Now 2010 | June 14, 2010

By B. Jesse Clarke, Race, Poverty & the Environment

Penn Loh is a professor at Tufts University's Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning. From 1996 to 2009, he served in various roles, including executive director (since 1999) at Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), a Roxbury-based environmental justice group. He holds an M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley and a B.S. from MIT. Before joining ACE, he was research associate at the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California.

Jesse Clarke: What was your involvement with environmental justice in the early ‘90s when you were at the University of California Berkeley?

Penn Loh: I went to UC Berkeley because I realized that much of the work of electrical engineers (I had an undergraduate degree in that field) at that time was really in the military industrial complex. It seemed like the profession, rather than making life better for people, was largely involved in projects supporting war research. So, I started down a different track.

At that time, I saw environment as a secondary concern to other social justice issues. But at U.C.Berkeley I met folks who had just attended the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington D.C. I got involved with that student group and also took a class with Carl Anthony. Suddenly, light bulbs went off and I realized, “This is what I can do to contribute to something positive and which goes real deep with respect to my own social justice commitment!”

Clarke: Is that why you got a job with ACE when you got back to Boston?

Loh: Yes, I jumped at the opportunity to join an organization that was just getting off the ground. It was founded by two lawyers who had been inspired by people like Luke Cole. We were trying to figure out how we could bring legal and technical assistance to grassroots communities and support bottom-up movement building for social change. Our early issues dealt with asthma and air pollution—specifically diesel pollution.

We looked at the work WE ACT was doing in New York City and at what the Bus Riders’ Union was doing in Los Angeles to get a clean bus fleet and we recognized that we were facing exactly the same issues in Boston. So initially, we got into transportation issues from an environmental health standpoint. As we started to deepen our organizing in this area, we realized that we had tapped into a much bigger issue. The riders and folks in the community who relied on these buses every day didn’t see the diesel pollution issue as separate from all the other issues with transit. There was extreme pent up anger and frustration at the transit system. The bus riders felt like they were part of a second class system, as compared to the subways, which Boston touts as being world class.

Clarke: Can you talk a little more about the equity dimension of the transportation system and just how that came to the fore in terms of the politics around it?

Loh: We had done some very focused campaigning around clean buses and ACE was facilitating a Clean Buses for Boston Coalition that included a number of community groups, our youth, and some environmental groups. We targeted the transit authority to persuade them to use alternative fuel bus technologies as they replaced their aging fleet but they didn’t much want to talk to us.
In 1997-98, we held a series of community forums over a five-month period attended by about 500 people. We invited the transit authorities and were able to get their middle management to come out to listen to the people.

People talked about a variety of issues of which two clearly stood out: (1) inadequate and poor transit service and (2) disrespect in terms of how the system treated people in their communities. There was a strong sense of the inequity in the way resources were dedicated to the bus rail and commuter rail systems but there was no organized voice of transit riders, particularly in the transit-dependent low-income and communities of color. We eventually launched the T Riders’ Union—inspired by the Bus Riders’ Union.

Clarke: A decade later, how has the struggle to equalize transportation investment and access for transit-dependent low-income communities and people-of-color communities been progressing in Boston?

Loh: After about three years of intensive advocacy and organizing, we succeeded in getting the public commitment from the transit authority to switch the fleet over. So, now almost the entire fleet of thousand buses serving Eastern Massachusetts is being converted to cleaner alternatives. We’re very proud of that. Also, we didn’t realize it then but we had really started a movement for transit justice. The T Riders’ Union has really grown and become the voice of low-income riders in the area.

The biggest battles we’ve had to fight since 2000 are the fare increases because of the structural deficits built into our transit system. We’ve had a cycle of 25-30 percent fare increases across the board, every couple of years since 2000. It’s been quite a struggle to try to keep the fares affordable in a way that also ensures no service cuts.

Over the years, we’ve come to realize that we need broader and deeper solutions. So, about four years ago, we started to advance our own systemic solutions to dealing with the structural deficits. One of our suggestions— which is now part of the mainstream discussion—was to look at how to relieve our transit authority of an inordinate amount of debt on projects, such as the “Big Dig” highway project [a freeway tunnel under the Boston harbor]. Read the full article...