The Elusive Environmental Justice Area: Three Waves of Policy in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Despite almost two decades of effort, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues struggling to define “environmental justice areas” or “EJ communities” for the purpose of administering its programs and measuring its progress. One cause for the long delay is the lingering technical problem of determining disproportionate impact; another is the political and administrative challenge posed by changes in environmental justice policy. In this historical overview, I argue that the EPA's efforts to establish nationally standardized guidelines for identifying EJ areas have corresponded to three overlapping but distinct “waves” of environmental justice policy. Although the third wave of EJ policy has restored the program's original focus on low-income and minority populations, it will remain difficult to institute a consistent definition in the face of place-specific differences among communities experiencing environmental injustice.