Ivy City: A Case Study for Environmental Justice
Environment attorney Nicholas Targ was quoted in a Washington Journal article titled "Ivy City: A Case Study for Environmental Justice." The article focuses on Ivy City, a neighborhood in northeast Washington, D.C., where tensions between residents and a local chemical company illustrate the complexity of environmental justice and the difficulties encountered when advocating for cleaner communities. Mr. Targ commented on the legal side of these issues, saying that as various groups, including the legal profession and businesses, begin to understand and use this term, "environmental justice may be more descriptive of a set of environmental problems rather than being a special category apart from environmental law itself." Additionally, he noted that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) doesn't explicitly contain the words "environmental justice," even though marginalized communities are supposed to be protected under it. This raises questions about how the judiciary would respond to lawsuits citing it.
"So, how a court would address the issue of environmental justice by name – [in] looking at regulations that address it by name without it being expressly called out in the statute – is to be determined," he commented.