Lisa Jackson
|
|
|
President-elect Barack Obama announced Monday that New Jersey's Lisa Jackson, a New Orleanian, will become the first African American to lead the Environmental Protection Agency under his administration. Ms. Jackson was born in Philadelphia, Pa. but was raised and educated New Orleans.
Jackson is the second New Orleanian selected by Obama as a member of his Cabinet. Barack Obama announced late last month that Orleans native Desiree Rogers, a former Zulu queen and the daughter of the late New Orleans City Councilman Roy Glapion Jr., will serve as White House social secretary for the next four years.
Born Feb. 8, 1962, in Philadelphia, Pa., Jackson was adopted a few weeks later and raised in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. A straight A student who once described herself as "a geek basically," she graduated first in her class at St. Mary's Dominican High School. After graduating summa cum laude from Tulane University's School of Chemical Engineering, she earned a master's in chemical engineering from Princeton University.
She, hubby Kenny Jackson and their two sons live in East Windsor, N.J. Like Desiree Rogers, Jackson is a proud New Orleanian whose signature culinary dish - gumbo - is a tribute to her Louisiana roots. A talented party-giver in her own right, Jackson is renowned for her annual Mardi Gras party, which she has not thrown since Hurricane Katrina devastated her hometown in 2005.
Jackson worked for 16 years at the EPA in Washington and in New York before taking over the helm at the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection in 2002, an agency that has been plagued by budget cuts and personnel shortages. Jackson was named the head of the department in 2006 by Gov. Jon Corzine, overseeing environmental regulation in a state besieged with pollution problems and home to the most hazardous waste sites in the country. She left earlier this month to take a job as Gov. Corzine's chief of staff.
During her brief stint, Jackson has worked to pass mandatory reductions in greenhouse gases, to reform New Jersey's cleanup of contaminated sites and to establish a scientific advisory board to review agency decisions.
"In New Jersey, you're working on contaminated sites, you're working on open space, endangered species, clean water. New Jersey is the laboratory for environmental protection. Whatever bad happens in the environment, it happens in New Jersey first. It is a good proving ground," Jeff Tittel, executive director of the New Jersey Chapter of the Sierra Club, told The Associated Press.
Not everyone was pleased with Obama's selection of Lisa Jackson. A small but vocal group of environmental protection groups campaigned against her the week before she was officially selected, asking President-elect Barack Obama to reconsider Jackson as a candidate.
In a letter to the transition team, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that represents environmentally-minded state and federal employees, said it was "distressed" that Jackson was under consideration.
The group said that while Jackson had "a compelling biography," her record at the Department of Environmental Protection did not warrant a promotion. As evidence, they cited an EPA inspector general report that concluded that New Jersey failed to use its power to expedite cleanups at seven hazardous waste sites. The state also has been criticized by federal wildlife officials for failing to adopt standards for pesticides and other toxic chemicals that protect wildlife and for delays in meeting its greenhouse gas emissions targets.
Responding to those allegations, DEP officials defended Jackson and said she inherited many of the problems, and that in the case of global warming the state was getting back on track.
Other environmental groups who support her nomination but criticize some of her actions say that in those cases she was overruled by Gov. Jon Corzine.
"She is the best possible choice that President Obama could make," Dena Mottola Jaborska, executive director of Environment New Jersey, told The Associated Press. "She has had a lot of situations where protections needed for the environment were politically difficult, and sometimes she didn't prevail and sometimes she did prevail."
"There are hundreds of environmental groups in New Jersey, and if you called all of them up, I think 99.5 percent of them would say that Jackson is a great pick," Mottola told U.S. News & World Report.
Jackson brings to the job two decades of experience as an environmental regulator and a reputation as a consensus-builder. A chemical engineer, Jackson brought a more policy-driven approach to New Jersey's historically politicized Department of Environmental Protection as its commissioner. During her 33 months in that job, the state began conducting compliance sweeps to crack down on polluters in environmentally ravaged sections of Camden and Paterson, ended its controversial bear hunt and unveiled a plan to reduce carbon emissions 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.
This article was originally published in the December 22, 2008 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper |
