The president’s top environmental justice official resigned just weeks before the White House marked the one-year anniversary of his ambitious climate agenda
By Darryl Fears Washington Post
As he prepared to embark on “the most ambitious climate and environmental justice agenda ever pursued” in Washington, President Biden tapped one of the nation’s foremost experts on the topic to lead his historic effort.
But Cecilia Martinez barely lasted a year in a role that felt like a pressure cooker.
Building a new framework across multiple federal agencies at the thinly staffed Council on Environmental Quality was exhausting, Martinez said. She resigned exactly three weeks before Thursday’s anniversary of Biden’s executive order to inject environmental justice into the DNA of federal agencies.
The Jan. 27 order seeks to undo historical wrongs that burdened underprivileged communities with disproportionately high levels of pollution.
“I got dangerously close to burnout,” Martinez said in a recent interview from her home in New Mexico. “Literally it was nonstop, seven days a week, all day long. In the midst of just some personal family issues I had, I literally had to rearrange my stepfather’s funeral around … meetings. It was just an incredible pace.”
‘This is environmental racism’
That arduous pace and near burnout show how difficult it is to bake an environmental justice framework into the federal government from scratch. Her departure has led some in her circle to wonder if the administration is truly committed to employing enough workers to tackle an overwhelming job.
Environmental justice — also known as environmental injustice and environmental racism — emerged out of protests against toxic-waste dumping, freeways, industrial plants, concrete batch facilities, incinerators, landfills, mineral mines, and other types of pollution that are disproportionately located in communities of color.
A recent study by the Environmental Protection Agency showed that particulate matter air pollution adversely affects Americans of color regardless of their state or income level.
Other studies have shown that air pollution is disproportionately caused by the nation’s White majority but its impact is felt largely by African Americans and Latinos.
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