On Jared Blumenfeld’s most recent trip to Hawaii as a regional administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, he took a short break from his new job for a very special occasion: a Passover seder.
When Gov. Linda Lingle heard he was coming to Hawaii, and that he would be there for the first night of the holiday, she invited him to her seder.
“She’s a Republican,” Blumenfeld said. “So it proves you can cross party political boundaries and that faith has no bounds.”
President Barack Obama appointed Blumenfeld, 41, to the EPA post, which he assumed in January after eight years directing the S.F. Department for the Environ-ment. Blumenfeld oversees California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, the Pacific Islands and 140 tribal nations that comprise EPA’s Pacific Southwest Region 9.
Blumenfeld lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children, ages 8 and 11.
J. spoke to him by phone in March.
Q: How did you get interested in the environment?
A: I always was interested in nature and the outdoors. I grew up in a rural village in Cambridge, England, and was always outside. I trained to be a human rights lawyer … which is when I realized the relationship between human rights and the environment — namely, that if the environment is destroyed, and the drinking water is polluted, you have a human rights case to make.
Q: Is your environmental work in any way influenced by your Jewish values or background?
A: Yes. I grew up close to my grandmother, who was a very wise but argumentative woman. A few years before she died at 93, she said to me, “You should become a lawyer! All we’ve ever done at the dinner table is argue — and you’re pretty good at it.” I had not faintly thought about it until then. She pushed me in that direction.
Also there’s a culture in many Jewish communities, and certainly the one I grew up in, that emphasizes public service. That was very ingrained in my upbringing and had a big role in shaping who I am.
Q: This year you left the S.F. Department for the Environment to work for the EPA. What inspired you to stretch your legs and widen the scope of your work?
A: I started my career working for an organization on Cape Cod that did habitat protection and I oversaw conservation work in 15 countries, which was too broad. I wasn’t seeing the results day-to-day. So I made a goal to work on a community scale in one place and realize change on a community level. I did that [in San Francisco] for eight years. This job still allows me to see real change. It’s not working for EPA in their headquarters. It’s still a scale where I can work with communities at a local level. This is a huge opportunity to work with both rural communities and medium and large cities to effect change as well as working with states.
Q: What successes did you achieve in San Francisco that gave you the confidence to direct your efforts beyond the city?
A: The plastic bag ban. The untold story is the way the San Francisco plastic bag ban transformed the paper bag industry. We required paper bags to be 100 percent recycled, and 40 percent of that had to be post-consumer content. And so Duro Bag, the largest manufacturer of bags in the world, changed the specs of all of their bags to meet San Francisco’s requirements because it would be difficult to make one for San Francisco and one for everyone else.
Q: At the EPA, will you continue looking at the connections between the environment and economic growth?
A: The myth is that it’s environment versus jobs. In most cases, the environmental legislation has pushed society and industry in a clear direction, and that has created new jobs. The only reason any green initiative works is when there’s an economic incentive behind it to make it work.
For example, for every one job at a landfill per ton of waste, there are 12 jobs at a recycling facility for fairly similar costs. So do we promote landfills or recycling? Obviously we’d choose recycling.
If you think about green building, the way we build LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] buildings, the materials we use, creates whole new sectors in the economy to meet those demands.
In the United States, our edge has always been innovation. We need innovation to solve the world’s problems. The question is: Will it happen here or somewhere else? The EPA wants to make sure the jobs and the innovation are here.
Q: How will your role at the EPA help to promote social justice?
A: A lot of communities that suffer suffer because they are politically marginalized and lack access to clear information. If [j. readers] read that a metal plating or a wastewater treatment facility decided to open up shop next door to their home, they’d go screaming to every elected representative they could.
But in many cases, people who live in communities where this happens often don’t have access to or understanding of how the political system works. I am in position to understand how the system works, and I can empower these communities. To improve the environmental and economic prospects of a community is the most important thing and is something that can’t be ignored.
In Kettleman City, in the middle of the Central Valley, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco on I-5, is the largest hazardous waste dump in California. Most of the workers speak only Spanish. Within the last two years, six mothers have given birth to children with cleft palates. Some have ended up dying. So I’ve sent out five inspectors and one of the world experts on cleft palates. We’re saying: This community needs help.
The EPA is great at talking; so we’re learning how to listen better, and how based on what we hear, how to help communities. One of the EPA’s tendencies historically has been to do what the EPA thinks should be done rather than to listen to the community and then do what they are asking.
Q: On the horizon is a huge military buildup in Guam that intends to move all the troops from Okinawa, Japan, to Guam by 2014, adding 80,000 people to an island with a current population of 175,000. What are you doing about the environmental implications of such a move?
A: I was just in Guam [in March]. I visited power plants, wastewater treatment plants and took a helicopter ride with the Navy. The EPA has already spent two years working with the Navy and the Department of Defense to ensure that the buildup doesn’t negatively impact a very stretched infrastructure, and also positively supports a greener Guam. … The main discussion at the moment is: How can we provide a sustainable infrastructure for this induced growth?
Also, there is a 71-acre coral reef that could be completely destroyed if the military goes through with a plan to build a nuclear power aircraft carrier. It would be one of the largest destructions of coral reef in U.S. history. So we’re looking at how things could be reconfigured to reduce the impact.
Q: Is there a place for faith-based communities in environmental policy, advocacy and improvement?
A: Yes. There’s a huge role for faith. To me, faith — whether Judaism or any belief system — is looking at our place in the universe and on this planet and realizing there’s something larger and more powerful than us that governs how we live on this planet. And I think when you lose that, there’s a certain arrogance that ensues about our ability to shape the planet to our own ends.
Faith-based organizations really understand and believe in the sanctity of the environment and the resources we’ve been given, and feel a stewardship role in protecting them. Everyone from religious leaders to business owners are environmentalists. To me, the environmental movement needs to be a very big tent and not seen as the exclusive domain of anyone. Someone who doesn’t own a car and bikes to work is doing something to help the planet. They should feel just as much a part of environmental movement as someone who’s been a Sierra Club member their whole life.