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Engineering to Promote Climate Justice

In the symposium’s third panel session, Darshan Karwat, Associate Professor at Arizona State University, engaged in a conversation with Carlton Waterhouse, Professor of Law and Founding Director of the Environmental and Climate Justice Center at Howard University School of Law, on the intersection of engineering, human rights, and climate change. Karwat and Waterhouse also discussed opportunities for engineers to participate in minimizing climate-related harms and reconciling historical injustices. Following their discussion, the two panelists answered questions from symposium participants.

Karwat started the conversation by asking Waterhouse how he became involved in the work he does. Waterhouse replied that in the 1970s, he grew up in the shadow of a smokestack, so he could see how engineering was affecting his environment. Years later, while studying electrical engineering at Penn State University, he took a class on science, technology, and society, which connected back to his experiences as a youth and the idea of engaging in the world with the goal of helping and protecting people. At the same time, he was organizing an effort to stop racial discrimination on campus, work he found exciting and energizing. As a result, he decided to attend law school and work in environmental law rather than become an electrical engineer, which would bridge his interest in science and technology with his law degree. Early in his law school experience, he learned about environmental justice and the unequal distribution of pollution’s effects across society. “That seemed like a cause that I was interested in championing and led me to where I am today,” said Waterhouse.

When asked by Karwat to share his thoughts about the intersection of engineering and human rights, Waterhouse recounted that he chose Howard University Law School because he was impressed with the school’s civil rights legacy and Charles Hamilton Houston, whose work made him “think about law, not as an opportunity for me to make money, but as a space for me to help problem solve,” noting that he most enjoyed problem solving in his engineering education. For Waterhouse, law school was about learning to solve social problems and engage in the legal profession in ways that enhance people’s lives. During law school, Waterhouse had a pivotal realization about international human rights, inspired especially by Professor Goler Butcher’s teachings. He observed that many of the world’s problems are often exacerbated by the siloing of professions, which prevents a holistic understanding of issues because professionals think about only one aspect of solving a problem rather than the full picture. For example, engineers might help solve the problem of making an algorithm run faster, but they might not consider how the algorithm is used or its potential consequences. “That kind of segmentation and divorcing or abstracting of the engineering and scientific knowledge and expertise away from the actual lives that people live is deeply problematic,” said Waterhouse.

In his role working for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Land and Emergency Management, he learned that the nation is still cleaning up pollution from the 1930s. The Department of Energy alone has vast legacy waste sites, costing hundreds of millions of

dollars a year to remediate and taking decades to finish. The mining that occurred during World War II to meet national security interests left more than 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation that have yet to be remediated (EPA, 2016).

Now, when he hears statements about the need to mine critical materials to create a better future, Waterhouse worries that the United States has not yet cleaned up the mess left from the national emergency declared to keep the world safe from Nazi Germany. “How do we have these initiatives that are so divorced from the consequences they cause?” asked Waterhouse. “I think part of it is because we do not bring in engineers and scientists…We do not bring ethics to bear in what the products are going to be doing or what they are being used for.” To address this problem, he said all engineers must be beholden to a code of ethics—not just licensed professional engineers—so that they will be as committed to thinking about the consequences of what they are engineering as they are about the data they are using.

Those ethical standards, said Waterhouse, are essential for the future, because most of the cataclysmic problems faced by society today—such as air pollution, heat islands, and climate change—are the consequences of human decisions related to science and engineering. He noted that although the industrialization of American society produced great wealth and prosperity for certain segments of society, some people are living with, and dying from, toxic waste every day.

Karwat noted that the idea of justice, rather than human rights, seems to be more prevalent in discourse in the United States and asked Waterhouse to comment on the overlaps and differences between justice and human rights. Waterhouse said that human rights enable thinking about the floor of acceptable treatment of people by governments and others. It sets a standard or norm for how all people must be treated. In Waterhouse’s opinion, justice tends to fit more in the context of American society and the country’s history of thinking about injustice and exclusion based on group identities.

Waterhouse said that the concept of sustainable development offers a promising approach to integrating international human rights and justice. He noted that when the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), introduced the idea of sustainable development, it did not discuss justice or international human rights. Rather, it established equity as a foundational aspect of sustainability, which relates to how humans can not only be harmonious with nature and ecology but also be in better relationships with one another. “If you do not have humans working together, in a good relationship, or there are vast inequities in their experiences, humans trash the environment,” said Waterhouse. He added that we have seen many ways in which human conflict has harmed the environment, such as through water pollution or land contamination, and that we must consider how human rights are impacted and how we can produce just outcomes, noting “no one should have to bear the burdens of a society’s pollution because they’re a member of this or that group.”

When asked to describe what is unique about the interaction of climate change and human rights, and the role that engineering plays, Waterhouse said this relationship is actually not unique because the U.S. environmental protection regime is based on the recognition in the late 1960s and 1970s that industrialization produces some adverse consequences. He noted that before climate change appeared on society’s radar, the thinning ozone hole led to global action and the Montreal Protocol. Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change, strong resistance from certain industries has prevented similar progress from being achieved.

For Waterhouse, engineers and scientists need to prioritize acting on two fronts: resilience and adaptation. He does not recommend starting with mitigation, which overlooks the reality that, for many, the damage is already done. Efforts to mitigate climate change often center

on saving the planet, but they fail to acknowledge that the crisis already exists for people who have lost their families or communities to wildfires, stronger hurricanes, or the impacts of living in heat islands. For these individuals, we are not looking to save the future, but to address the urgent challenges of the present. “We have to lean in on resilience and adaptation because there are people right now who are already dying from climate change,” he said. This approach entails designing resilient systems and societies so that the next major hurricane or wildfire does not wipe out marginalized communities. It also involves mitigating damages already resulting from industrial activity. Mitigation efforts should be designed to meet the standards of higher-income communities, because solutions deemed acceptable for those communities will likely be beneficial for all, whereas those designed only for lower-income communities often fall short of true quality and equity. “We need engineers and scientists who are thinking about how to ethically create the kind of world they want to live in, whatever neighborhood they happen to be in,” he said.

Karwat raised the question of how to deal with contests to environmental impact statements, which are detailed documents that evaluate the potential environmental effects of a proposed federal project or action. In Waterhouse’s view, a cumulative impact analysis is a critical way to help address environmental justice. He explained that “health is not bifurcated based on whether the pollution is in the air, water or soil…it’s impacted multiple ways from multiple directions and all of those impacts should be part of every decision.” He noted that the Environmental Protection Agency is developing a model for use in cumulative impact assessments. He believes that contestation of environmental impact assessments is not harmful in and of itself, but it can be problematic if the opposition leads one to conclude that the original assessments are invalid without having evaluated them based on evidence and established standards. Another concern is that affected communities are often excluded from these analyses and the decision-making process. A New Jersey environmental justice law gives community members a voice and uses impact analysis to determine whether a community is already overburdened by environmental contamination. In that case, the state has the authority to veto a permitting request.

Waterhouse said that he would like the engineering profession to voluntarily adopt a code of conduct that guides how engineers behave in a particular setting or context, similar to that for lawyers. Such a code of conduct would enable engineers to choose not to work on a project that does not align with their association’s norms and it would help raise the level of ethical norms for the profession. He commented that symposia such as this one are critical to informing engineers’ understanding of these ethical responsibilities and duties.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

When a participant commented that various engineering professional associations have already established codes of ethics, Waterhouse asked whether those codes incorporate the types of norms addressed by this symposium. “Do those standards include engineering and science in a way that thinks about the human communities that are being impacted by the work that we are doing?” he asked. He noted that those codes usually apply to professional licensed engineers and wondered about the consequences for non-licensed engineers if they do not adhere to the codes.

One participant expressed concern that mitigation of past harms often leads to gentrification and displacement of communities who suffered from the pollution but do not experience the benefits of living in a remediated area. Waterhouse affirmed this concern, adding

that anti-displacement “has to be an integral part of the way you’re thinking about green infrastructure, because while we don’t have the ability to control the outcomes, we do have a lot of nudging power right through design.” Engineers should partner with lawyers, city council members, and legislators to design programs to lock in tax rates and help long-term residents retain ownership of property, for example. The important point, he said, is that sustainability must include both environmental sustainability and social sustainability.