Remarks for the NEJAC Annual Meeting, As Prepared for Delivery
Michael Regan
Washington, DC
March 24, 2021
Hi everyone. Thank you for inviting me to be here with you all.
I’m glad we’re having the opportunity to meet early on, because the work you’re doing will be front and center to our agenda moving forward.
I want to start by saying how much I appreciate everything NEJAC has done and how you’ve always welcomed Administrators at your meetings.
Even when things were difficult, when you didn’t have the proper support or the attention from leadership that you deserved, you stayed true to the principles that have always guided you – and you lived up to them.
You maintained the integrity of the body, and you looked for opportunities to lift up environmental justice and speak truth to power.
I want to thank the current and former leadership of NEJAC for providing stability, leadership, and strength to the larger body and to all of us at EPA: Sylvia Orduno, Mike Tilchin, Na’Taki Osborne Jelks, and Richard Moore. Your thoughtfulness, guidance, and perseverance have left an indelible mark. I’m grateful to all of you.
Environmental justice is near and dear to my heart. It's an issue that I've spent much of my career on.
As many of you know, I got my start at EPA more than 20 years ago, and I was focused on environmental justice and equity issues from the beginning. Most recently, as Secretary in North Carolina, I established the state’s first environmental justice and equity advisory board, bridging environmentalism and civil rights to find solutions for our fence line and underserved communities.
It’s also not lost on me that in more than 50 years of EPA’s existence, I’m the first Black man and only second person of color to serve as administrator. It’s an honor – and not a responsibility I take lightly.
We have a lot of ground to make up, but I’m enthusiastic about what’s ahead and what we can accomplish together.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that environmental justice will underpin all our work – confronting climate change, safeguarding our drinking water, revitalizing contaminated sites.
It will be the heart of our work because it’s our obligation to empower the people who’ve been left out of the conversation for too long – the same communities who are on the frontlines of pollution, who suffer disproportionately from the impacts of climate change, who are dying at higher rates from heart and lung disease, and now COVID-19, too.
We cannot allow these disparities to endanger the lives of our Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and low-income communities anymore. They’ve suffered disproportionately from policies and processes that didn’t go far enough or failed altogether.
Fortunately, we have in President Biden a leader who has pledged to prioritize environmental justice and put the whole of government behind advancing a systematic approach to racial justice, civil rights, and equal opportunity.
In his first days in office, the President signed a series of executive orders, mandating that all executive departments and federal agencies embed fairness and equity into their decision-making – from issues of housing, to incarceration, to Tribal sovereignty, to combatting xenophobia against the AAPI community, to climate change.
I’m proud that environmental justice is finally taking its rightful place in the work of EPA and the entire federal government – not as an add on or an afterthought but as a central driving factor in all that we do.
This includes a return to serious strategic planning and setting transparent commitments for how EPA integrates environmental justice into all our work, and your partnership will be critical to that.
We’re working closely with CEQ and OMB to develop a climate and economic screening tool in line with the President’s Executive Order that builds off EPA’s own mapping tool experience.
We’re in the early days still, but I’m especially enthusiastic about EPA’s involvement with the administration’s Justice40 Initiative. It’s a critical opportunity to invest in the cleanup of legacy pollution, create clean energy jobs in disadvantaged communities, and help elevate environmental protection for all Americans.
We’ll also be actively supporting CEQ to evolve the Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice into the White House Interagency Council.
As you know, the President established a new White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council to coordinate environmental justice work across agencies, as well as a new White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, that will be made up of EJ experts who will provide guidance to the interagency group.
EPA is going to play a role in managing the two committees, and we’ll be looking to NEJAC on how the two bodies can best support and reinforce one another on a consistent basis.
And as part of the American Rescue Plan, Congress acknowledged EPA’s essential role in closing the healthy disparity gap. The new law earmarks $50 million for state and local environmental justice programs. We’re working through the best uses of those funds and seeing where those dollars will go the furthest in helping communities hit hardest from COVID-19, the economic downturn, and the environmental issues they face.
We have a lot of ahead of us, so it’s going to be even more important that we maintain an open dialogue with one another.
I want you to have the support you need to not only provide advice and recommendations to me, but to all of EPA’s leadership. And it’s not just advice or recommendations that you’ll provide – it’s a measure of transparency and accountability for what EPA commits to doing.
This body is also a powerful forum for EPA to hear what the reality is on the ground for environmental justice communities and for ensuring that our broader agenda is responsive to that reality.
That broader agenda includes strengthening the relationship between the EJ and External Civil Rights program – with a renewed focus on ensuring implementation of the Civil Rights Act. In the coming weeks, I’ll be appointing an environmental justice adviser to help guide this work.
We’re going to look at high-profile environmental justice issues, like coal combustion residuals, emergency preparedness and response, chemical safety, worker protection standards, ensuring that all communities in America have access to safe drinking water, and protecting the farmers and laborers who put food on our tables from harmful pesticides.
I appreciate the recommendations you’ve provided for EPA’s current work and am looking forward to the recommendations that you set for Fiscal Year ’21 that I know will touch on many of these areas and even more.
On day one, I told the dedicated staff at EPA that our work in the years ahead will be guided by the belief that all people in this country have the right to clean air, clean water, and healthier lives – no matter the color of their skin, the money in their pocket, or the community they live in.
Your partnership is critical to seeing that mission through.
Next year, EPA will celebrate three decades of formally recognizing environmental justice as being central to our mission. We’ve moved forward in some areas but not done nearly enough in others. But these communities deserve more from their government.
Until every child can safely drink water from the faucet, inhale a full breath of clean, fresh air, and play outdoors, without risk of environmental hazard or harm, our work continues. Our work continues – “where we live, work, play, pray, and go to school.”
Our legacy must be that we did not just deal with the issues up to the fence line, but that we saw the people on the other side of the fence. We looked them in the eyes. We listened to them. We learned from them. And we made their lives fundamentally better.
Their health matters. Their safety matters. Their lives matter. They matter to me, and I know they matter to all of you. And we’re not going to leave them behind.
Thank you.