Charles Lord
Charlie Lord is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was the Editor-in-Chief of the Law Review. After clerking on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, he founded Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), an environmental justice center based in Roxbury and served on ACE’s Board until 2004.
In 1998, Charlie founded the Urban Ecology Institute (UEI) at Boston College, and he served as UEI’s Executive Director until 2008. Charlie is now teaching in the Environmental Studies Program at Boston College and completing a research project for the National Science Foundation’s Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where he is a co-principle investigator. He is also co-founder and a partner in URGENT VC, a venture development company launching green businesses in cities. He taught environmental law and policy and environmental legal history at Boston College Law School from 1993-1998. He was a founding board member of the Community Rights Council in Washington, D.C. He has published numerous articles on environmental law, environmental justice and environmental policy.
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Abstract Environmental justice theory demonstrates that disadvantaged groups, especially low-income and racial/ethnic minorities, bear a disproportionate burden of environmental disamenities, enjoy fewer environmental amenities than advantaged populations, and are often excluded or marginalized from decisions that generate such patterns. This project provides a ground breaking method for evaluating the role of race and its treatment in legal and political systems in creating the present day distribution of environmental disamenities. We are exploring whether race, immigration status and/or income are determinative drivers in the distribution of environmental disamenities over time. Most environmental justice studies focus on outcome equity with only a cursory treatment of the processes that create those patterns. The Boston College team is working on a process equity analysis of zoning and nuisance law for the period 1880 to the present. We are assessing whether zoning and nuisance decisions illustrate a pattern over time of approving or allowing certain noxious uses in certain neighborhoods as compared to others and whether the approval patterns correlate to race or income. We hypothesize that neighborhoods dominated by African-Americans, recent immigrants, and low-income groups have been more negatively affected by zoning decisions and nuisance law than the white majority. The team has evaluated over 1000 variances in the City of Baltimore for the period 1931 to 2000. We have mapped these variances and we are analyzing whether there is any correlation between these variances and historic disinvestment in certain neighborhoods as a function of race. We are also analyzing whether there is a disproportionate distribution of these variances according to the demographic characteristics of a neighborhood. The team will present its distributional analysis and preliminary statistical analyses. |