Asthma & Environmental Justice Campaign for Solid Waste Plan 31
and other respiratory diseases. Despite legislation (Local Law 40) requiring the
Department of Sanitation to issue siting regulations for these facilities, they had failed
to do so. In 1993, regulations were proposed but never passed; in 1997, the city was
ordered by a court to issue regulations; in 1998, they issued weak regulations that
would have no effect on the concentration of sites; these were unsuccessfully contested
in court by OWN, but Sanitation was forced by political pressure from community
organizers to tighten up on enforcement.
36

Although this was clearly a land - use issue, the Department of City Planning never
addressed the location and concentration of waste facilities in the city. They could have
proposed using the city ’ s “ fair share ” rules, which were to ensure that no neighbor-
hood had more than its fair share of certain facilities. Although these rules, established
in the City ’ s Charter, apply only to certain publicly owned facilities, the planners never
evoked the principle or instituted efforts to apply them to all facilities serving a public
function. Instead, they deferred to the Sanitation Department and missed an important
opportunity to work across departments. The Department of Health instead recognized
the critical importance of asthma and began an initiative that included research,
education, and prevention; it targeted intervention in neighborhoods with high concen-
trations of childhood asthma cases. Three neighborhood - based health initiatives in
affected areas went beyond traditional regulatory measures and promoted more com-
prehensive approaches that, in collaboration with community - based advocacy groups,
identifi ed elements in the built environment that tended to trigger asthma crises.
However, the Department of Sanitation did not engage the health professionals, and
they were not obligated to do so by the City. The City Planning Department was also
not involved and did not make any changes to zoning regulations that would have
restricted waste facilities, and they did not support community - based planning efforts
that addressed unhealthy conditions in a comprehensive way.
3


costs and remove a potential obstacle to gentrifi cation in waterfront neighborhoods
they were targeting for new housing development. It strengthened the hand of commu-
nity groups angling for a greater say in land - use planning so that a better environment
would not be accompanied by gentrifi cation and displacement. City Hall followed
the principles of growth and effi ciency while OWN emphasized equity, but the two
came together in a tactical compromise. According to environmental justice activist
Eddie Bautista, the plan was resisted by the city ’ s Department of Sanitation, whose job
seemed to be defi ned as only “ taking out the trash. ”
36

Advocacy Planning and Environmental Justice
Eddie Bautista was OWN ’ s lead organizer for most of its history and worked for the
nonprofi t New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. He became one of the city ’ s lead-
ing experts on solid waste management and a central fi gure in the development and
advancement of OWN ’ s plan and then the city ’ s SWMP. Bautista got involved as
an advocate for the neighborhoods that were saturated with waste transfer stations and
became a leader in the city ’ s environmental justice movement. He had grown up in
Red Hook, one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods affected by waste transfer stations.
After the city adopted the principles of the OWN - backed solid waste plan, Bautista
became an aide to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and went on to assist in development of
the city ’ s fi rst long - term sustainability plan, PlaNYC2030.
38

What led Bautista and OWN toward a comprehensive, citywide approach? First,
according to Bautista, was the realization that the city ’ s experts were always setting
the agenda, and to get involved in the discussion, OWN had to have an alternative.
OWN hired the Institute for Local Self Reliance, a Washington, D.C. – based non-
profi t, to help fi nd that alternative. However, according to Bautista, “ one of the prob-
lems was that their experience was mostly in recycling, and that wasn ’ t our priority.
After a lot of discussion, we realized that what was missing in the traditional approach

out the campaign, he worked closely with urban planners, engineers, and public health
professionals, including the coauthor of the OWN plan, Barbara Warren.
Tom Angotti fi rst met Bautista when Angotti was a senior planner with the
Department of City Planning in the early 1990s and worked on a community -
generated plan for Red Hook, a low - income waterfront neighborhood that had suc-
cessfully fought off two proposed sewage sludge treatment facilities and shut down
several private waste transfer stations. After playing a critical role in the environmen-
tal justice campaign in Red Hook, Bautista collaborated in the development of the
community plan. After Angotti left City Planning, he became professor and chair
at the Pratt Institute Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. He then
joined OWN, representing Planners Network, a group of advocacy planners founded
in 1975, and advised OWN in a court - endorsed mediation with the Department of
Sanitation that was geared toward creating siting regulations for waste facilities
(no agreement was reached). He also became Eddie Bautista ’ s thesis advisor. Angotti ’ s
role followed closely that of the advocacy planner and is one illustration of how
urban planners can step out of their assigned roles to support efforts that are aimed
at improving environmental health. It is also an example of how learning and
c02.indd 33c02.indd 33 6/3/09 11:57:40 AM6/3/09 11:57:40 AM
34 Environmental Justice Praxis
knowledge in academic, professional, and community arenas is a complicated pro-
cess in which all teach and all learn from one another, as opposed to a top-down and
hierarchial approach.
39

ASIAN IMMIGRANT AND REFUGEE ORGANIZING FOR
ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH AND HOUSING IN THE BAY AREA
In Oakland, California, an environmental justice initiative illustrates how academic,
social, and political forces interact to move practice toward new holistic and interdis-
ciplinary approaches. This example is where a community - based organization, Asian
Pacifi c Environmental Network (APEN), works to promote environmental justice,

campaign to adopt a “ just cause ” ordinance similar to those in other Bay Area cities.
The campaign argues that “ everyone has a basic right to continue to live in their com-
munities. ” LOP ’ s newest front is fi ghting displacement and winning protections for
tenants against unfair evictions. LOP ’ s focus on housing justice strongly affi rms a
c02.indd 34c02.indd 34 6/3/09 11:57:40 AM6/3/09 11:57:40 AM
Asian Immigrant and Refugee Organizing 35
basic principle of environmental justice: “ fi ghting for basic rights to protect our com-
munities where we live, work and play. ”
4

1
Vivian Chang, then-Executive Director of APEN, explained her view that the
environment does not just mean pollution exposure (personal interview by Sze, August
5, 2006). For example, many Laotians grow their own food in their gardens (a practice
they brought with them upon coming to the United States, journeys that were a result
of U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia). Their view is that when tenants are evicted,
these gardens and spaces that provide food as well as psychological connection to the
land are also destroyed. Thus, environmental justice for Laotians also means commu-
nity food security and access to environmental “ goods ” (e.g., gardens and open spaces).
APEN also advocated for an enforcement board to deal with code violations and evic-
tions in Richmond.
APEN ’ s other organizing arm, Power in Asians Organizing (PAO), is focused on
organizing Asian ethnic communities in the city of Oakland, including large numbers
of Vietnamese, Chinese, Laotians, Cambodians, and Filipinos. Like LOP, PAO ’ s core
group of community resident/activists focused on safe and affordable housing through
their Housing Justice Campaign. PAO, with two other organizations, worked for three
years to secure affordable housing at Oak to Ninth, a large housing project of 3,100
residential units located in the heart of PAO ’ s organizing area. The land, a sixty - four
acre contaminated parcel on the waterfront, was originally proposed as 100 percent
luxury condominiums (in a community where the average family is considered “ very

political and practical vision. Chang previously worked as an organizer with Asian
Immigrant Workers Advocates on their garment worker justice campaign, after which
she worked briefl y with the California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA)
on their cumulative risk project. At Cal/EPA, she learned the importance of having an
insider- outsider strategy to successfully implement positive policy change for envi-
ronmental justice (as Angotti also learned). That is, to be effective, environmental
justice activism and policy development needed to have both intermediaries and allies
within public agencies and movement pressure from outside the agencies, specifi cally
from community - based organizations. After those experiences, Chang attended the
University of California at Los Angeles and received a masters in urban planning. For
Chang, graduate education offered both a theoretical framework for interpreting
regional economies and industries (e.g., the garment industry in Oakland) as well as
pragmatic tools (GIS mapping and how to research particular industries and corpora-
tions). According to Chang, “ graduate, academic, and professional training helped me
develop smarter activist and organizing campaigns (such as living wage campaigns), ”
because this training helped her understand the dominant discourses and frameworks
for policy development.
Chang believes that her personal work and academic experiences work synergisti-
cally, leading to innovative approaches to improving community development and
public health in low - income Asian immigrant and refugee populations in Bay Area
cities, specifi cally through the language and framework of the environmental justice
movement. One of the key questions she grapples with in APEN ’ s programmatic
work is: “ What does a public health approach to urban development look like? ” In
part, the answer depends on whether a particular development project or existing
policy (whether land use, economic development, housing, environmental, or public
health) promotes or negatively impacts community health and improves democracy,
what environmental justice scholars call “ participatory justice. ”
APEN strategically uses research as an organizing tool. To document environmen-
tal justice problems, APEN and four other environmental justice groups released
“ Building Healthy Communities from the Ground Up: Environmental Justice in

And government policy tends to focus on individual programs and agencies to solve
specifi c issues and problems without necessarily looking at the whole picture. Holistic
approaches are preached and promised by many, but they are often hard to come by in
practice. Grand theories may promise effi cient and equitable solutions to chronic urban
health problems, but in practice, equitable solutions that address differences of race
and class are often compromised.
Environmental justice praxis can help address these issues. Through environmen-
tal justice praxis, practitioners use technical knowledge that moves among urban
planning, public health, and other disciplines, and they incorporate professional exper-
tise to achieve broad goals of social and environmental justice in communities long
disenfranchised by race and class. In doing so, environmental justice praxis embodies
and represents the best possibilities for holistic urban health research and practice. In
crossing disciplinary and organizational barriers, environmental justice practitioners
are making both public health and urban policy better, particularly in helping to
advance such concepts as cumulative impact and the precautionary principle. Although
more orthodox approaches to comprehensive societywide problems often result in rela-
tively greater health risks for low - income communities of color, environmental justice
praxis can help ensure that “ nobody ’ s backyard ” becomes a health risk.
This path is not without challenges, especially because existing divisions and
categories are entrenched in both academic training and policy contexts. But environ-
mental justice activists tend to understand that the problems faced by low - income and
urban communities of color are relentless and that existing modes of practice are not
working. This reality paradoxically creates better conditions for more dynamic and
interdisciplinary urban health and environmental research and policy. Our real - world
c02.indd 37c02.indd 37 6/3/09 11:57:41 AM6/3/09 11:57:41 AM
38 Environmental Justice Praxis
examples from New York and California, coming directly out of the environmental
justice movement, show just how and why improved interdisciplinary approaches may
help to remediate the worst examples of social injustice (and their health and environ-
mental impacts) at community, city, and regional levels. Ultimately, interdisciplinary

cases, activists employed an environmental
justice framework in seeking to understand
community health and environmental prob-
lems and to advocate for solutions through
community organizing. They adopted a
broad a defi nition of community health and
reimagined urban development, the built
environment, and public health in broad,
holistic terms. Lessons learned include the
importance of understanding the relation-
ship between social justice movements and
the production of know ledge and under-
standing the occasionally fraught and con-
tested relationships between communities
and academic institutions.
c02.indd 38c02.indd 38 6/3/09 11:57:41 AM6/3/09 11:57:41 AM
Notes 39
NOTES
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Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.
3. Angotti, T. New York for Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real
Estate. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008.
4. Davidoff, P. Advocacy and pluralism in planning. Journal of the American Institute
of Planners, 31, no. 4 (1965): 186 – 197.
5. Corburn, J. Confronting the challenges in reconnecting urban planning and pub-
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19. Tolley, R. The Greening of Urban Transport. London: Belhaven, 1990.
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21. Kaufman, J., Ed. Special issue: Planning for community food systems. Journal of
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29. Morello - Frosch, R., Pastor, M., Jr., Sadd, J., Porras, C., and Prichard, M. Citizens,
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