'm going to start with some level setting and then talk about where we were as of 1159 on January 20th, when I left the administration and it changed Inauguration Day.
I'll then touch on the challenges posed by both the legal landscape and even pre-Trump and now by the Trump administration, as well as possible pathways forward. Notably, we don't have to do too much speculation about the Trump administration because they've already taken a wrecking ball to environmental justice initiatives. I hope, though, to end on a positive note because environmental justice did not start at the federal level and it won't end with the administration's wrecking ball.
Communities have driven the movement, and communities will continue to fight for environmental justice. I want to say just a few words about my perspective. As Kristof said, I'm a civil rights lawyer who gradually focused more and more of my work on the environmental and climate and environmental justice sectors. I started my career at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund during what we might call as the dawn of the formal environmental justice movement and increasingly spent time working on discrimination in the environmental sector.
I started focusing on health and education, but realized that there was so much attention needed to civil rights enforcement and the enforcement of other laws in the environmental sector. So I started working on confined animal feeding operations, the location of medical waste incinerators and other issues. There was simply a lack of civil rights enforcement in the sector, and over time that is something that I've tried to address.
Since the 1980s, the nation has learned what residents of environmentally overburdened and underserved communities have known for years, based on their experience in this country, the color of a person's skin and their income, but the color of a person's skin is a predictor. Often the most salient predictor of whether you're living near a polluting source and whether you're exposed to more pollution such as particulate matter.
2.5 The little pieces in the air that can get into your lungs. The release of the report Toxic Waste and Race in 1987 was a seminal moment in the birth of the movement. The report found a significant relationship between the race of a community and the location of hazardous waste sites. And indeed, that race had more explanatory power than other factors such as income and dumping in Dixie.
A book I recommend, Dr. Bob Bullard said that environmental racism, which was the term we used at the time, is the distribution of environmental burdens and benefits along racial lines such that one racial or ethnic group shoulders a disproportionate share of the costs and another a disproportionate share of the burdens. We have a broader view of the idea of environmental justice, which I actually think was packed into what Dr. Bullard was saying.
The findings of toxic waste and race have been replicated many times since the report was released in different contexts. Research has found relationships between the placement of multiple types of polluting sources and race, the availability of environmental goods such as trees and race and class and exposure to particular pollutants. This is not a surprise given the history of land use in this country.
The United States developed a land use policy and zoning layered on policies and practices of segregation and redlining. The vestiges of these policies have never been uprooted. Unlike in the areas of education, for example, where the promise of equal education remains illusory. The Supreme Court in 1971 and a case that many of those on the phone probably studied in constitutional law in Swann versus Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, held that school authorities had the obligation to eliminate from the public schools all vestiges of state-imposed segregation.
In contrast, secretarial patterns of land use were never uprooted. If, for example, areas where communities of color resided were deemed industrial and polluting facilities were clustered nearby, there was no moment, no Supreme Court case that demanded that zoning laws be redrawn to address racial inequality. As a result, today, race, color and national origin, a person's racial or ethnic background, is a predictor of exposure to pollutants.
So there are many other ways in which discrimination perpetuates, and racial inequality in land use is perpetuated. There was a 2022 meta study looking at 17 such studies and reported that overall studies nearly universally report evidence of an association between redlining and health-relevant outcomes. We see the continued imprint of policies of racial segregation and redlining on the life chances today, and there are a number of other spaces, a really great body of literature.
I would recommend Paul Mohi and Robin Salas, which came first People Air Pollution, a review of Theory, which looks at some people might think, Well, these are low-income areas, they're at landfills or refineries. And so people with fewer with less wealth might move to them. And they tried to answer that question. And what they found was that pollution moves to people of color and moves to low-income people more than the other way around.
Of course, there's a little bit of both. And, you know, in this country, all people should have the right to clean water, clean air and a safe place for their children to play. That should be part of what we think of when we think of the environment and environmental law and the mission of agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.
Just a note. We looked at what environmental justice looks like in Vermont. Is there an environmental justice in Vermont and where part of our coalitional effort covered Joyce, where groups came together and they held and we were part of this, providing some legal assistance and support. How focus groups across the state and did a survey to ask communities, what does E.J. look like to you and found that there was something called environmental justice in the state and that having a co productive relationship with communities where we heard from them helped to more fully inform our notion of what environmental justice was.
But it's similar to the rest of the country in that it reflected environmental privilege and harms in even though Vermont is seen as such a green and environmental state, that there were these inequalities, disproportionate impacts, cumulative impacts and the need and importance of engagement to really get at those issues. So coming into the Biden administration, we had all that as background, do a little bit more background.
But I just want to remind us that in 2021, when the Biden administration came into office, we also had the reminder of these stark inequalities in seeing hospitalization and death rates from COVID were related to race and ethnicity. And there are lots of reasons for that, for the disparities, including workplace conditions. But studies during the pandemic indicated a relationship between PM ten levels and the dispersion of the virus and exposure to PM 2.5, which again we already know is disproportionate in communities of color, in low income communities, and greater rates of hospitalization and death.
And this study said, you know, it really was a wake up call, that this has these inequalities in the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens really have very significant impacts on morbidity and mortality. So let me just touch on a couple milestones. We're going to play just a minute of this. This film, which is about what we think of as the growing consciousness in the early 1980s of environmental racism and the issues that that we now call environmental justice. We will not allow one county to become a dump site.
The state Highway patrol began moving in on the marchers as they approached the entrance to the state landfill. The signs and chants of the protesters made clear their opposition to having the toxic chemical buried in their county. You can. Yeah. So just that was a little clip which you can find online of the Warren County protests in 1982.
There were PCB laid dirt that was being moved into this landfill in a historic African-American community. And for six weeks, the community members, Native American, African-American allies from local colleges all came together to protest the movement of this these PCBs, PCB laden dirt into their community. They went to jail. They used tactics of the civil rights movement, but really focused in on the issues of what we now know as environmental justice.
So there were tactics in the civil rights movement. There were forerunners in the Native American struggles for self-determination. They were forerunners and workers rights like Cesar Chavez and the workers movement around pesticides. But this particular movement in 1982 got a lot of TV attention, and it brought this local struggle to national attention. And in doing so, it woke people up across the country that was quickly followed by the Toxic Waste and Race report in 1987, which made this connection, which was a study, wasn't just happening here.
Was it happening everywhere? Was there a disproportionality? They confirmed there was, again, which has been reconfirmed by a whole literature. The other interesting things about the thing about toxic waste races, there was a there were a set of recommendations which were really prescient or putting in another way came out of the community and had an impact on policy.
So they called for an executive order on environmental justice, which, of course, we know President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, the first executive order on environmental justice. They called for the formation of an Office of Hazardous Waste and Racial and Ethnic Affairs, which subsequently became the Office of Environmental Justice, was first called the Office of Racial Equity, then the Office of Environmental Justice.
And under Biden, it became the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. They called for a national environment Advisory Council, which was called for in the Executive Order 12898 and became the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, or the Jack. And other things. So this whole set of recommendations really came from communities, came from this initial study and are a reflection of the fact that communities created the movement, created the policy, and are not going to stop now.
So Bernie talked about Warren County, United Church of Christ. And I just want to say that communities all across the country were experiencing this, these environmental injustices and saying, is it just us? Just another example. In 2011, the fire at the sewage plant in Harlem. It's the origin story for we have for environmental justice. There was sewage pouring into the Hudson.
There were there's a long back story to this, but, you know, folks in Harlem were saying, wait a sec. Why is that sewage plant being put in an already overburdened with very high asthma rates? And when when the TV coverage happened in 1982 and then other folks were saying, well, wait a sec, we were experiencing that there was a greater consciousness, that it wasn't just their community that was experiencing these environmental problems, but there was a pattern.
And of course, the scientific literature affirmed that. So people came together in the first national people of color Environmental Leadership Summit, and that was part of the growing consciousness. And one of the things they did at the summit was pass up principles of environmental justice. And these principles affirmed both substantive rights like the right to clean air, the sacredness of Mother Earth process rights, which I'll get to, and second, the distributional rights and also ideas of restoration or risk of restorative justice.
I just want to emphasize this procedural justice piece, because it applies not only to the government but to us as lawyers or to me and the clinic that I run or the clinic folks here are running in. They that our work needs to be based on these principles of environmental justice, which call for self-determination, the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision making, including needs, assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation, mutual respect.
And these notions of procedural justice make their way into the executive orders and also state laws, state environmental justice laws like the environmental justice law that we have here in Vermont. So just in sum, what is environmental justice and includes distributive justice? This idea of fairness in the distribution of environmental benefits like early trees and burdens like pollution, it includes procedural justice, respect equality, includes substantive justice of equal access to clean air, clean water, outdoor recreation, healthy homes, health, health care, fresh food, and includes restorative justice.
We're not. If we're not on an equal playing field now, we need to restore legacy site. So all of this was in mind, all of this, these values and principles. And Jill, Lindsay Harrison wrote a book called From the Inside Out, which was a critique of EPA focused that EPA was focused on the universal rather than the distributive aspects of pollution that is looking at, say, how much mercury is released across the nation.
Is it going up or going down and not? What is the distribution of those releases? If you think about the Department of Education or the HHS Health and Human Services, they never release length of life data or eighth-grade test scores without also releasing the distribution by race or by income or by region. So we can see if there are trends and if there are hotspots.
And whether we should address those trends are disparities going up or are they going down? What can we do about that? That had not been done by EPA. And so really starting to rethink that. It's not we have to be concerned not just about the global amount, the universal amount, but those disparities within the numbers. So an example of that is the Toxics Release Inventory.
It showed trends in mercury emissions, but not trends. And who was exposed to mercury by race, national origin region. So the goals were to identify disparities where they exist and target investments or resources where they're needed most, and also to ensure meaningful participation. Of course, we also had to take into account developments that really change how we think about environmental justice, including climate justice, which the climate justice movement grew out of the environmental justice movement.
It too focused on disproportionate impacts of climate change, on people who were vulnerable, which such as people of color, low-income people, people with disabilities and others, and the and often the disproportionate impacts of climate action. For example, a move to nuclear. Where's the waste? Where is the mining? How do we think about that? Or training and the need for communities to be at the table as we think through those options?
So when Biden came to office, he called for a new executive order, or at least a study of whether we needed an executive order. And he committed to really dedicating ourselves to integrating environmental justice in all that we did. Executive Order 12898, signed by Bill Clinton, had called on every agency to make environmental justice part of its mission, which was an enormous step forward and the culmination of this effort by communities.
But compliance by agencies was inconsistent. There had been a one time planning session, but it hadn't been renewed. There was little accountability. While there was this presidential memo that that recognized the role of civil rights and environmental law wasn't embedded in the executive order, and there was a need for an all government approach. The Executive Order 12898 designated certain agencies that were covered by the executive order, but not all agencies.
So that was part of coming into the administration what was on folks minds. And and Candidate Biden was really the first candidate to have a very robust platform on environmental justice. Under the Obama administration, EPA had put forward something called legal tools to advance environmental justice. We, during the Biden administration, worked on that, improved it, brought it up to date.
But there was all this groundwork for the Biden administration. And I just want to give a nod to the fact that Vermont itself had in 2022. It wasn't before the Biden administration, but an act related to environmental justice. And it's still being implemented. It was sort of an iterative process between what was happening in the States and then what was the administration did.
So then we get to the Biden administration, and I want to just say a few words about the gains in those four years between, you know, from where we were when Biden took office to January 20th, 2025. So we're switching gears on how all of this led to what was really unprecedented action in the Biden administration and those gains.
So as a result of all this pressure from community activists and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, candidate Biden had this robust platform and through a series of executive orders, he immediately created an Office of Environmental Justice, and the White House established, not just a National Environmental Justice Advisory Council that we need.
Just continuing at EPA to make recommendations on advancing environmental justice. He established the Justice 40 initiative to ensure that resources were targeted where they were needed most. You required every agency to develop agency equity plans and subsequently under the second executive order, which was signed April 21, 2023, established a government wide definition of environmental justice, required every agency to develop environmental justice plans on a regular basis and set forth a number of other charges to hold agencies accountable for integrating environmental justice into their work.
So there was a lot happening every day on environmental justice. And we can we can talk more about all of these developments. Sometimes people ask me, well, was it a waste of time since it's all been six by by the president? And I would say the answer to that is no. First of all, these documents, the definitions they've given, you can deep-six something.
But we have it. We have those documents. We know what that definition was, and it's a more robust definition. And they'll be an iterative conversation with the next round of of activities happening in the States. And what happens in 2029? You can't erase history. You can try, but you can't erase history. And then, as the administrator would often say in our closing days, once you take a lead pipe out of the ground, we'll never put it back.
So to the extent that, you know, some of the resources, some of the investments, you know, went into effect during the four years, such as taking lead pipes out of the ground in communities that are overburdened or all communities that will never be undone. That's good and that will save people and it will save children. And that's a good thing.
So. So, yes, there's retrenchment, but there was so much that happened. That's truly exciting. One of those things was the definition of environmental justice. And again, Executive Order 1096 has been rescinded, But the definition lives on, and I underline some of the areas that are new. And I will say in 2022, the Vermont definition of environmental justice has a lot of these components as well.
So there have been no federal-wide definitions of environmental justice before this time. There had been one an EPA, and that was adopted by a lot of states. But this and so some of the language here will be familiar because it builds on that language. But I should say that Executive Order 1496 came out of recommendations from the Jeff White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council and the Interagency Council within the federal Government building on a lot of what the states did.
But so one of the things that really bubbled up is that environmental justice has to address issues of impacts that are particular and vulnerabilities that we were seeing coming out of COVID and as a result of climate change on tribes and people affiliated with tribes and people with disabilities. And and so the way Jeff made that recommendation, the interagency council approved it, and the president's definition of environmental justice means that says environmental justice means that just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, that would be familiar.
But now also tribal affiliation or disability, the definition of who was covered, which agency. This topic was much broader. And then there's a lot of new language recognizing that we needed to take into account climate change, the cumulative impacts of environmental and other burdens and the legacy of racism or other structural barriers, and not only focus on the maldistribution of burdens, but also equitable access to a healthy and sustainable and resilient environment.
There was a lot of other activity, so there was activity at the White House level that applied to the whole federal government, but also activity within the EPA. So the agency I mean, I don't have time to discuss all that the agency did for sure, because literally every aspect of our work, our research, our science, our environmental enforcement, the week of the Office of Environmental Enforcement and Compliance Assurance put out four memos talking about the need to make sure that enforcement activities were targeting communities that needed it most.
We put out legal tools to advance environmental justice, to really go through every statute and say, where is there a requirement or discretion? And that's still around. You can still use that to understand where their discretion is under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, or the whole alphabet soup. Where is there a mandate or discretion?
Now, getting ahead of myself, you know, the president likes to slap words, adjectives onto phrases and pretend that it's true. So he says, like illegal environmental justice. It's not clear what that means. Environmental justice is not illegal. And in fact, you know, as he does that we can use legal tools, which was a very precise, not comprehensive but precise analysis of where we do have discretion or a mandate to consider environmental justice in statutes and regulations.
And then there was an addendum on cumulative impacts. And so there's a lot of material out there to clarify legal authorities for addressing environmental justice. There were practical impacts on the ground. And just to illustrate one that when we came into office, there was a hunger strike had been going on for a few weeks. I arrived February one.
It had been going on for a few weeks at that point, General iron ore, too, was the largest metal shredder in in that region of the country. The facility had been located in Chicago's predominantly white and affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. And there had been incidents there and it faced a lot of opposition.
After discussions with the city and state, they decided to shut down and build a new facility in the southeast side of Chicago in Lincoln Park, which was already very overburdened. And people saw this as a sign of environmental injustice or environmental racism, that this this facility was in a white area that was closing down and moving to an already overburdened Latino area.
And yes, it had a bigger buffer over it. That facility said it's going to be newer. It's going to be bigger, there'll be a bigger footprint, so it'll be further away from people. But there was a real concern about the impact in an already overburdened community. So people on a hunger strike and the EPA's administrator didn't have authority to stop it, but he did take a look and he talked to the mayor.
He wrote a letter to the mayor on May seven, 2021, and he suggested after sort of reviewing the fact that prior to reaching a decision on the merits, the that the city complete an environmental justice analysis such as a health impact assessment. And the mayor decided to do that. And on that basis and also on the history of this facility, decided to deny the permit that was challenged and upheld in court.
And EPA provided technical assistance on health impacts assessments through our Office of Research and Development and through Region five. So it was just an example of the work to integrate environmental justice, equity and civil rights into permitting rulemaking and the agency's many activities, both through our official power and also soft leverage and the administrator stated over and over that banking, environmental justice, equity and civil rights into the DNA of the agency was the goal in recognition that it was integral to our mission.
We, the administrator, launched the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights to lift this up, not have environmental justice sort of be off on its own, but to lift it up at the same level as the Office of Air and Radiation and the Office of Water, for example, to make clear that this was important. And this new office both had an unprecedented budget for environmental justice and civil rights, and also worked with all of the agency to integrate environmental justice in all that we did.
So there was a rollout of unprecedented funding. We strengthened civil rights in important ways, including issuing a procedural guidance, providing an unprecedented amount of technical assistance and training inside and outside of EPA, totally revising pre award reviews so that if if a community group or state or agency was getting funding from EPA, any kind of funding, they had to have certain baseline requirements that were in our regulations.
And we had increased transparency. We put our docket online and it's it's still online, fortunately. And together with the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Center, we expand the civil rights program, expanded opportunities for community complainants to have a voice in resolving their complaints. There was a knee-jerk working group on making recommendations, just a tremendous amount of work. It was maybe baby steps.
It wasn't where we needed to go to really make up for decades of inaction, but it was there were important steps. We put out new materials, new guidance. My favorite things that we did remember, I talked about Lindsey Harrison's book and how try and other data that we put out was usually only universal and didn't really dig into disparities.
Well, for the first time, we were trying to change the conversation and put out an initial batch of indicators of environmental disparities that aim to help industry disparities in key environmental and public health conditions. The pilot six indicators were blood lead levels in populations in monitored counties Meeting PM 2.5 National Ambient Air Quality Standards, hypertension, adverse birth outcomes, life expectancy.
But all of this could then feed back in understanding where do we need to target our work. So that leads to the challenges. And I want to talk briefly about challenges, pre-Trump, and then the challenges of Trump and then a little bit of what's what we're doing. First, I want to say there were challenges even before this administration came into office.
Even today, the Supreme Court ruled in a NEPA case with a decision by Justice Kavanaugh that NEPA is a procedural cross-check, he said, not a substantive roadblock. And they overturned the D.C. Circuit, which had said that this project needed to look at upstream and downstream effects. So we have a court that has moved in a certain direction, and that's already the landscape we're facing.
And that landscape also includes a skepticism about race-conscious action, which provides a legal landscape for work that we're doing in civil rights enforcement and addressing racial disparities. And we have to be thoughtful and work within the law to address those racial disparities. Doesn't mean that addressing racial disparities is illegal, but taking race-conscious action raises constitutional concerns, at least for the government.
And there was pushback on our civil rights enforcement wasn't only the courts, it was also sort of an organized pushback. And at EPA, we were sued by the state of Louisiana in a pretty high profile case, Louisiana versus EPA. This was a case that involved complaints we had received. And we're investigating about two facilities in what's called cancer Alley, very overburdened communities and we were investigating.
And the law requires that we have a back-and-forth and try to resolve cases voluntarily. And Louisiana's attorney general, now governor, sued us, saying that the that the case raised concerns and found a judge. A judge came in the Western District of Louisiana that permanently and joined us from enforcing the disparate impact standard or the regulations that prohibit actions with unjustified disparate impact and cumulative impact analysis under title said, okay.
So that's the sort of the lay of the land until January 20th, 2025. And from day one, the president shows hostility toward efforts to address racial inequality. He bundles DACA, which he says, you know, uses disparagingly and environmental justice. They're very different. But he bundles them together because I guess they're all trying to address some form of racial inequality.
They're not only doing that, they're also trying to ensure meaningful involvement. They're trying to ensure, in the case of environmental justice, clean air, clean water for all, in the case of DEI that are also universal goals of inclusion. But he bundles them together in this disparaging way. And you know, the tide of that first day one, Executive Orders Ending Radical and Wasteful Government Programs and Preferencing.
And this includes language about inequity, action plans and equity and environmental justice. Somehow, through the title, he's trying to suggest that advancing equity or environmental justice is a form of preferencing, ignoring the history of discrimination in land use, and stating as if true, that somehow prioritizing communities in greatest need is a form of referencing. The EO calls for the termination of environmental justice offices and positions fairly immediately.
The Department of Justice's Office of Environmental Justice and other offices across the Federal Government are closed and fairly immediately. Hard-working civil servants in the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were put on administrative leave, and it became clear through rumor that they were going to reorganize and get rid of the office. And now we know that they're all going to be released.
That all going to be fired or moved. I just want to say this is a huge loss for the federal government. Many of the we had not only staff at headquarters, but there were parallel divisions in the regions, many of those division directors who were put on administrative leave. And now we removed or fired, spent decades building trust in the federal government with communities, low-income communities, tribes and others who had long distrusted the government.
And these relationships were invaluable. It's also worth noting the somewhat Orwellian provision of this executive order requiring agencies to provide the Director of the Office of Management and Budget with a list of all DEA or positions that have, quote, misleadingly relabeled and or in an attempt to preserve their functions. So this idea that we're sort of going to rat on each other, you know, there are a whole bunch of executive orders.
They eventually repeal executive order 12898 signed by Clinton, the repeal the executive order 1096 that gets rid of the knee jerk, the we Jack the interagency council all of these efforts and the Department of Justice has also just ravaged their civil rights office is ravaged and we know even a lot more now. We also have the freezing and termination and uncertainty of environmental and climate justice funding.
In a video posted on ex the new way of governing, apparently administrator Lee Zeldin said that EPA would revoke contracts for the still still emerging at that time Green bank that was set to fund tens of thousands of projects. People had worked hard on these projects. There is so much more. This is a complete wrecking ball. There is an attack on data collection that we need to pay attention to.
There is a case, American Alliance for Equal Rights versus Bennett, which is a challenge to the state of Illinois, a requirement that certain nonprofits collect and disclose demographic data, which, by the way, is required under many regulations by many agencies. But Attorney General Pamela Bondi intervened in that lawsuit on the side of saying that it is illegal to collect and to require collection and posting that data.
There is also this attack on disparate impact. There was an executive order called Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy, which really is just retrenching on the strength of civil rights law. It's part of a very long effort to roll back civil rights law. And now we're seeing pursuant to that executive order agencies, they're not actually promulgating new regulations.
They're trying to bypass the EPA. And so where do we go from here? I've heard him talked about commenting on rules and ways in which courts have already stopped the administration from doing some things. I just want to say a few about the rule of law, states and localities and what they're doing and communities. We're going to have to see how Trump's efforts play out in court.
I've lost count. There are hundreds of lawsuits that have been filed against the administration, and judges have issued multiple orders blocking action. Say a little bit more about that. This is just a few of the some of the suits that push back on the actions. I've talked about litigation to challenge the freezing and termination of grants, personnel actions and and some of those are involved in trying to also organize community defense clinics, community and economic development clinics.
Pro-bono assistance groups like Lawyers for Good Government Environmental Protection Network, providing an array of services from public education. So they know if they fit into, say, an injunction or what their rights are to counseling, to representations, to being part of litigation. And lawyers for the government has an intake system. If you know a group that should plug into that.
And there's a role, a really important role for litigators and for attorneys general. So we're going to see what happens, whether the rule of law holds states and localities play a really important role, both in pushing back on illegal activities by the federal government and also by continuing to push for environmental justice for almost every state. I think if you go to the mapping tool that the E.J. Clinic here has helped develop, I think there may be six states that don't have something that might be called an environmental justice, but most states have some kind of law, regulations or process, including mapping tools, advisory committees, language access laws or rules, public participation, cumulative impacts laws,
enforcement of civil rights laws. So that needs to continue and that will be our goal work. And of course, I started with this and I'm going to end with this, that communities are at the forefront of continuing to push. They were at the beginning. That is the strength of the environmental justice movement, and they're going to keep going.
So the last thing I want to say is we can get discouraged. But I've been thinking back to my at the beginning of my practice, which was during the Reagan and Bush Bush one years, and I went to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and this is Julius Chambers, who was the director counsel of the Legal Defense Fund. And we went on a retreat to talk about how we survived the Reagan-Bush years and how we strategize around it.
And of course, at that time, it seemed like a nightmare because the Reagan administration was moving the Department of Justice from pushing for racial equality to intervening in or switching sides on school desegregation cases and affirmative action and so much more. And it felt like a real retrenchment. So we went we were all sitting around in a in a room, in a beautiful place and and on this retreat.
And everybody was like, what do we do? What's our strategy? And Julius, who was just amazing, he argued that Swann case, he argued Griggs which established disparate impact on employment discrimination. And we all looked up to him. And so he he said, listen to yourself that what he was saying was he grew up in segregation. We got to get a grip.
Things have been really bad in this country and people have lived through really bad times and we have to pull ourselves together. And as Thurgood Marshall did, as Charles Hamilton Houston did, we have to find our strategies and work toward a better future. And so bending the arc of the law toward justice is why I went to law school.
And I continue to believe in the school.
Christophe Courchesne
Thank you, listener, for tuning into Hothouse Earth today to view the full lecture with a Q&A afterward, please visit the Vermont Law and Graduate School YouTube Channel.
Narrator
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