Fair or not, the race of Biden’s EPA nominee raises expectations

Commentary

Michael Regan, President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), has been celebrated in the short term in the spirit of bipartisanship. Four Republicans joined all the Democrats on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in moving Mr. Regan’s nomination to the full Senate.

In addition, Mr. Regan, currently serving as the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ), has garnered praise from environmentalists and is seen as a stark and needed change from the previous administration.

It is important to ask, though: How far will those changes go? And who will have a voice in them?

When we think of the EPA, we imagine conversations about climate change and hydraulic fracturing. Yet the role of the agency decisively ties into the relationship between working-class people and corporations. Within the context of that relationship, protecting the environment should mean protecting – and listening to – the people.

Mr. Regan’s leadership model in North Carolina suggests that he wants to hear from the people. He founded the Environmental Justice and Equity Advisory Board in 2018, a group specifically designed, he said, to “help us elevate the voices of the underserved and underrepresented as we work to protect the public’s health and natural resources.”

Yet, while his concern for community has been applauded, his response to business interests has been criticized.

In 2017, just after Mr. Regan took office, the EPA’s External Civil Rights Compliance Office expressed concerns about people of color being disproportionately affected by hog farm waste. Yet two years later, the department, well established under Mr. Regan’s leadership by then, issued a five-year permit for swine operations that required adjustments environmentalists felt were far too minor. In particular, it continued to allow “a blatantly unfair and dangerous industry to manage waste in the exact same way, … unfairly and illegally extracting a disproportionate cost from communities of color,” river-keeper Katy Langley Hunt told Facing South, the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.

The history of environmental racism

Whether fair or not, high expectations have been placed on Mr. Regan because of his race and his roots. If selected, Mr. Regan would be the first Black man to head the EPA, after having been the first African American to lead the NCDEQ. That distinction, combined with his degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, a historically Black school, means Mr. Regan will be looked upon to lead with a conscience that is mindful of the history of environmental racism.

That history is extensive – in North Carolina alone. In 1972, after months of fighting the placement of a landfill in Rogers-Eubanks, a predominantly African American community just outside Chapel Hill, residents agreed to accept the landfill in exchange for sewer services and construction of a community center. It would take more than 40 years for the community center to come to fruition in 2014, and sewer infrastructure was completed in 2019.

During that time, a flashpoint of the environmental justice movement in this country happened in Afton, North Carolina – once again, around the placement of a landfill. Afton, in Warren County, a low-income area with a high percentage of the state’s Black residents, was marked by the state to host a hazardous waste landfill. The NAACP and other activists, including Benjamin Chavis, who would later be appointed to then-President Bill Clinton’s National Resources transition team, began a series of protests in response to the decision, including obstructing trucks bringing material to the landfill. More than 500 people were arrested. Though protesters were not successful in stopping the landfill, they drew considerable attention to the need for environmental justice.  

Will urgency mean inclusivity?

If Mr. Regan’s appointment is approved, EPA challenges won’t be his to face alone – they rest on the entirety of the Biden administration, which has touted diversity, saying that it wants to “build an administration that looks like America.”

Mr. Regan fits that model and has made comments in tune with President Biden’s with regard to climate change. “We will move with a sense of urgency on climate change, and we will stand up for environmental justice and equity,” Mr. Regan told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on Feb. 3.

One thing is clear: If Mr. Regan is appointed, his approach will be profoundly different from that of the last administration, which literally deleted the phrases “climate change” and “global warming” from many EPA webpages and rolled back both regulations and staff.

While the challenges and failures of the EPA shouldn’t be relegated to one party, Mr. Regan, if appointed, will have a unique opportunity to turn the department in a winning direction. And part of his motivation is literally inside of him. As a child, he used an inhaler for a respiratory condition linked to pollution from factories and power plants in his native North Carolina.

Yet, even with Mr. Biden’s backing, Mr. Regan won’t be able to succeed on his own. As the Afton landfill example illustrates, communities have a role to play in steering the country toward more just environmental policies and practices.

That kind of unified approach might change more than the environmental condition of our country and world. It might signal a change in political climate as well.

Ken Makin is the host of the “Makin’ A Difference” podcast.