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Less visible but vitally important, Biden has also selected Brenda Mallory, the director of regulatory policy at the Southern Environmental Law Center and an Obama administration veteran, to run the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The CEQ is charged with making sure federal agencies comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) so that proposed infrastructure projects undergo rigorous scientific review for their potential environmental harms. One of the final acts of the last administration was to severely limit NEPA's time and scope of reviews and relieve agencies of factoring in the effect of projects on climate change. Mallory was general counsel at the CEQ in the Obama administration and helped craft many of its environmental proposals, including establishing the Bears Ears National Monument. She would be the first Black person to lead the council. She was a member of the steering committee of the Climate 21 Project, organized by former government environmental officials and university environmental policy experts to propose actions the Biden administration can take to restore the global leadership on climate change. "The next administration will need to act quickly to confront four crises simultaneously: The COVID-19 pandemic, economic devastation, racial injustice, and the accelerating threats of climate change," the project said. "Climate should be fully integrated into economic, racial justice, and foreign policy, national security, trade and other areas of the president's agenda." If that happens, it will help institutionalize the influence of the environmental justice movement in our priorities about air and water pollution policies and likely help solidify the next generation at the ballot box as well. For too long, the voice of environmental justice has waxed and waned with the political winds. In 1994, President Clinton ordered that the impact of federal actions must factor in their impact on low-income communities and communities of color. That focus faded under President George W. Bush, received a boost under President Obama, and then was trashed by the Trump administration. Perhaps the viciousness of the past administration's systematic attack on environmental protections, combined with the outrage over systemic racism in policing and the systemic racism in environmental justice and health care laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic finally created the transformation we are witnessing, led by voters who see clearly that these issues are all connected. The potential for connection throughout federal agencies increased even more with Biden's selection of Merrick Garland for attorney general. Garland is best known for having his Supreme Court nomination blocked by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But Garland has a strong track record in the federal appeals court of ruling in favor of stronger ozone and air particulate laws, and EPA's authority to regulate them. Garland will take over a Justice Department where Biden has pledged to add an environmental and climate division to prosecute pollution of communities, including legacy pollution, "to make communities safe, healthy, and whole." Such a heightened pledge of environmental protection is welcome to activists such as Tina Johnson, director of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. She told the New York Times, "Equity and justice were on the ballot. . .I'm happy to hear those concerns, from the environmental justice perspective, have been heard." Robert Bullard, the Texas Southern University professor who is considered the father of environmental justice and who recently received a "Champions of the Earth" lifetime achievement award, told the Washington Post that he is impressed with the number of Biden's cabinet nominees who "have seen what it's like on the other side, in terms of communities that have suffered. They have been fighting for justice. Now they are in a position to make change and make policy. That, to me, has the potential to be transformative." Transformation would mean that the once lonely voice of environmental justice is no longer in the wilderness. To borrow from Vidaurre, it's very validating when the environmental justice community need not yell out to the wind. The chances are good it will have the backing of the federal government as never before.
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