Leaving EPA Behind, Environmental Justice Pioneer Preaches Hope Amid Trump Cutbacks

One year ago, Charles Lee could look across the federal government and see his life’s work in action on multiple fronts—new grants awarded to minority communities overburdened with pollution, a new expert science panel established to look at their unique mix of health risks and the first White House Summit on Environmental Justice in Action underway.

“This has been an incredible week for justice!” Lee posted on the social media site LinkedIn, as he detailed the work being done by his colleagues at the Environmental Protection Agency and throughout President Joe Biden’s administration.

That work came to a crashing halt when President Donald Trump took office in January. Trump’s EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, terminated all environmental justice grant programs and eliminated the EPA’s environmental justice office. He has taken his cues from one of Trump’s day one executive orders, which sought to re-brand EJ as a “radical and wasteful” form of reverse discrimination and racial preferencing, lumped together with “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

But even before layoffs and buyout offers decimated the ranks of his colleagues at EPA, Lee put in his notice to retire after 26 years at the agency. He said he had decided some time earlier to leave EPA rather than stay through a second Trump administration.

At 74, Lee could have retired years earlier. Now, he finds himself uniquely positioned, he believes, to offer hope to those living in and fighting for communities who bear a disproportionate burden of pollution and climate risks. Lee feels his mission now is to spread the lessons he learned as both an eyewitness and active participant at the birth of the environmental justice movement. He has joined Howard University School of Law’s two-year-old Environmental and Climate Justice Center in Washington, D.C. as a visiting scholar, and key among the messages he hopes to get across is that the Trump administration can’t kill the environmental justice movement.

“One legacy of environmental justice is that the movement does not depend on whether you have the support of the federal government,” Lee said. “It is driven by people, it is not driven by an executive order.”

A Study That Launched a Movement

In 1987, a dozen years before he joined the EPA, Lee directed the study widely recognized as helping to launch the environmental justice movement: Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The analysis, by the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice, showed a strong correlation between the location of U.S. hazardous waste dumps and the racial makeup of nearby communities. The findings galvanized disparate community groups into a movement, inspired a new branch of environmental science and ultimately, transformed the government’s approach to environmental protection.

Lee, often appearing alongside more fiery activists early in his environmental justice career, came across as the bookish scholar—listening, taking notes, identifying next steps forward. Without formal training in advanced statistics, science or law, Lee played a role in the history of environmental justice that cannot be overstated, leading practitioners say. He helped organize the first national summit of environmental justice advocates in 1991, then served as an outside advisor to the federal government, and finally, became a career public servant, navigating difficult politics in Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

“I put him on the Mount Rushmore of environmental justice,” said Sacoby Wilson, director of the University of Maryland’s Health, Environmental and Economic Justice Lab. 

Matthew Tejada, now a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council, worked alongside Lee in EPA’s environmental justice office for years. He calls him “one of the chief visionaries of the environmental justice movement.”

“He has always been looking 10 years down the road and thinking, ‘If this movement is going to be legitimate and powerful, what does it need?’” Tejada said. 

For much of Lee’s career, it meant helping the movement gain governmental support. Now, it means helping the movement find the best path to making progress without that support.

Born in Taiwan, Lee came with his family to New York when he was 8 years old. His father, a chemist, “was totally consumed with making a better life for his family, tenacious about making sure we ended up in a place where we could be successful,” Lee recalled.

“I put him on the Mount Rushmore of environmental justice.”

— Sacoby Wilson, University of Maryland’s Health, Environmental and Economic Justice Lab

And Lee showed every sign of being on track of fulfilling his family’s dreams. He got into the Bronx High School of Science, a highly competitive public magnet school. After graduating in 1969, he was accepted into Harvard University, where he planned to study architecture.

But he was destined to draw up blueprints not for buildings, but for a new movement.

The Vietnam War protests moved him deeply. He felt he was viewing the conflict in Indochina as one who shared a bond with the people whose worlds were going up in flames. “Coming of age at that point, I am part of a generation that was trying to understand where we fit in, in the U.S.,” he recalls. “I think the war really, really instilled in us a sense of group identity.”

Lee left Harvard in his second year—“the only thing that I share with Bill Gates,” he jokes—and got involved with various community and labor groups in the New York area for the next decade. He ended up in New Jersey, working for a nonprofit organization focused on improving occupational health and safety conditions for mostly Black and Latino workers.

In 1982, the Vietnam War was over, Ronald Reagan was president and social protest seemed a thing of the past. But a newspaper story caught Lee’s eye. It described protestors who were blocking construction of a dump site for highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in a rural, mostly Black community in Warren County, North Carolina. “As in the ‘60s, Protesters Rally,” read a headline in The Washington Post in October 1982. “But This Time The Foe Is PCB.”

In 1978, as the federal government was implementing a ban on PCBs and new rules on their handling, a trucking company had illegally dumped the industrial waste material along 200 miles of North Carolina highways in order to avoid disposal costs. The dumpers were arrested and jailed, but the state was left with the mess. North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, a Democrat, got the federal EPA’s backing for his plan to collect the 30,000 tons of contaminated soil and dump it in Warren County. 

Community members believed the decision to foist the problem on Warren County smacked of racism. Four years of pleas to officials and lawsuits had failed to derail the plan, so activists joined in a human blockade to stop the dump trucks. Over the course of the standoff, there would be 500 arrests, not only of local residents but of national civil rights leaders who made pilgrimages to the scene.

Lee helped organize a small group from his organization to travel to North Carolina to show solidarity, and also, he said, because he felt compelled to learn more. “That’s when the whole idea of the confluence of issues of civil rights, race and environment were just coming together,” Lee recalled. “I just had the sense that this had an incredibly transformative power. I probably couldn’t articulate it all at that point, but the idea really resonated with me.”

Lee sought to help by spreading the word. He brought protest leaders like the Rev. Leon White, a regional field director for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice and a protest leader in Warren County, to speak to activist groups he knew in New York, Philadelphia and Newark, New Jersey.

“This issue wasn’t really on anybody’s radar screen,” Lee recalled. “Civil rights organizations were more focused on things like employment, educational opportunity and political empowerment. And environmentalists were more focused on conservation, wildlife preservation.”

Lee felt civil rights and environmental activists could achieve more if they saw how their missions intersect. 

“Warren County demonstrated that when they come together, then you can really get something capable of driving progressive change,” Lee said. “You really get to some core issues in the way that American society works.”

A Landmark Report, a Watershed Summit

Activists in Warren County didn’t know if theirs was an isolated environmental struggle, but a small study by the agency then known as the General Accounting Office suggested they were not alone. The GAO found that three of the South’s four commercial hazardous waste sites were in majority Black communities, and poverty was rampant in all four places.

Lee, by then director of the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice’s new program on toxics and justice, believed that if the GAO’s approach could be expanded, it could help bring the issue the national attention he believed it deserved. And exciting resources and tools were available, like the then-new personal computer.

“Arguably, environmental justice would not have come about the way it did, if it weren’t for the emergence of large-scale demographic databases and large-scale environmental databases, which enabled you to visualize the distribution of impacts across multiple geographic areas,” Lee said. The technology was still nascent and expensive; Lee and his team had to hire an artist to draw maps by hand. But with the help of outside data experts, they quantified for the first time the extent of the toxic waste pollution burden borne by U.S. communities of color.

Race proved to be the most powerful of any variable tested in predicting where commercial hazardous waste facilities were located, they found. And communities with two or more hazardous waste sites had an average minority population three times higher than communities without such facilities.

Toxic Wastes and Race forced the federal government to take the problem seriously. By 1992, President George H.W. Bush’s EPA would establish an Office of Environmental Equity. 

But the more immediate impact of Lee’s work would become perhaps its most durable legacy. It brought together activists fighting pollution threats—often in isolation—in minority communities across the country.

Latino residents of Albuquerque fighting groundwater contamination; moms fighting diesel bus pollution in Harlem; tribal leaders grappling with gold mine tailings in Minnesota—all saw themselves in Lee’s data. About 1,100 of these activists came together in Washington, D.C. in October 1991 for what they called the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. In a 30th anniversary recollection on the gathering, the Kresge Foundation, a nonprofit supporter of environmental justice, called it “a watershed event – a crucible of solidarity and creativity that sought to change the trajectory of the U.S. environmental movement.”

Lee insisted the summit not just be a forum to advise existing large environmental groups, but a session for grassroots groups to set their own path forward. “Who sets the table and who sets the menu—who determines what the agenda is—is very important,” Lee said.

Helping to Transform a Former Foe

Early on, some of the most bitter fights of the environmental justice movement pitted activists against the EPA, in both Democratic and Republican administrations. President Jimmy Carter’s EPA had granted the Warren County PCB dump waivers from environmental rules, and President Ronald Reagan’s EPA had defended the decision.

President Bill Clinton was the first president to use the term “environmental justice,” and his EPA chief, Carol Browner, a protege of then-Vice President Al Gore, helped establish a national advisory committee in their first year in office. Months later, Clinton directed all federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their work—a milestone Lee remembers by heart as “Executive Order 12898.”

Lee now had a chance to work with the government to shape public policy. Appointed to the first National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine committee to address environmental justice, he reflected on the new opportunity for himself and the movement as he took his seat in the boardroom under the portrait of the Academies’ founding president, Abraham Lincoln. “I looked up and wished my father was still alive,” Lee said. “He would have liked that.”

One of the EPA’s first environmental justice initiatives was its “Brownfields” program—grants and technical assistance to get abandoned contaminated properties cleaned up and redeveloped. Both then and now, the Brownfields idea attracted supporters across the political spectrum because it opened up new commercial and real estate development opportunities. (Although the current administration’s EPA has cut off most environmental justice grants, it is still issuing Brownfields grants.) But Lee wanted to make sure that the concerns of the people living around the redevelopment sites were put front and center.

“At one point, I told Carol Browner, ‘The Brownfields train has left the station without a big group of passengers on it, which is the community,’” Lee recalled.

As chairman of the waste and facility siting subcommittee of the EPA’s national environmental justice advisory council, Lee organized public dialogues in five cities on the Brownfields idea throughout the mid 1990s. The panel’s recommendations helped guide EPA’s implementation of the program—including elements like jobs training to ensure there were tangible benefits for community members.

By now, Lee had gotten to know many EPA staffers. “I developed a lot of respect for them,” Lee said. “They’re very mission-oriented people who care about what they do.”

He wanted to see if it was possible to help EPA better harness its resources to build healthy and sustainable communities in areas that were bearing a disproportionate pollution burden. He felt he could better make this difference from the inside, and in 1999, he joined the EPA.

Lee became personally involved in one of the EPA’s greatest environmental justice success stories: the redevelopment of blighted communities on the south side of Spartanburg, S.C. Abandoned industrial and waste sites had become a haven for drug dealers; even worse, deadly cancers and respiratory disease ravaged the largely African American communities. The EPA confirmed what local activists suspected: The soil and water were highly contaminated with carcinogenic dioxin and heavy metals such as mercury, lead and cadmium.

A key to cleanup and redevelopment was for a small neighborhood nonprofit group, ReGenesis, to work in close partnership with local government and the business community, despite a history of mutual mistrust. “Charles was strategic in his thinking, and deliberate with trying to get to that end result,” recalled local activist Harold Mitchell, who founded ReGenesis after health struggles in his own family. “What he always used to tell me is, ‘Never let them rattle you to the point where you get up from the table. Whatever you do, don’t get up from the table!’”

Mitchell took the advice to heart and over the next 20 years, ReGenesis would partner with 124 different government, private and nonprofit partners to help remake the neighborhoods. An initial $100,000 EPA grant grew into $300 million in federal, state, local, private sector and foundation investment. The once-blighted neighborhoods now are home to mixed-income housing, health and recreation centers, shopping, an entertainment complex and green space.

Lee took meticulous notes on every step of the effort, Mitchell said. “Charles thought that we need to have templates and models for communities to understand how to navigate these situations,” Mitchell said. “The idea was that you could replicate this approach.”

Lee would call it the “Environmental Justice Collaborative Problem-Solving Model.” It would be years before Congress would give the EPA a large-scale opportunity to put that model into action, with the $3 billion environmental justice block grant program in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. 

Progress, No Matter Who is in Charge

Lee joined the EPA just prior to an election year he thought could have been a watershed for environmental justice. Gore, the Democratic candidate in 2000, had sponsored one of the first environmental justice bills while in the Senate in 1992.

Of course, Republican candidate George W. Bush would win the close and contested election, but that did not end the EPA’s environmental justice work, Lee said.

Bush’s administration “just basically left environmental justice alone,” Lee recalled. “It didn’t support environmental justice, but it didn’t overtly attack it. There was still room to try to make some progress.”

In Lee’s view, the challenges were not too different from those in the Clinton administration, which was just feeling its way with the new concept. 

One problem, Lee felt, was that communities didn’t have the experience or know-how to influence arcane regulation-writing efforts at the EPA. Experienced lobbyists for industry and big environmental groups dominated the process. In 2005, a GAO report concluded that the EPA had devoted little attention to environmental justice in the drafting of major Clean Air Act rules. So in 2007, when Lee became director of EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice, he made addressing this problem a chief goal.

“What I have is a unique talent, I guess,” Lee said. “Essentially, I’m an advocate, and I’ve mastered the art and science of how to bring together the information, expertise and resources necessary to move forward on a given issue.”

By the time President Barack Obama’s administration tackled its signature climate policy—its Clean Power Plan—the effort had come a long way. The agency conducted in-person trainings on the Clean Air Act and the rulemaking and permitting process with more than 3,000 participants. Ultimately, Lee helped develop technical guidance for EPA staff on how to incorporate EJ into the regulatory process, a document completed in Obama’s last year in office.

But when the first Trump administration began in 2017, Lee and his environmental justice colleagues at the EPA knew their efforts were at risk.

“We had a lot of quiet conversations,” recalled Tejada, who had become director of the EJ office during the Obama administration, while Lee moved to another role. “Our job, our duty, was to protect the program to survive, so that there’d be something of it left on the other side of that first Trump administration.”

“I’ve mastered the art and science of how to bring together the information, expertise and resources necessary to move forward on a given issue.”

— Charles Lee

Tejada, the former director of a Texas nonprofit Air Alliance Houston, felt he could work on the inside with the southwestern team that Trump’s first EPA chief, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, brought into the agency. Meanwhile, Lee maintained ties with the outside environmental justice community.

“I really counted on Charles to kind of be the one looking out for our integrity,” Tejada said.

Lee said he decided to focus on the environmental justice action then underway in the states. California officials were developing mapping tools for identifying and prioritizing environmentally burdened and vulnerable communities. In 2019, Lee helped organize an EPA-sponsored training workshop for states, in collaboration with both California and Minnesota. Some 1,500 participants from government agencies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia signed up, and the Trump administration’s EPA that year touted the work with the states as one of its environmental justice accomplishments. 

In Lee’s view, the environmental justice movement had built resilience, not just because of the EPA. Events like Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Flint, Michigan water crisis in 2014, and even the COVID-19 pandemic had made it impossible to ignore that some communities—often communities of color—faced disproportionate climate and environmental risks. 

“EJ had become seared into the mainstream of the American consciousness,” Lee said.

Blossoming and a Backlash

The stage was set for environmental justice to flower in the Biden administration. Campaigning in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, Biden made investments in disadvantaged communities a pillar of his “Build Back Better” campaign platform. This evolved into his “Justice40” initiative: 40 percent of the benefits of federal environmental and clean energy spending would flow to disadvantaged communities.

Biden’s EPA Administrator Michael Regan, a former head of North Carolina’s environmental protection agency, traveled in 2022 to Warren County to announce that EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice would be elevated, and placed on par with offices EPA has that focus on pollutants in air, water and on land.

“Environmental justice was no longer a side show or an appendage, but at the center of the agency’s mission,” Lee said.

That same year, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act and its unprecedented $3 billion environmental justice grant program.

“It was a time of incredible growth at EPA, but I wouldn’t romanticize it,” Lee said. “People had to work really hard, and they were under a lot of pressure. I mean, it was maybe a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so there was a need to really take advantage of that.”

About $53.7 million of the EJ funds went to 124 partnerships between grassroots nonprofit groups and governments: the Collaborative Problem-Solving Cooperative Agreement program, based directly on the model Lee had built out of the Spartanburg ReGenesis program. Mitchell joked that he believed people sometimes tired of hearing about the Spartanburg success story. The IRA for the first time gave the EPA money to replicate the model nationwide at scale. 

“Environmental justice was no longer a side show or an appendage, but at the center of the agency’s mission.”

— Charles Lee

But grants that would help communities monitor air pollution from nearby petrochemical refineries, or convert homes to energy-saving heat pumps and solar energy, put the EPA’s environmental justice program in direct conflict with the corporate and fossil fuel allies of Trump and his party. House Republicans accused the Biden administration of cronyism in its EJ programs, and the conservative policy roadmap Project 2025 called for abolition of the EPA’s environmental justice office.

“It wasn’t until the Biden administration that you had the tools, you had the information, and you had the political will” to make a difference, Tejada said. “And the fact that the government was really changing for the first time, really put a bull’s-eye on the back of the environmental justice program.”

A Message of Hope in Dark Times

Soon after the second Trump administration began, Trump’s new EPA chief, Lee Zeldin, was deriding environmental justice as a “leftist buzzword” and arguing that grants to community-based nonprofits siphoned money away from where it was needed. 

“This administration strongly believes in clean air, land and water for every American,” Zeldin wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Post as he was dismantling the EPA’s environmental justice programs.

Zeldin terminated all IRA environmental justice grants, even making an unprecedented move to claw back money already awarded. The matter is still being fought in federal court, but for now, most EJ community groups have lost access to EPA grants awarded under Biden.

To Lee, the moves betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of environmental justice.

“Environmental justice is about protecting everyone,” Lee said. “And it’s a recognition that certain groups are not as well protected for a number of reasons, and they’re suffering greater environmental and public health harms. It’s not a special program for anybody. It’s to make sure everyone gets protected.”

Lee retired from the EPA earlier this year, convinced that he could now do more to advance environmental justice outside of the federal government. He hopes to continue to work on solutions to one of the most important environmental justice problems—how to assess and address “cumulative impact,” the overlapping stresses that EJ communities often face from multiple pollution sources and climate change.

Most of all, Lee hopes to encourage a new generation of environmental justice advocates, including in the Howard Law School program. 

“There are so many young people that are being drawn to this issue, in a way that is really very, very deep,” Lee said. “For them, it’s not just something of a passing interest. It’s something that they want to devote their life’s work to.”

The Howard environmental justice center’s founding director, Carlton Waterhouse, a former deputy EPA assistant administrator, said he felt Lee was a perfect fit to help the center support communities while serving as a think tank for research and policy development.

“This kind of balancing of a thoughtful approach in order to both support communities and to move forward the conversation is exactly who Charles is and who he has been throughout his career,” Waterhouse said. “Charles has represented, researched, policy-driven insight into the human experience of the communities that are left behind by our status quo.”

Lee recently wrote an essay for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ blog aimed at those who are feeling despair about the Trump administration. He wanted to remind people how far the environmental justice movement has come, how many more tools and resources are available today, and how much can be accomplished by small, dedicated groups of people.

“It’s definitely going to be more difficult,” Lee said. “But these communities have become so much more empowered and sophisticated, and they are going to continue fighting for the issues that are essential to better health, and a better life. There’s no way that anybody’s going to stop that.”