The mother ship.

Photo: Wal-Mart.

It was easy for Wal-Mart’s critics to laugh this past spring when CEO Lee Scott proudly announced that he drove a Lexus hybrid. For Scott to expect praise for his consumer choices given the abysmal record of his massive company — which has repeatedly violated the Clean Water Act while contributing to sprawl, air pollution, and a host of other serious problems — seemed to insult public intelligence. It also seemed a strange maneuver for a man heading a company known for shunning environmental concerns. Indeed, in Robert Greenwald’s new film, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, one veteran activist says she has never encountered a company as unresponsive as Wal-Mart.

But since then, Scott’s green inclinations seem to have grown. In late October, he unveiled plans to hold Wal-Mart’s suppliers to higher environmental standards and to begin selling clothing made from organic cotton. Just four days later, in a speech to employees, he outlined his goals for being a “good steward” to the environment. Scott plans to increase fuel efficiency in the company’s truck fleet — one of the largest in the world — by 25 percent over the next three years, and to double fuel efficiency over the next decade from 6.5 to 13 miles per gallon. He promised to cut energy use at new stores by 30 percent and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions at the more than 5,000 existing stores, warehouse clubs, and distribution centers by 20 percent over the next eight years. He also said the company would offer cheaper health insurance to its employees, and called upon the government to raise the minimum wage.

How meaningful are Scott’s plans? Are they simply attempts to divert attention from concerns about Wal-Mart’s notoriously shoddy treatment of its workers? The mixed reaction from progressive activists reveals no easy answers.

Lee Scott.

Photo: Wal-Mart.

Baby Steps

The new proposals are, by Scott’s own admission, a response to increasing public pressure on both social and environmental issues. Reactions from activists have varied, reflecting divergent analyses of the company and differing opinions of how best to approach it. Without exception, they fault the plan for vagueness, and for including no intention of public reporting. But some advocates are cautiously hopeful.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club — which has, as he puts it, “frequently crossed swords” with the company in community battles — said Scott’s speech was “environmentally important and substantive, but it did not address some of the environmental problems with their business model.”

Despite concerns about the company’s use of “cheap land” and encouragement of sprawl, some critics still see Wal-Mart’s size and market power as a potential plus. “Wal-Mart ought to be using its competitive advantage to raise standards,” Pope says, and others agree. “Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world,” says Gwen Ruta, director of corporate partnerships for Environmental Defense, which has been in talks with Wal-Mart about these issues. “I’d like to see them flex their purchasing muscle. If you can make a change in Wal-Mart, even if it’s a small change, it’s really a big change, especially if it affects the supply chain.” (Wal-Mart has thousands of suppliers, and many manufacturers say its dominance is so complete that it would be impossible to stay afloat without doing business with the company.)

From the point of view of Pope, Ruta, and others, the proper response to Wal-Mart’s proposals is to see that the company actually lives up to them. Some will do that by continuing to fight community battles or assisting with public education efforts, while others will work more closely with Wal-Mart, hoping to influence company officials. Says Pope, “We have to acknowledge [Scott's plan]. We have been very careful not to call it green-scamming. It’s more like, when your kid is making progress going to bed, you acknowledge the progress, but you still have to make sure they get all the way to bed.”

Pope is also on the board of Wal-Mart Watch, a coalition that began with seed money from the Service Employees International Union. He says he sees connections between Wal-Mart’s abuse of the environment and of its workforce: both reflect the company’s fanatical obsession with keeping costs low. This connection is often made by activists at the community level, where environmental groups tend to work closely with labor and other social-justice groups, but such alliances have been slower to emerge among national groups. However, Tracy Sefl of Wal-Mart Watch says the contingents have been talking to each other far more this year, as a result of national visibility and momentum on Wal-Mart-related issues.

Down With Love

Many environmental leaders acknowledge that they have put less pressure on the company than social-justice activists have. And perhaps the most intriguing fallout from Scott’s announcement is its dismissal by labor advocates, who have managed to keep Wal-Mart’s offenses against workers in the news on an almost-daily basis. Rather than claiming credit for the initiatives and praising Wal-Mart for taking action on a matter of pressing public interest, Chris Kofinis of Wake Up Wal-Mart — a project of the United Food and Commercial Workers — calls the new plan a “publicity stunt.”

Green becomes you.

Photo: Wal-Mart.

To Sefl, dismissing the environmental overtures is politically “short-sighted. Just to say it is bad, bad, without consulting our environmental friends would make us sound like blowhards.”

Plenty of environmentalists also consider Scott’s announcement a sham, however, and find it difficult to imagine a truly green Wal-Mart. Stacy Mitchell, a senior researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance who is working on a book on big-box stores, views Wal-Mart’s size not as an opportunity, but as a critical part of the problem. To her, the company’s new initiatives “miss the bigger picture. What is truly sustainable is local sourcing. Of course we will always have trade, but sourcing locally cuts down dramatically on fuel and energy use.” She says local businesses are more politically accountable to communities and more invested in them; when you live and work among people, you may be less likely to dump toxins in their water.

And for Wal-Mart to promise more fuel efficiency while it continues to expand its operations, Mitchell says, “is like the person who buys a car that is 25 percent more fuel efficient, then drives it twice as much, and expects us to applaud.” Mitchell thinks environmentalists should oppose Wal-Mart’s growth. After all, the more stores Wal-Mart builds, “the more we have to drive — that is the biggest piece of the company’s environmental impact,” she says. “The best thing for the environment would be if Wal-Mart stopped building stores.” The very week of Scott’s speech on the environment, the company announced plans to add more than 60 million square feet of retail space.

Heather Rogers, author of Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, is equally skeptical of Scott’s newfound environmentalism. “It is a distraction, because the real environmental impact comes from what Wal-Mart sells: cheap commodities that are designed to wear out quickly,” she says.

Indeed, Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Patrick Jackman, who has extensively studied Wal-Mart’s prices, believes much of the savings consumers derive by shopping there may be offset by the poor quality of the goods. This disposability, Rogers points out, has a “double impact” on the environment: more raw materials must be extracted to replace the defunct products, while at the same time the discarded items are sent to polluting landfills.

Environmentalists’ disagreements on Wal-Mart offer a window on progressive confusion about the retailer: Is Wal-Mart a purely rotten model, or merely missing opportunities to be a force for positive change? Asked about the larger concerns that Mitchell and Rogers raise — worries that can’t be easily allayed by fuel-efficient trucks or organic cotton T-shirts — Ruta is philosophical. “The fact is, Wal-Mart exists,” she says. “We might as well try and make it better.”

Evacuees make their way from helicopter to bus.

Photo: FEMA/Win Henderson

For years, these advocates have been telling anyone who’d listen that blacks in New Orleans were far more affected by environmental problems than the white folks in, say, the Garden District — and would be far more vulnerable in a disaster. They’ve long realized a truth that the response to Hurricane Katrina seems to be proving: people in power viewed the city’s poorest residents as, says Robert Bullard, “expendable in some sense.”

Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University and author of the forthcoming The Quest for Environmental Justice, has been leading a research project on official responses to environmental disasters with Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. Wright and Bullard say blacks and other people of color are all too often overlooked in such crises.

For instance, last January, in Graniteville, S.C., a train crash released deadly chlorine gas, forcing the evacuation of some 5,500 people; black residents contended that white people were evacuated immediately, while a black neighborhood was not evacuated until hours later. There are hundreds of black farmers, their crops and barns destroyed by tornadoes, who have filed lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Agriculture for failing to grant the relief they say is provided to white farmers; in 1999, the government settled a $2 billion class-action suit addressing claims of discrimination. And after Hurricane Hugo devastated South Carolina in 1989, black victims received less emergency shelter and food assistance than whites in similar situations.

Katrina offered another painfully vivid illustration of the way inequities can pervade government planning for an emergency. Bullard explains that the evacuation strategy for a Gulf Coast hurricane, a long-anticipated event, “did not plan for people who did not have lots of money, do not own cars, the poor, sick, elderly.” (New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who is black, was justifiably — in his own words — “pissed” at the slow federal response to Katrina, but his race hasn’t spared him from criticism over his own failure to plan for his city’s least fortunate citizens.) This critical weakness had been exposed as recently as last year. During Hurricane Ivan, rich, primarily white people fled New Orleans in their SUVs, while the city’s poorest and darkest residents stayed behind. That time, the area was spared as Ivan drifted elsewhere, but many warned that the next storm might not be so merciful.

Louisiana, long a nationally recognized poster child for environmental injustice, has seen such inequities for decades. The 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is home to more than 140 oil refineries and chemical plants, accounting for one-fourth of the nation’s petrochemical production. Known as Cancer Alley because of the industry’s devastating health effects, the area has been a hub of environmental-justice organizing since the 1980s. Oil and chemical companies in Louisiana have long spewed pollutants in local communities, with little interference from any government agency. That’s what helped to create the toxic broth that now fills New Orleans’ streets, which is going to make cleanup difficult and, according to The New Orleans Times-Picayune, may make much of the city uninhabitable for years. Many houses, now stewing in these poisons, will have to be bulldozed even if their foundations are solid, says Wright.

The no-win situation New Orleans residents found themselves in last week has many antecedents. Wright points to a community in the city that was sited on top of the Agriculture Street Landfill, a Superfund site that closed in the 1960s. When the hurricane hit, the neighborhood’s mostly African-American residents were awaiting a judge’s decision on a request for relocation, a battle they’d been waging for over a decade. A 1999 state report found that residents were exposed to pesticides, metals, and numerous other toxic chemicals; the neighborhood’s breast cancer rate is the highest in the state. “It is ironic that the hurricane has given them what they have been asking for all these years,” Wright says.

For anything hopeful to emerge from the wreckage, New Orleans and Louisiana — as well as the rest of the country — will need representative and functional government, committed to a social safety net and environmental health. “When you ask, where is the history of Louisiana defending itself and its people, it’s just not there,” says Monique Harden, codirector of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights, which was based in New Orleans until the hurricane struck. “What Katrina has exposed is decades of benign neglect and racism, which you can’t prettify with a crawfish étouffé. This is the other side of New Orleans.”

Observers predict that economic issues will profoundly affect this legendary city’s future, just as they shaped its past. The rebuilding and cleanup will create jobs, and hold the potential for a massive New Deal-style public-works program, advocates agree. It will be critical to make sure that the city’s poor — those who want to come back — get the jobs, says Daryl Malek-Wiley, an environmental-justice organizer with the Sierra Club who took refuge from the hurricane in Houston, but plans to return to the city. “We shouldn’t allow Halliburton” — which already has a $17 million contract to rebuild naval facilities in Mississippi and Louisiana, and is likely to get far more — “to get millions while people who lived there get nothing.”

Keeping the vultures in check won’t be easy, activists acknowledge. “The economic structure of the city is controlled by old-line wealthy families and corporations,” says Wright, also a New Orleans resident. She points out that because the well-heeled live on higher ground, they will have a much easier time moving back than residents of low-lying, predominantly black communities.

“This may sound cold, but I think the [city's real-estate developers] are doing a break dance right now,” Wright says. “They are really happy to have us gone.” Wright and others fear that the city could be rebuilt as a massive gentrification project, one with no room for Katrina’s displaced. Of course, that would present a problem for the elites: in a New Orleans “cleansed” of poor people and blacks, where would all the petrochemical waste be dumped? Who would live on top of the leaky, carcinogenic landfills? And who would bear the brunt of the next Katrina?

The agency’s new plan defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”

That sounds uncontroversial enough on the surface, but the trouble lies in the word regardless. The field of environmental justice is based on the idea that some people — specifically, racial minorities and the poor — are more affected by environmental problems than others. It’s an idea based on substantial evidence, which has been accumulating for decades. For example, in the early 1980s, a landmark U.S. General Accounting Office study found that three out of four landfills in the Southeast were located in communities of color. A 1992 National Law Journal study found that Superfund offenders paid 54 percent lower fines in communities of color than in white communities. And recent studies have found that Latinos and blacks are much more likely to develop — and die of — diseases related to pollution, like asthma.

As Diane Takvorian, executive director of the Environmental Health Coalition, a 25-year-old group focusing on border communities in San Diego and Tijuana, explains, “We have always worked in low-income communities of color, because that’s where the pollution is the worst.” These areas are often ignored by local and state environmental authorities, she says, and activists in her group “have had to take enforcers by the hand into their communities” because the officials were afraid to go into “bad” neighborhoods.

In 1994, after years of pressure from the environmental-justice movement, then-President Clinton issued an executive order decreeing that all relevant federal agencies must work to identify and address “disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations in the United States.” The EPA’s new draft plan, by contrast, removes race and income from special consideration.

In the years since Clinton’s executive order, says Takvorian, things have improved, “especially at the regional level. The EPA has had a greater sensitivity, and taken approaches more appropriate to our communities.” She is not optimistic about the implications of the new plan: “We assume that sensitivity, and the resources now applied to environmental justice, will disappear.”

Robert Bullard of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University has called the EPA’s draft “a giant step backwards.” Other advocates agree. “We think this is the wrong direction for the EPA to go,” says Will Rostov, staff attorney for Communities for a Better Environment, a California-based environmental-justice group. “Essentially what they’re trying to do is not have an environmental-justice program.” Eliminating considerations of race and income, he says, “makes the program meaningless.”

This reaction goes beyond the world of environmental-justice activists. Last week, more than 70 legislators, including Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), signed a letter saying that the EPA’s draft plan “fails to address the real environmental-justice problems facing our nation’s most polluted communities” and lambasting the dismissal of race as “a significant departure from existing environmental-justice policies.” In their letter, the legislators also say the draft violates Clinton’s 1994 executive order.

EPA spokesperson Stacie Keller denies that. She emailed Grist a statement promising that the agency “has a continuing commitment to environmental justice and the full implementation of the executive order.” Asked why consideration of race appeared to have been excised from the agency’s definition of environmental justice, Keller said she would check with the program office, but did not respond before deadline.

In addition to being unhappy with the plan itself, environmental-justice activists are troubled by the process surrounding it. The EPA says it welcomes outside comments on the draft, but Rostov criticizes the agency for permitting a “very short time frame” for such feedback. “One of the principles of environmental justice is getting the public to participate,” he says, “and they allowed less than 30 days to have people comment, in the summer.” Although the original public-input period ended July 16, EPA announced on July 28 that it would hear comments until August 15. The agency expects to issue a final plan by September 2006.

It’s not as if there is any doubt that race and income affect a person’s likelihood of living in a polluted neighborhood, or suffering from the effects of inadequate environmental policies, observers say. “There is a disparate impact,” says Takvorian. “There are 200-plus studies that demonstrate that. So the question isn’t, ‘Is this true?’ We know it’s true. The question is, ‘What are we going to do about it?’”

Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), one of the legislators who signed the letter criticizing the EPA draft, puts it even more bluntly. “It isn’t that EPA doesn’t know what problems exist,” he said. “It’s their willingness to do anything about it. Shame on them.”