In effect, the proud tradition of American environmentalism has mirrored the same democratic deficits that have afflicted society as a whole. Bureaucratic, centralized, and technical, modern mainstream-professional environmentalism has largely ignored local communities and the civic networks necessary to sustain them. Notwithstanding the rich tradition of grassroots environmentalism dating back to the neighborhood organizing of Jane Addams’s Hull-House and still extant today in many communities across the country, mainstream-professional environmentalists have not used their considerable power to foster community-based environmental efforts and have even sometimes helped to undermine them, as evidenced by the disproportionate impact of polluting facilities in minority communities for too long sanctioned by environmental regulators and public interest environmentalists alike.
By focusing their problem-solving strategies on the courts and Congress, and on issues like protection of wilderness areas, parks, and endangered species, mainstream-professional environmentalists have generally avoided local environmental issues and discounted the value of local civic networks in addressing environmental harms. Consequently, they have indirectly countenanced the continued environmental degradation of local communities.
The elitism and homogeneity of traditional environmentalism are further evidence of the movement’s democratic deficits. Only recently bothering to reach out across racial or economic lines, mainstream-professional environmentalism has alienated racial minorities and the working class, who traditionally have not identified with environmentalists. Moreover, notwithstanding the progress of the past several decades, environmental harms have not let up in lower-income and minority communities, revealing a gap in mainstream-professional environmentalism’s advocacy agenda or, worse, confirming the success of the environmental law and policy system.
Because environmental laws do not prevent pollution but merely control it, and decisions about the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens such as parks and polluting facilities are naturally a function of the relative political power of communities, it is no accident that environmental hazards persist, often following the path of least resistance to lower-income and minority neighborhoods. Lacking the political, medical, economic, and legal resources more affluent communities possess, and facing environmental hazards of all kinds, lower-income and minority neighborhoods are at the greatest risk of harm. The physical conditions in these neighborhoods thus represent some of the most serious environmental problems of our time. Yet the mainstream-professional movement has just begun to take notice.