Our host, Lindi von Mutius, visiting professor of law at Vermont Law and Graduate School, Class of 1946 Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College, and inaugural director of the Center for Environmental Networks, chats with Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC). She is also SELC's Environmental Justice Initiative leader, which has produced "Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward," a multimedia storytelling series following the throughline from slavery to pollution—revealing how Black communities have borne environmental injustices for generations and continue to demand the healthy present and future they deserve.
Plantations to Pollution: Black Communities, Legacy Pollution, and the Path Forward - a multimedia storytelling series following the throughline from slavery to pollution—revealing how Black communities have borne environmental injustices for generations and continue to demand the healthy present and future they deserve.
https://plantationstopollution.selc.org/
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC)
https://www.selc.org/staff/chandra-taylor/
Narrator
This podcast, the production of the Maverick Lloyd School for the Environment, a Vermont law and graduate school.
Lindi von Mutius
Hello and welcome to the Hothouse Earth Podcast. I'm your host for this episode focused on environmental justice. My name is Lindi von Mutius, and I'm a visiting professor of law teaching in the Environmental Justice Clinic and handling some cases in the Black Belt. I'm also the class of 1946 Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Williams College, where I teach about toxics, waste, justice and the law and I'm also the inaugural director of the Center for Environmental Networks. I love working both as an educator and an attorney. And I'm so pleased to welcome someone whose career has taken a very similar path.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, also known as the SELC and leads this environmental justice initiative. Since 2016, she has served as an adjunct faculty as well at the University of North Carolina School of Law Teaching, Environmental justice, law, policy and regulation for nearly two decades. She has worked to confront the disproportionate burden of pollution worn by communities of color and low wealth neighborhoods across the South. Her legal career spans water quality advocacy, industrial hog operation reform and litigation to clean up toxic waste sites, always with a focus on protecting public health and elevating community voices.
There's a very long list of accolades behind her bio, including being recognized nationally for her leadership as an Audubon Toyota TogetherGreen Fellow, and she serves on the boards of the USC Institute for the Environment, the Greater Triangle Area chapter of the American Red Cross and the National Environmental Education Foundation. As a North Carolina native, she's also a proud graduate of USC Chapel Hill. Chandra, I'm so delighted to welcome you to the podcast today because it's an honor to get to speak with someone who is not only such a accomplished practitioner and educator, but someone whose own personal story is interwoven in her work. And I'd love for you to introduce yourself in a little bit more detail to our listeners.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
Thanks so much, Lindi. It's a real pleasure to speak with you today to be reconnected with Vermont Law School. I did have the opportunity. I think it was an opportunity of a lifetime, from my perspective, to participate in the Vermont law School, Environmental Justice Young Fellows Exchange. The collaboration between Blass and the Woodrow Wilson Institute, Department of State did realize, for me an even broader understanding of the importance of environmental protection.
I mean, I knew that entering this work that there were opportunities for international influence and international collaboration. And I think that was something that myself and the other participants in that program got to experience by being together in China. We were in Beijing for a while together, Gwangju for a while together, and exploring what it looks like to see a new burgeoning environmental protection system grow.
Hopefully we'll have some more opportunity to talk about that. But I do lead our environmental justice initiative at ELC, and I came to feel the 19 years ago. So, it has been a career for me that I've been able to grow and do even more work to help reduce disproportionate burdens of environmental harm on the most vulnerable communities in the South.
I came to SELC with that intention in 2006 knowing that SELC was a very formidable organization, and you know, we've grown so much since then. But even then, to know that there was an organization that was focused on improving the quality of people's lives in the South through protection of the environment, I was like, This is the organization that is going to do incredible environmental justice work in collaboration with black communities, with vulnerable communities, with communities that don't have a lot of money because of, you know, just being a group that is so intentional about making sure that we have a safe place to live, to work and to play.
So, I'm from eastern North Carolina. I've always lived in the South, and I've always been interested in social justice work. So, for me, environmental justice work is social justice work. It's about creating a level playing field so that people can live the best lives that they've envisioned for themselves. So, from my perspective, there are a lot of ways that we can all contribute to creating a level playing field for people to live the best lives that they envision for themselves.
And one of those paths, I think, was through environmental protection. And I come to this work as a person who's always been deeply interested in science and deeply interested in advocacy. So for me, the common Asian of an interest in science and an affinity for advocacy, that it made perfect sense that I was going to be able to do work to improve people's lives in an area of the country.
That means so much to me. I think, you know, people love where they grow up. They appreciate where they grow up. I do appreciate, you know, our abundant water resources, how green it is in the southeast. And, you know, the southeast is very, very diverse. I like being able to see, you know, lots of different people, lots of different races, people from my perspective, it felt very welcoming to stay in the South.
And I know I won’t overlook the problems that the South has. You know, we there's the legacy, a legacy of plantation slavery. That is a big part of, you know, what is the has looked back on with our plantations to pollution project black communities’ legacy pollution and the path forward. We are very thoughtful and intentional about making sure we're documenting that through line of this is what the harm was in the past.
This is how decisions about where people are after enslavement, where they would live, how the decisions about what types of land were going to be available to communities who host enslavement, that it was often land that wasn't the most desirable. And then there were future decisions made. You know, with urban renewal, like there is a clear threw line from plantation slavery through the decisions after that.
That brings us to how we see that the same communities that we're building our nation, without that, we still see these harms that are ongoing. And being able to connect those harms to current injustice, I think really brings more people into the understanding of this as a, you know, a social justice issue and more people into understanding what they can do to act to make things better for their own communities and for their neighbors.
Lindi von Mutius
You did something really important in your introduction here and talking about sort of the overview of your work, which is that there, you know, there's two ideas in environmental justice. The first is that environmental justice is the civil rights movement are tightly related, that the fight for social justice is also the fight for a clean, healthy environment is also environmental justice and that I think it's difficult to separate those two ideas from each other and, you know, make a sort of clean distinction between them because there are so many important connections between these two movements.
And I heard you say something very important, and I know that this is a real key feature of the way you illustrate the plantations pollutions timeline is that, you know, the the pollution that black communities in the South are living with today are the result of things that started in the 1600s that over 400 years ago. America created a system that has led us to a place where we now see that pollution.
And one of the things that is so interesting, I think, about environmental justice and also difficult is that environmental justice is really a part of a broader national conversation about the impact of racially discriminating policies and systems. And particularly, I think, the differences in the South between black and white Americans in those communities. Now, there are many other forms of environmental justice.
There's indigenous and viral, there's farmworker justice. There are many people who benefit, right? Black communities in the South as a slice of environmental justice. But I think it traces the origins of this movement so well, because this movement originated out of the civil rights movement to the point where you had Dr. King working to support the sanitation workers strike a day before his assassination.
So, you just had historical moments as well as impulses to bring these movements together. And so, I'm really grateful that you lifted that up in your introduction. And I would love to hear a little bit about how you as a lawyer are leaning into that nexus of social justice and environmental justice in delivering those solutions to the communities that you work with.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
And I think there are some some really straightforward practical ways that as a lawyer that I look at the intersection between civil rights work and environmental protection, and I'll get into a little bit of the weeds and we can pull out if we need to or so at Southern Environmental Law Center, there are, you know, where 240 staff, thereabouts, you know, that at least half are attorneys.
And we have all of our program areas. So, forests, coasts and wetlands, land and community water, wildlife, energy, air. And in each of our program areas, one of the things that our attorneys are doing, our program staff are doing, is looking at those areas with a lens of, you know, environmental justice, like what are the ways that we actually can make sure that we see, you know, a lessening of these extra burdens on communities that are most vulnerable in each of these program areas like that's making sure that the work of helping to achieve environmental justice is not siloed.
There are, at any given time, so many people who can take action to actually deliver additional amenities to communities that have been underserved. Seeing expansion of solar in areas where that is not available, making sure that energy is affordable in places where it has not been affordable. Looking at the gas build out and seeing how, you know, the influence of expansion of air is impacting the need for more or actually that the story about the need for more gas which you know is actually not you know that's a fiction like there's not this need that needs to be built out in this way. But what happens is that communities, vulnerable communities, black communities, are being disproportionately burdened by it. But all of these environmental issues do have at the same time, like this land, like who is suffering the most, who is receiving the least environmental benefit. So that is part of our approach to the work through our environmental justice initiative. In the political context, where we are right now, we're acknowledging that direct attacks on civil rights actually does implicate the delivery of environmental protections to communities of color that that that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a federal statute that prohibits discrimination in the use of federal funding. And that is a bedrock civil rights statute that is meaningful to communities that are seeking to achieve environmental justice. We know it's meaningful. And we also know that it is under direct attack by the current administration. So, what we are doing is making sure that we are continuing to look at, well, what are the ways to shore up continuing to have this bedrock environmental statute available and the regulations that implement it.
So that is part of the work of environmental justice, not only in one of our program areas, but that is across the program, areas like preserving this important civil rights protection because communities that have seen permits issued by state regulatory authorities, those state regulatory authorities receive federal funding to operate their programs. So when a community has seen a program operate in a way that has the impact of harming that community without the intent, then they have been able to rely on the implementing regulations of the Civil Rights Act to raise up like this is a problem with how this program is operating.
There is a discriminatory impact on how this program is operating. We want to point this out to your attention regulatory agency, and we want to point it out to your attention. You know, federal government that has the obligation to make sure that there is not discrimination in federal funding. Well, part of what we do is, you know, we're requesting information from the federal government about what's going to happen next with implementing regulation.
We're definitely keeping our eye on what we can do to protect those civil rights, implementing regulations. And we're also looking at, you know, what are the other tools that still remain to actually help achieve environmental justice? Because, yes, there's the direct intersection between civil rights law and environmental law. But at the same time, our bedrock environmental laws still remain and they also exist to protect all communities, including the communities that are most burdened.
So, we are making sure that we're looking at the National Environmental Policy Act and raising issues in review of environmental impact statements where we know that there are huge projects that may have, you know, like huge road projects. I mean, over and over again, we see that there are huge road projects that not only bisect communities, you know, so there's this left community cohesion.
There is the additional air pollution that comes with communities living in close proximity to big road projects. Well, when we had the opportunity to comment on a proposal for a big road project where an environmental impact statement is required, well, we still can raise issues regarding public health impacts, regarding impacts on the communities, quality of life, impacts on neighborhood character and cohesiveness, cultural heritage impacts.
We know that we still have the National Environmental Policy Act case law that says that these are important considerations that will continue even with the rollback of environmental justice, executive orders that were really meant to help provide more protections. And even with the rollback of the Council for Environmental Quality Regulations that gave really explicit instructions on considering environmental justice.
So, you know, there's definitely you know, this, as you said, this intersection between the two that we are always considering, we are still using our existing environmental law to make sure that we are working to provide more amenities for underserved communities and to provide more protections to overburdened communities.
Lindi von Mutius
I hear you saying the fight continues, which is really important. And I think for our students, very important message to hear in these unprecedented times. And I like to remind people that these are unprecedented times because Trump 1.0 was very different than what we were seeing now with more aggressive rollbacks, more aggressive slashing to protections, aggressive granting of exemptions for industry under current pollution and permitting rules.
We're just seeing a real increase in the sort of shots on goal, if you will, to to attack, especially communities that have already faced disproportion in it, harm from industry and fossil fuel. And so as the fight continues, where do you see opportunities for the fight to be unprecedented from our side as well? Like what's the call to action that you would give to our students and to our communities in this unprecedented moment?
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
Yeah, So that's a two-part question. I'll start with. What are some additional opportunities that we still see exist very early on in this administration as the LC and several of our partner groups immediately jumped into the fray and under the leadership of our litigation director to take on protecting federal funding that had, you know, that was unprecedented, that, you know, the environment and climate justice block grant program was something that had been unseen for that block grant program came into play the largest grant amounts for communities that were seeking to do work to achieve and global justice where, you know, typically $25,000 technical assistance grants that in fact had a lot of paperwork to
administer those grants for communities that have, you know, are often understaffed or unstaffed completely like this is with environmental justice groups. What we see over and over is that there are people who are caring and care to improve their own quality of life, to protect their quality of life, to seek more amenities. But there is no funding like that is also an issue that philanthropy has not supported black or led groups in the environmental movement in the same way as white led groups.
So, this community, these community organization and these organizations and small nonprofits have been operating on a shoestring budget or no budgets at all. And then with the prior administration, we see this $3 billion block grant program to actually give them more runway for groups that are trying to do important work, to improve air quality, to improve water quality, to improve people's access to safe and healthy food.
Food justice is incredibly important right now. We see what it was, what was happening with holding back snap benefits for people when we are so food-insecure as a nation. There are so many kids that don't. You know that during the summer they're not able to depend on the meals that they get during the school year. Well, in order to protect this funding, we got into the fight in two separate pieces of litigation Sustainability Institute versus Trump and Appalachian Voices versus EPA.
The prior being a lawsuit that involved 13 nonprofits and six cities all doing work to protect access to this funding that has been congressionally mandated and approved to be spent on these important projects and then a class-action to it to protect the entire grant program. So, making, you know, doing all that we can to make sure that resources that were made available and congressionally mandated actually get to those groups and to, you know, ultimately to the people that will benefit from that work.
So, you know, that is ongoing. And I will also just say that generally attacks on the words environmental injustice don't mean that suddenly the problem has gone away, that we still have the harm still exists, economic inequities still exist between black families and white families. Health disparities still exist between Native American families, lives of black communities, Native American communities, Latino communities are still having poorer health outcomes than white communities.
We still see that there's more likely to be black communities are more likely to be sited in close proximity to polluting facilities than white communities and white families. So, the problem still exists, even though there are direct attacks on the shorthand for disproportionate burden of environmental harm on the most vulnerable communities are attacks on the words. The problem is still here and there's still work to be done in using the bedrock environmental tools, using tools on the local level, like zoning, you know, looking at existing zoning, looking at the possibilities to have new ordinances that are more protected on the local level, where there are where they are receptive bodies of law makers looking at states that still have environmental justice, executive orders and environmental justice statutes. So, you know, we still see that there in what North Carolina still has an environmental justice executive order. We have at least one statute that looks directly toward permitting the siting of solid waste facilities in communities that would be disproportionately burdened by the siting of that new facility.
You know, Virginia has an environmental justice statute. So, looking at those state level opportunities, at the municipal level opportunities, of course, organizing for those who organize. So many of our partner groups do organize. And that is always going to be an incredibly important factor in making sure that you get the ordinance that you want or you that you see that a zoning decision that is about to be made that's going to be harmful, that you get to put that out there and possibly stop that zoning decision from happening that would have decades of consequences by allowing for, you know, a polluting facility to site right next to a residential neighborhood because of a zoning change. So, we still use the federal statutes and the federal protections that exist, look to state level protections work to build local ordinances that will be protected. And I think the second part of your question.
Lindi von Mutius
Yeah. The call to action, although I have a little bit of a call to action in the answer to the first part. So, I'm hanging on to that.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
Yeah. Yeah, I do think, you know, I do think that that is that, you know, all of that that last round up of where we can look for relief. And I also say I'm excited that we have rolled out citations to pollution black communities, legacy pollution, a path forward so that people can engage with this multimedia project. It is incredibly well done.
So, the Environmental Justice Initiative at SELC So there's, let me say, there's all of our staff who can at any time be doing the work of achieving environmental justice. But then there are dedicated staff who are regional staff like myself. My position is regional. That's been a part of my joy in being in this job of growing from an attorney license in the state of North Carolina to being a person who can work in our six-state region and work on South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia. And then we have our federal affairs team in Washington, D.C. So being a person who's able to work across the region and engage with these incredibly passionate, intelligent practitioners and incredibly resourceful, intelligent and passionate partner groups to achieve environmental justice. So, I am one of the regional staff members at SELC. We also have a environmental justice outreach associate who is part of our Chapel Hill office based in Memphis, who has done incredible work in Memphis to help achieve environmental justice. But she's in a regional position, working on, you know, making sure we're out there in communities, hearing what issues are and figuring out where we should be deploying the resources that we have. Because, you know, as you know, we are a nonprofit that is resource, but there is not there are not enough resources to attack all the problems that still exist.
So, you know, having someone on the ground regionally in communities is helping us have our ear to the ground to make sure we are actually hearing from like what are the priorities of communities to achieve environmental justice? We have an environmental justice senior attorney who's also regionally based and who's working on the federal funding freeze cases and also on other cross-cutting regional issues that we think will have national impact.
So I think that when people take the opportunity to actually view, you know, get into all of the stories, get into what's happening in Bucksport, get into what's in the Hampton Roads area and the history of plantation slavery in the United States to see what's going on in the Haiti community, too, to link to Starkville Plantation. And then what's happening now to get into these stories so that they are able to make the connection between prior injustice and current harm to explore, to actually, you know, support environmental justice organizations, to support the environmental justice organizations with time, talent and treasure, to actually reach out to decision makers, to let decision makers know, hey, their attacks
on these words, the problems still exist. What is it that you can do to make sure that the communities that we live in are safe, are healthy, and they're also allowing people to live the best lives that they envision for themselves. So, I mean, I think those are some calls to action that I think anyone can take. And I hope that people will have some inspiration, some education as a motivation from exploring the plantations to pollution project.
Lindi von Mutius
Wonderful. Chandra Well, I, I think what I see there is one thing that I feel like I always find about environmental justice is that environmental justice work is really democracy and community building work, right? You fix the pollution in a place, you strengthen that community's ability to be resilient for the future. Whether that is something around climate adaptation or removing pollution from the water or the air, you create a stronger, healthier community.
And at its core, this is the work that we must all do and all embrace in our own communities. I also loved and the irony of your one of your calls to action being that we can now use zoning because as we both know, zoning used to be used to concentrate hearts in black communities. And I think it's really wonderful that you've noted that it's actually a tool black communities can use now at the local level and local state legislators can use to turn that trajectory around and actually protect their communities from future harm.
I think the other thing I just wanted to summarize from what you said was that it is really important to understand the historical context of what we see today in the continued fight for environmental justice and understand that we have made a lot of progress and we still have a lot of tools, even if the zeitgeist of the moment would have us believe that this is not something we should be actively pursuing and fighting with this much passion.
So, I want to thank you for bringing that perspective to this podcast, because I think it can energize folks who are really scratching their heads right now and saying, you know, what can we do? I was just at a community meeting in Uniontown, Alabama, last week where SELC, some of your colleagues from Alabama were there, just simply explaining to the community what a new pipeline, a new proposed pipeline would actually do, how big the trench would be that they would have to dig through that community, helping the landowners, most of whom are black landowners who've been in that community for hundreds of years, several generations of black land ownerships now exist, explained to them so that they can understand and the consequences of saying yes or no to that proposed pipeline. And I think that I was I was so I felt so excited and energized when I walked away from that meeting because it was a simple tool of just educating people about their options in this ongoing fight, in these unprecedented times that felt so, so much like a victory. And I want to thank you and your colleagues for the work that you do at SELC in Black communities all over the South to make sure that people have a voice and to make sure that they understand how they can fight for their own communities.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
You know, Lindi, I want, I want also people to be thinking about how the work of achieving environmental justice is a part of the work that actually is in advancing our entire nation by protecting the most vulnerable communities. We are actually doing the best that we can for our entire nation.
Lindi von Mutius
Yes. Amen.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
You know, when I actually went to Beijing, you know, however many years ago, 2012, I remember, gosh, feeling like I had asthma, feeling like a person, like trying to exercise outside and like, oh, my gosh, you know, air quality here. You know, there are problems. You know, this nation is growing. They're trying to do the same thing that people are doing all over the world, you know, with, you know, a developing, you know, a nation that's, you know, they're powerhouse. They want to have the cars. And I was like, this is hard. This is why we have these environmental protections. And I think, you know, like what I understand now is like they've made so many advances. You know, they're protecting communities. They're making changes in terms of electric vehicle adoption, to have less reliance on fossil fuels that are harming our environment, like they're making advances that are that end up protecting the most vulnerable communities.
I also will say that in order to do environmental justice work, it has to be in collaboration with the most vulnerable communities. Doing work that's ancillary is great, but it is not the same as doing work directly with the most vulnerable communities. But to see other nations advance on, you know, protections that improve the environment for everyone, like we'll be left behind if we continue to make choices that don't protect the most vulnerable communities. And I think that's just a fact. So I think I hope that people will be motivated to see, you know, the nation make decisions that will protect everyone and advance all of us for healthier lives and a safer environment.
Lindi von Mutius
Well, thank you. I can't think of a better way to close our podcast, and I just want to say thank you so much for your courage and the work that you're doing, because the work that you are doing to make communities stronger and more resilient is really, as you said, the work that makes our nation stronger and more resilient.
So, I'm just really grateful to you and to the SELC and for everything that you've shared today. Thank you so much.
Chandra Taylor-Sawyer
Lindi, I appreciate the invitation. It has been a wonderful conversation, and I am so excited to be able to share the work that Southern Environmental Law Center has been doing. Our incredible staff all over the Southeast are incredible partners all over the Southeast with you and courthouse listeners. So, I appreciate you and I've enjoyed having a conversation with you today.
Thank you.
Lindi von Mutius
Thanks, everyone for tuning in to this episode of Hothouse Earth. My name is Linda Lucas, and I'm a visiting professor in the Environmental Justice Clinic here at Vermont Law and Graduate School, also a proud graduate class of oh eight. I am so grateful that you joined us for this episode and want to encourage you to check out our next episode on Hothouse or.
Narrator
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