House Bill 2488 would codify environmental justice principles, but lawmakers are already limiting its scope
Lisa Arkin is the executive director at Beyond Toxics. The Eugene-based nonprofit centers and uplifts voices that are most affected by pollution and climate change in frontline communities to build a statewide environmental justice movement.
Land is identity. “I’m from the coast.” “I own a farm.” “My family has lived on ranch land for five generations.” Our sense of ourselves is integrated with the way we own and use land.
Land is wealth. Those who own and control land may perpetuate generations of wealth — or conversely, landlessness may perpetuate poverty.
Land is equity. Colonial settlement in America was nothing less than taking land — along with identity, wealth and equity — from the Native American peoples. The pattern continued as Black Americans were systematically denied farm loans from the U.S. Department of Agriculture throughout the 20th century, forcing many to lose their farms and homesteads. Systemic exclusion was repeated again when, left out of the GI home loan programs for war veterans, many Black families were forced to remain renters. Collective historic inequity is four centuries of excluding from land ownership people of color and those not of European ancestry.
Correcting these disparities in identity, wealth and equity is what we today must tackle. Exactly such an effort came directly from Oregon’s environmental justice communities in the form of House Bill 2488, a bill forged in a time when we know that vulnerability to the risks of climate change are borne most heavily by frontline, low-income and rural communities, as well as communities of color.
H.B. 2488 incorporated measurable climate and equity goals into land-use decisions. Oregon’s statewide land-use system, conceived in the 1970s under the leadership of Gov. Tom McCall, established 19 land-use goals to guide everything from urban development to protecting oceans, farm and forest lands to planning transportation systems. It was a bold accomplishment that mandated natural resource conservation and coordinated urban development between local governments.
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Historically entrenched racial and cultural inequities, unfortunately, are not mitigated within Oregon’s original 19 land-use goals. A half a century has passed with few updates to the land-use planning system, despite the influence of land use on nearly every aspect of identity, wealth and equity. During the two terms I served on the Lane County Planning Commission, I observed how patterns of historical exclusion and bias are woven into the fabric of land-use goals. This is particularly true for Goal 1, called the Citizen Participation Goal. The people participating were land owners and their lawyers. Over the nearly eight years I served, I never heard testimony from a person of color, a renter, a houseless person or someone from public health or disability services.
H.B. 2488 is the first land-use legislation to reveal and unravel underlying prejudices in order to reweave social, economic and environmental justice into the fabric of land-use laws.
The bill’s visionary chief legislative sponsors — Reps. Karin Power (D-Milwaukie) and Ken Helm (D-Washington County) and Sens. Michael Dembrow (D-Portland) and Jeff Golden (D-Ashland) — embraced science and environmental justice to craft a new Goal 20 for climate justice. Proponents set out to reverse centuries of excluding vulnerable, disproportionately impacted people from the rooms where decisions are made. Gov. Kate Brown set aside $800,000 as seed money to launch the Department of Land Conservation and Development’s Goal 20 adoption process.
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Prospects of passage looked hopeful. Yet the version of H.B. 2488 that passed out of committee on a 4-3 partisan vote was extensively altered due to opposition from lobbyists and legislators who prefer to keep the status quo.
Understanding this “lay of the land,” Rep. Pam Marsh (D-Jackson County), chair of the House Committee on Energy and Environment, made a strategic decision to keep H.B. 2488 alive by limiting its scope.
Gone is the climate mitigation goal that would have required city and county planners to consider the climate impacts of major land-use decisions, such as whether to expand city limits toward an unstable shoreline, or whether carbon rich farm soils should be converted to parking lots.
Gone, too, is development of maps and tools to help local governments understand and better address the unequal impacts of climate and public health burdens on vulnerable communities, such as where to build transportation corridors or whether to allow heavy industries next to low-income neighborhoods.
The amended bill still aims to center inclusion in land-use planning by incorporating practices to engage the community, particularly our historically excluded groups.
That is a positive step, yet we take such tiny steps at our own peril. Today’s land-use decisions inexorably shape what will only become more critical — and less reversible — as climate-deteriorating impacts accrue. Lack of action will, as it has for centuries, cause vulnerable communities to suffer disparities in identity, wealth and equity.
As the bill moves on to the Joint Ways and Means Committee, let’s hope that our legislators will adopt H.B. 2488 as amended for the public purpose of achieving equity and inclusion. With the commitment of all legislators, not only our champions working to keep it alive, H.B. 2488 can spur immediate next steps on the pathway toward achieving climate, equity and environmental justice for all of us.
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