Region’s new EPA leader talks of priorities
Earthea Nance was tapped in December by President Joe Biden to serve as a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency in a five-state area that includes Texas.
At the time, Nance was an associate professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston. The 59-year-old has since moved to the EPA regional headquarters in Dallas, where her family is from, and has been traveling throughout the region she oversees, called Region 6, which also includes 66 tribal nations.
Nance views the appointment as an opportunity to make use of her wide-ranging experience: She was the first in her family to graduate from college. She holds undergraduate and master’s degrees in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Davis. She received a PH.D. from Stanford University, where she expanded her research to include Latin American studies and anthropology. Her dissertation focused on communities in Brazil that lacked water and sanitation.
Three months after she landed her first teaching job at Virginia Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology recruited her to teach in New England. Then Hurricane Katrina hit. The mother of two headed for New Orleans, where she was appointed as a city official to help with recovery. She launched the city’s first hazard mitigation unit, prepared a sustainability plan and oversaw its first carbon report. In 2013, she made her way to Houston to teach at the one of the nation’s largest historically Black universities about how people, infrastructure and the environment are linked.
At the EPA, Nance and her office quickly set a tone of advocating for previously ignored communities, pushing companies to move ahead on cleaning up hazardous waste under the San Jacinto River and asking Union Pacific to do more to address contamination in Fifth Ward. She spoke by phone last week with the Houston Chronicle about her background, her goals and her new job. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Can you walk me through your current priorities?
A:
The first is delivering on both the president and EPA administrator’s goals about embedding climate change and environmental justice into everything that we do. The next one has to do with delivering to Region 6 the great amount of resources that have been made available by the White House and by the administrator. Another priority is for many of the lessons learned here in the region to be brought back up to the national level and turn into changes in policy.
Q: It seems like such a broad job that you’ve stepped into. You’re a regulator, but it also involves some politics,
and I know you have a research background.
A: Everything that I’ve ever done and all of the experiences that I’ve had are brought to bear in this position, literally. There’s been moments in discussions with communities where I can bring an example of something that I’ve experienced, or a piece of knowledge, that becomes useful in that moment. The environment is pretty much everything. So even in just a regional position, this is a big job. That’s why we have so many people and we have a lot of expertise among the staff.
Q: Tell me about where you grew up. Did anything about your childhood get you into environmental policy, or was there a moment later that pointed you in this direction?
A:
As a child, I was very curious and very geeky. I went to the library every weekend and read and read and read. It would be not unusual for me, in elementary school, to pick up a chemistry book and just start reading it. I also grew up in the late ’60s and ’70s during the environmental movement, and I’m from San Francisco, so that was a really important cultural thing happening. It was a natural thing for me to be an environmentalist.
What you said about the environment encompassing so much, that rings true to me. Getting beyond the science of it and into the community part seems really interesting.
A:
That is to me the most important part of it. It’s true: As engineers, we don’t usually talk about the people. I could say that from experience. I’ve had my engineering license for 25 years. I’m very interested in the impacts on people. I even tell my staff, if they show me a map, and the location of people is not on there, I ask them, “Where are the people?”
Q: Why did you want to go to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?
A:
If you remember Katrina, it was the biggest disaster we had ever seen. It was on TV. Everyone saw it. You remember the people begging for help. I’m sitting in Cambridge, Mass., so comfortable, with every skill that’s needed on the ground. I thought, how can I sit there? So I left and I found a way to make probably the biggest contribution I’ve ever made in my career.
Q: With this Region 6 position, did you apply or were you nominated?
A:
When the president on his first day issued executive orders for environmental justice and climate change, I went to the website — the White House has a website — and applied. It was another one of those moments where everything just made sense.
Q: Are you the kind of person who’s working all the time?
A:
I enjoy my work. I feel like I’m making a difference.
Q: How would your friends describe you?
A: They’ve literally said the word, “relentless.” (Laughs.)
Q: Do you have any announcements coming regarding the Houston region, maybe with regard to concrete batch plants, ethylene oxide or the Union Pacific site?
A:
You just named three things that we’re working diligently on. Those are incredibly important issues to the community. We’re working on those and paying attention to those.
Q: Has it been frustrating to you, having to let states lead the way on these projects?
A:
When Congress wrote the laws that we’re implementing, they wrote that states lead in many of these areas, in terms of permits and other things. That’s not something that we decided. That is how it is. We usually have an oversight role. So that means we can object. We can make comments. So it’s frustrating, but everything is frustrating. You have to work with people. You’re not always going to get your way. People do sue each other. We have to work it out.
But I never forget our mission. The mission of EPA is to protect public health and the environment. I’m working at the level within the EPA, within a region, and so I understand those limitations that I have, but within that I can still make a lot of decisions. I can make a lot of things better than they are.