Environmental activists exercise new clout
Tom Udall’s candidacy for Interior post was among first targets
WASHINGTON — When Joe Biden in December was mulling whom to name as his Interior secretary, entrusted with hundreds of millions of acres of public land, a network of nascent environmental groups eager for clout made a move that defied the usual Washington playbook.
They launched a campaign to block the person believed to be at the top of the president-elect’s shortlist — retiring New Mexico Sen. Tom Udall, a longtime Biden friend and former aide whose father held the post in John F. Kennedy’s Cabinet.
“It would not be right for two Udalls to lead the Interior before a single Native American,” they wrote in a public letter to Udall.
Soon after, Udall was passed over in favor of another New Mexico Democrat less familiar to Biden: Rep. Deb Haaland, who, if confirmed, would be the first Native American to run a Cabinet level agency.
Similarly, California air quality regulator Mary Nichols, the perceived front-runner to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, was derailed — much to the dismay of some big, old-line environmental groups — by opposition led by local activists from California.
As Democrats have taken power in the White House and Congress, long-simmering tensions within the environmental movement are coming to the forefront, leaving established leaders pushed aside by activists who see them as too white, cautious and out of touch with the effects of industrial pollution on communities of color.
“It used to be that these mostly white, mainstream environmental groups would be in those rooms, making the decisions and then call us to say what was decided,” said Robert Bullard, an author and co-chair of the Black Environmental Justice Network, known to some as the father of environmental justice. “We said, ‘Never again. We are not going to leave it to other folks to speak for us.’”
“The tension has been there for a long time,” said Ramón Cruz, who last year was elected the first Latino president of the 128-yearold Sierra Club. “Organizations like ours have done harm in the past. We have supported policies seen by many environmental justice groups as displacing pollution into what we see now were ‘sacrifice zones.’ That is no more.”
The realignment creates both political opportunities and risks for the new administration. Biden benefited from the more liberal groups’ organizing power and resonance with young and nonwhite voters to win election and to help Democrats retake the Senate.
And yet, though he delighted the groups with his Cabinet picks, delivering on their policy expectations could prove fraught, given Democrats’ tight majorities in the Senate and House. Biden will be beholden to centrists including
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, an ally of fossil fuel companies. The last time a Democratic Congress considered a major climate bill, in 2010, the coal-state senator made a political ad in which he fired a bullet through a copy of the legislation.
“The environmental justice groups this election did the grassroots work of mobilizing voters and getting their agenda recognized by the Democratic Party for the first time in history,” said Phaedra Pezzullo, a scholar of the movement at the University of Colorado. “Now they are going to be assessing whether it made a difference.”
In recent years, the grassroots organizations coalesced to increase their power and grabbed attention last year amid the national reckoning over racial violence and discrimination.
Before that, environmental justice was the inspiration for New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to first run for office — after her 2017 visit to Indigenous activists fighting the Dakota Access pipeline. The congresswoman, who quickly became a leader of the party’s left flank, went on to co-author the Green New Deal — an ambitious agenda for fighting climate change that links joblessness and public health crises in marginalized communities to environmental neglect.
The blueprint’s influence grew as groups like the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented climate-justice organization, led efforts to oust congressional Democrats perceived as moving with too little urgency. A week after Democrats took control of the House in 2018, Sunrise activists were protesting at the office of House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. By 2020, the Green New Deal had helped shape the climate plans of every major Democratic presidential candidate, though Biden’s wasn’t nearly so bold.
The actions that initially confounded some in the mainstream organizations ultimately proved successful in pushing Democrats to embrace more ambitious climate goals and make environmental justice a priority.
The pressure drove then-candidate Biden to bolster his climate agenda, vowing an emissions-free power grid by 2035 and that 40% of spending in his $2 trillion climate plan would go to polluted, low-income communities.
The tension between the old and new guards is spilling over into one of the most sensitive areas: funding. The grass-roots groups now compete for large philanthropies’ donations.
Another change: Both old and new groups had seats at the table during Biden’s transition to the presidency. Last week, justice activist groups’ allies in Congress unveiled legislation to force the administration to allocate conservation funds in accordance with Biden’s campaign promises.
The activists are now contemplating their next targets.
One priority: making sure communities that disproportionately contend with pollution get the money Biden promised. Another: ensuring that local groups remain influential in an administration heavily staffed by veterans of the Obama administration and mainstream environmental organizations.
Conflicts among the groups are likely to emerge over how — and how quickly — to shift the nation’s power sector from oil and gas without killing thousands of jobs. There are already clashes over the transitional role of nuclear energy and carbon capture strategies, with activists on the left objecting that such sources would slow the phaseout of fossil fuels.
For that reason, they oppose Biden’s “all of the above” energy approach and his compromise stance on fracking.
It all leaves the president and other Democrats on tricky political terrain.
The influence over Cabinet nominations by groups previously dismissed as small and disorganized was a “watershed moment,” said Michael Mendez, a University of California, Irvine professor and author of a book about the environmental justice movement in California. “We have entered a new era.”