The Chicago Sustainability Series returns for Season Three with A POLICY Dialogue held on June 9, 2026 with Jen Walling. Jen is the Chief Executive Officer of the Illinois Environmental Council.
A POLICY Dialogue
The Chicago Sustainability Series returns for Season Three with A POLICY Dialogue held on June 9, 2026 with Jen Walling. Jen is the Chief Executive Officer of the Illinois Environmental Council.
The Chicago Sustainability Series is sponsored by Ion Stewards Energy, learn more at ionstewardsenergy.com.
We covered Illinois Senate Bill 3772, the state’s Environmental Justice Air Permitting Bill. Once in effect, the new Illinois law will require a cumulative impact analysis assessing all existing air pollution sources, sensitive populations, and other factors that increase community vulnerability to the overall effect of newly proposed polluting projects seeking permits.
We covered recent related wins around transit, battery storage and clean energy, and what still needs to be advanced in Illinois to protect our bills and natural resources from data centers, protect our wetlands, and phase out polystyrene foam from our foodware by 2030.
Our discussion was centered in a full table approach for how important and difficult things get done together with space for technical and community skills, grassroots first mover expertise, practical optimism, good faith development, and how these actions advance every Illinoisian’s state constitutionally protected right to a healthful environment.
Learn more about Jen Walling and her team as anything good happens because of lots of committed and capable hands, where you can get involved, and the goals and progress of the Illinois Environmental Council at ilenviro.org.
Thank you to Dynasty Podcasts and Drew Fredrickson for production and editing services in support of this episode.
Learn more about The Chicago Sustainability Series at sustainthechi.com and stream previous and upcoming episodes at sustainthechi.substack.com.
Now, onto A Chicago Sustainability Series Season Three POLICY Dialogue.
All right, ready, three, two, one. A Policy Dialogue. The Chicago Sustainability Series returns for season three with a Policy Dialogue, held on June 9th, 2026 with Jen Walling.
Jen is the Chief Executive Officer of the Illinois Environmental Council. The Chicago Sustainability Series is sponsored by Ion Stewards Energy. Learn more at ionstewardsenergy.com.
We covered Illinois Senate Bill 3772, the state's Environmental Justice Air Permitting Bill. Once in effect, the new Illinois law will require a cumulative impact analysis, assessing all existing air pollution sources, sensitive populations, and other factors that increase community vulnerability to the overall effect of newly proposed polluting projects seeking permits. We covered recent related winds around transit, battery storage, and clean energy, and what still needs to be advanced in Illinois to protect our bills and natural resources from data centers, protect and advance our wetlands, and phase out polystyrene foam from our foodware by 2030.
Our discussion was centered on a full table approach for how important and difficult things get done together with space for technical and community skills, grassroots first mover expertise, practical optimism, good faith development, and how these actions advance every Illinoisan state constitutionally protected right to a healthful environment. Learn more about Jen Walling and her team as anything good happens because of lots of committed and capable hands where you can get involved in the goals and progress of the Illinois Environmental Council at ilenviro.org. Learn more about the Chicago Sustainability Series at sustainthechi.com and stream previous and upcoming episodes at sustainthechi.substack.com. Now on to a Chicago Sustainability Series Season 3 Policy Dialogue
So today is June 9th. We are doing Season 3 of the Chicago Sustainability Series for re-launching with Jen Walling of the Environmental Council in Illinois.
Jen and I go back about a decade when this was an idea to just try to talk to people and gather some speakers and learn. And she was one of the first people who said, yeah, this sounds interesting. I have someone on my team who could speak about the Future Energy Jobs Act.
And flash forward about a decade. I've been in this space for about 10 years through FEJA, FEJA, now looking ahead to CRGA and SB 3772. And so I deeply appreciate the individual work you do, as well as the difficult and rewarding work of building and keeping a coalition constantly evolving and moving forward.
Yeah, so we just finished legislative session May 31st, but I think the story of this session has to go back to last fall, where in veto session of last fall, we had the biggest impact ever on climate in Illinois in 24 hours with the passage of the Northern Illinois Transit Authority Act and the Clean and Reliable Grid Affordability Act. Those past, within 24 hours of each other, it was just like too much joy for us all to be able to handle, but a really big deal and just a huge 24 hours. And that the 24 hours is going to have climate impact for decades to come on the world.
And so that's just a really powerful way and a really powerful way of saying that I also went into this session expecting absolutely nothing to happen. There was an election March 17th in a primary election. A lot of state lawmakers were involved in that primary election, not for their own primaries, but because they were running for other things.
There were three state lawmakers that were running for Illinois Comptroller. There were several lawmakers running for Congress or supporting their friends in those fields. And so I went into this session with very low expectations.
And I will tell you those low expectations were met. We're not about to promote this general assembly, but they they did as little as I think they could. They passed a budget.
The budget held the line on things that were important. I think that we played a really important advocacy role in protecting nearly half a billion dollars that go to transit and agricultural programs in the last three days. We also passed this Environmental Justice Air Permitting Bill, we've been working on for six years.
And we moved a couple of other minor bills on conservation on plastics. But our big priorities, none of them were achieved. So we're hopeful for either veto session or lame duck on things like data centers, wetlands, our phone food ware ban.
Those are all really important things that we worked on, that there was just no progress on. And so we're excited to see where it goes in the future, but this was not a session for big things. And I think not just for us, other causes and other initiatives saw the same setbacks, just they weren't in very often, they weren't in at the same time so they could talk to each other.
It's just like a real session designed to do the minimum. And I think that was really unfortunate because we need to react to what's happening at the federal level. And I think lawmakers are going to go back home and they're going to hear about data centers.
Before we jump into the Power Act and how this all compounds and interrelates, can you talk about how you've learned how to keep people going and together and to manage expectations? Because you don't seem phased. You just seem to continue to have this endurance that is patient and continuing to be hungry and looking ahead.
Maybe I just don't feel anything anymore.
When we think about it, I think if people were aware of how many laws are made under just extreme exhaustion and frustration, and extreme human conditions, there'd be a little bit of a little bit of horrified, but it also pushes people to an end result. And so coalitions are really critical and important, and we have a lot of really great coalition members. And I think the pieces with folks in our coalition to move things forward is making sure that you give all the information that you can, and you listen, you take feedback.
So we often do that early. We'll start planning for the 2027 session in July, and just hear what people are saying, understand them. I mean, I know which of my affiliates are going to have which feelings about which things.
There's certain things I can be surprised by. But at this point, I know how they're going to react. I know if they're going to be mad about something.
I know if they're going to care about something and want to see it. And I think that's the point with good elected leaders as well, as they know the pulse of their community. They don't necessarily like they should have a public hearing.
But the best community leaders don't necessarily need one because they know what everybody's going to say. But I think there's a lot of work that we do. For example, some of the frustrations early in my career were really from, I'm going to call it the far left, and I say that in quotes.
But I think that a lot of us want to accomplish the same things, and we want to get to the same end result. But when you look at what's capable with all of the different stakeholders that are available, you're just not going to get there. And so looking at negotiations, looking at where the state legislators are, I think one of the things that we're able to accomplish is a really in-depth power analysis.
We assign power in terms of metrics and numbers and look at its growth over time. And it's been huge growth, especially on climate. But when we have a problem where one or several groups want us to move something more difficult than we're able to, we walk them through what the power analysis looks like.
And we say, with this bill, we have this many votes, you need this many votes, and this is what you need to do to get this many votes. And typically, when you start walking through that level of detail, it really opens people's eyes up to what's possible. And unless they're involved in elections and they're going to be removing some votes from those seats, they understand the work that they need to do and the boundaries of that work.
And so I think that's a really important part of a coalition is sharing that sort of analysis of what you can accomplish.
Absolutely. And one of my mentors in the space, someone that we both know and both hold them very high regard, I remember we were doing work in the space for the last decade. And I was asking for their opinion about, you know, it seems some folks have very, very strong opinions about how we close and what methodology we use to, you know, close coal plants or something.
And I said, and we're doing work over here. And it seems kind of duplicative. And shouldn't we be leading for this or that?
And this person helped me understand, oh, it's all this continuity. And one of the hardest, but rewarding parts is understanding where in this orchestra it's time for those people to have their solo, when it's time for ours, and trying to work in concert. But that is exceptionally difficult, especially when we have competing and overlapping language.
And, you know, that's something that you and your team carry a lot of awareness and stewardship around. Diving into a bit of the technical, I'd love for you to define SB 3772 and what it means for Illinois. First on the health and environment side, and then maybe on the business and stakeholder side.
So this is our, we're calling it our Environmental Justice Air Permanent Bill. And this bill, let me go a little back to my very first year in this job. We put in a bill in 2011, and it was a shell bill, and a shell bill is a blank bill.
And it just was called the Environmental Justice Act. It had no other text. It did nothing.
It just said Environmental Justice Act. And every industry and their besties were opposed just from the words, just the words Environmental Justice. They were up in arms.
They were really upset. They were like, you're never going to do anything with this. We really oppose it.
We did pass a commission that year, but it had a lot of industry stakeholders on it, and continues to do so. It doesn't really have any power still. And so, that's sort of the place where we started some of this work.
At least, I started some of this work. I know there are people who have been doing this work in their communities, and homes, and neighborhoods, for decades, but that's where some of that started. And I definitely have to give it to the folks that were really involved with the General Iron Fight, part of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, and that was where the General Iron Metal Shredder wanted to move from Lincoln Park, which is kind of a white, wealthy neighborhood, to the Southeast Side, which is more middle class, middle class people of color, and it just has a lot of pollution.
There's a lot of landfills, a lot of polluting factories, a lot of air pollution. You will put a, this is always the way I think illustrates it best, it's just, you know, you put a pie outside that has whipped cream topping, and it will have a black layer of dust in an hour. And that's just the sort of conditions that some people in Chicago live in.
But not everybody in the state lives in those type of conditions. And so to think about this facility that was causing major problems, that had a lot of compliance issues, moving to somewhere else was just really awful. And the activists did a lot of work, they had a hunger strike.
But during part of it, Governor Pritzker, who's really keen on these issues, who really supports them and his Deputy Governor Christian Mitchell, who grew up in one of these communities, who thinks this is really important, that IEPA had to issue a permit because they felt like under the law, there was nothing they could do other than issue this permit. And so they issued it and they said, we're going to work on this. And then we put bills in, I think in 2022, 2023, 2024, the bill actually in the house, passed the house one year, failed in the house twice the next year.
We were never able to move it in the Senate. So we had to bring a lot of stakeholders together, have a lot of discussions. But ultimately, it also was the Biden administration, the federal government that got this bill done because the US EPA came in and they made IEPA agree to a settlement to do work on environmental justice.
And they're still enacting that. And this puts into statute that settlement that they needed to agree to. And it was because of work from Southeast Environmental Task Force and People for Community Recovery that were part of that settlement and got it done.
And this is a bill that looks at data, including pollution indicators and demographics, and designates environmental justice communities, which are the bottom 25 percent census tracks based on that mathematical data. And in those communities, it's required that IEPA take a hard look at the permit. They look at the air in the area.
They look at additional air monitoring, additional inspections, enforcement. They look at compliance history. They can say no to permits.
And just really impactful and important. And that is what this legislation work to do. And it's only the largest air permit, so major source air permits, federally enforceable state operating permits, Clean Air Act program permits that it applies to.
But just incredibly important for air pollution in those communities that are already experiencing really serious threats.
One of the things that I've been thinking a lot about, and I see this implicitly in your type of organizing, in the work you're leading and your team is leading, is it's both lived experience on the activist side as well as expertise. Because the first air permitting walk I did was with Alfredo Romero down in Little Village, and that was in partnership with Environmental Law and Policy Center. And Alfredo is a cancer survivor, Negros for Environmental Justice, and a lovely, effective human being.
And he identified these things with his people because he had the lived experience, and then that's that first mover expertise. And so, years later, when there were two back-to-back fires where I live in Humboldt Park, one on the other side of the metro train tracks, a pallet repair shop, and the other one closer to me, right behind the Continental, and by Christie Weber, was at an auto repair shop and a battery repair shop. And these were June 18th and June 19th, 2024.
And it did an environmental justice self-designation process because there was a little carve out in our area that was marked as no longer EJC, even though it was basically Peninsula around on three sides. And my firm is an equity-eligible contractor. But part of the reason why I was able to do these things is because there was FEJA, because there were these activists, because there's so many things that came before.
So there was this wealth of expertise to put into action. And I think you're really speaking to that and how this was all cumulative.
Yeah, and I think just in any organizing and any of this work, anybody that tells you just one tactic leads to the result just doesn't know what they're talking about. So even if my organizing groups that just want to say, oh, grassroots got this done, and that could be a big portion of any of this, but there's the folks that bring up that there's a problem through the lived experience. There are different technical experts, legal experts, engineers, and then when you get into Springfield, you have grassroots and you have direct lobbying, and those things just all go together.
There's certain tools that we don't have as much of in the tool backs like political campaign donations, but there's some and it takes all of those tools to get these things done. And definitely all of those folks in the Chicago Environmental Justice Network, their ideas, their lived experience, wrote this bill, they brought it to us, and we worked together for a large number of years and fought together. We're sad about things together and are excited by this, when and what it can propel us into next.
And building off that, one of the things that's captured my imagination so much with this, well, there's two things. One, looking at the development of data centers pre-24 and now 25 going forward, and having been on both sides of the project development calculus, so many of the tools available to us around fugitive dust tracking, groundwater, plumes, vapor intrusion in homes, that are new risks that people kind of took for granted, are so present here. And I saw this as a project developer, and I was thrilled because this hits so many of the things and gives people more access to what they deserve in a healthful environment.
Can you talk about why this is so precise around things like plumes, fugitive dust, groundwater, and what informed that?
Yeah, so this bill really only tackles large major air sources. So we're not yet tackling things like water or fugitive dust if it's not part of an air permit. It tackles what are major sources of the Clean Air Act program permit and the federally enforceable state operating permit.
And those look at major sources. But things like particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, major air pollutants that if you're going to be putting those into the air, especially in Chicago and other urban areas that are non-attainment areas, it's really important. But one of the reasons it was really important to start with air permitting, and we need to go further.
There's going to be more. But air permitting was one of the few areas, environmental regulation, that kind of doesn't look at anything that's nearby. And so there is, with air permitting, the way the federal law works, you can be in an attainment zone or a non-attainment zone.
And that's for our national ambient air quality standards. You look at those, and they set whether you're attainment or non-attainment, that's it. And I think there are like six or seven counties in Illinois that are in non-attainment, and those counties need to follow lower pollution limits.
But at the same time, those are looking at things that are countywide, and Cook County is huge. So if you're just, if you're putting a bunch of factories really close together, the solution to pollution is not solution. It's, you know, it's, it's, the people who are living in residences around those different facilities are going to have much worse air than somebody living further away from them.
And so that's sort of how, how air law works. But there's no like cumulative look at what's going on in a particular area. With water law, you have what's called total maximum daily load, which looks at a different waterway, and everybody has these National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permits, NPDES permits, NPDES.
And with those, you, the total maximum daily load looks at everybody that is, has a NPDES and is putting pollution into the waterway. And so that total maximum daily load can say like, oh no, you can't put any more of that in here because this waterway has enough already. We don't do that with air.
And this is, that's why it was important to start here with this. But there's definitely more places to go. And this is really the first pollution center in environmental justice law.
But as you're referencing the Illinois Solar for All program through the Future Energy Jobs Act, I like to point out that was signed by Governor Rauner. Governor Rauner signed the bill creating environmental justice communities for the first time. I like to say that in committees with Republicans because that's where it came from.
But that process that was put in the law looks at where you can put solar facilities and get the benefits from the Solar for All program and many other programs under FEJA and CEJA look at those environmental justice communities to make decisions. And this is the first time that we look at them in terms of pollution and what can go into these communities in terms of pollution. And so it's much easier to designate communities when you want to provide a benefit.
And this is a benefit to those communities, but it is also something where you're putting a restriction on different types of businesses, which I think is also an economic benefit for some of those communities. I had to talk with a lot of lawmakers about, you put up one of these dirty, nasty polluting facilities, people don't want to live there. That's not the neighborhood they want to go in.
And so, yeah, that's a little of how this bill works. And there's definitely other places we need to go to look at all of it. And the next step needs to be the Hazel M. Johnson Cumulative Impact Ordinance of the city of Chicago, which goes much more broadly than this bill does. This doesn't negate the need for the Hazel M. J. Cumulative Impact Ordinance. It enhances the need. We need to get that done at the city level next.
I want to hit a couple of points really quickly, and then I'd love for you to talk more about the Hazel M. Johnson Cumulative Impact Ordinance. When I've had conversations with Republicans and other states that are red, sometimes there'll be this perspective of everything green, everything EV is a scam, etc., and I'm 100% against it. And then I'll have conversations of working across 12 Illinois counties to get solar done over the years, predominantly Republican, and why people wanted those, or why some of these areas have been the leaders in clean energy or EV adoption. And so you speak in the Governor Rauner aspect does speak to kind of providing some imagination or reminder that things can be bipartisan.
The other thing that I think is really important about this is when I look at the data center development trends in other counties, other states, I've seen air permitting, I would subjectively say, feel kind of restricted, where they say we have two measures we can look at. They've said that this is a synthetic miner, meaning the math says that there's no need for pollution controls. And we're going to take that at face value.
But if in these other states, something like this was then in effect for a data center build or something that large, then the cumulative record of something like trichloroethylene spread in fugitive dust could be weighed. And so these technical levers are so, so crucial, especially when we think about where we are and where we're going. Could you define the Hazel M. Johnson cumulative impacts ordinance and where that places us and what that helps us build to?
Yeah, well, that looks at, it uses another mathematical equation to look at different areas of the city. And it kind of, you know, because the city now is almost all environmental justice community is under IEPA. That's just how much pollution and demographics exist.
But it, it sort of creates different tiers of risk in terms of communities in Chicago. And in some of those communities, you need to do enhanced zoning that looks at cumulative impact analysis. You need to do a full health analysis, this full cumulative impact look, and can definitely deny a permit if that's the case.
And so the general iron permit was denied. And, you know, that's what we're looking at with the cumulative impact ordinance. It's much broader, looks at a lot more polluting facilities that might go into place, much larger facilities, and really has a assessment and discussion around whether those facilities should be located in that area and what the health risks will be from putting them there.
Something that stood out in the last year, and I believe it was you or it might have been Lucy with Green Latinos, talking about how something like the Power Act was a race to the top. Instead of us taking a ceiling of what's bare minimum acceptable, putting more guardrails is going to encourage good faith development, application of good faith, urban practices, nature-based solutions, etc. Can you talk about why that's so important for facilitating imagination and something like SB 3772 and the cumulative impacts ordinance to invite those types of good faith development and imagination and best practices to the state?
Yeah. I mean, oh gosh, with all of this, development is such an interesting conversation, right? And especially as environmentalists, having to go from no in my backyard, not in my backyard, to yes in my backyard for certain things, and seeing better development and actually seeing it take place. Incredibly important.
But going back to some of this, the Environmental Justice Air Permanent Bill or the Cumulative Impact Ordinance, when you decide that you're going to put a large polluting factory somewhere, or even a warehouse somewhere, you're making some decisions about the economic characteristics in the neighborhood. You're deciding that you're not going to have locally owned businesses, because locally owned businesses don't want to go by this big, ugly asphalt plant. You're deciding who you want to live there when you put in one of these facilities.
And wealthy people don't want their huge homes right next to a place that's going to have air pollution. And so you're making decisions about that community, and you're making them over and over and over again. And, you know, especially why we have environmental justice communities is a lot about political power, et cetera.
But like, how do we make decisions that instead lead to things like the nature-based climate solutions, lead to locally owned businesses, to wealth in a community, wealth staying in a community? How do we make those decisions? Like that's not just a statewide economic development, that's a piece that really impacts people's lives in a community. And keeps the wealth and resources right there.
100%. And I've seen some people with some of these, let's say they have one to 300 million dollars of active or planned commercial and residential development. And they're very excited about these things.
And then if you place a large diesel generator or coal powered, or you're not going to fully remediate the ground field before you build on it, with something that's going to impact the air and the water, etc. It becomes a catchment too, because you have people who've lent, you've planned on this community to have a turnaround or have an empowerment. But that can wipe out all of those gains.
And so something like this can provide frameworks, imagination. And I believe, you know, as a project developer, and we do health advising, the conversations I'm having around this are with landscape designers, looking at international models, looking at Eastern and Western Europe, looking at Northern Europe, you're looking at Mexico City, and saying, what can we apply here if we're going to do development of this capacity or this quality here? And so I see this as a huge opportunity for imagination and reinforcement of what's being said at the activist expertise and lived experience saying, hey, and even as you said, if I put my pie out, I want to be able to eat it in 10 minutes safely.
Yeah, great pollution indicator.
We sometimes what I'll do is take photos of the, you know, the city has the local cats that take care of the mice and the mice, etc. And we put water out for a few of them. And on bad air quality days, I bring that water in, take a photo and take a little sample of it.
“And then I'm going to work with our partners to get it tested. And so, you know, even being able to go locally and talk to our neighbors and point to things like this, even if it doesn't apply to a small development, it does reinforce, it does encourage that imagination. As you're thinking about what's next, what are some of the challenges?
And then we can close on what are some of the opportunities, as you look to IL SB 3772 from this.
Yeah, well, I mean, we had three big priorities that we wanted to get done this year and accomplish none of them. We got some things done, but our big priorities were around data centers, wetlands protection, and our foam food wear ban. And I think that the governor just came out and supported some principles that really reflect the POWER Act, our bill on data centers, the Protecting Our Water, Energy, and Ratepayers Act.
And we have heard from a lot of lawmakers about wanting to push that forward and put guardrails on data centers in terms of energy, communities, and water. And it definitely, it intersects with this issue that we're talking about, because a lot of data centers need to get federally enforceable state operating permits, or ESOP permits, that require a hard look under this law if they go into an environmental justice community. So that's a piece we know is going to be impactful.
We know it's important. We need it now. We need it in more communities.
So I think we want to see this enacted. We want to see the Hazel M. Johnson Cumulative Impact Ordinance move ahead. And then we want to see this apply to more and more places.
Ultimately, we need higher levels of environmental protection to sustain life and make sure people are healthy and thriving. And so that's a really critical piece. And then we need to respond to the Supreme Court's rollback of wetlands, which also has to do with all of these items.
That's our kidneys that filter out water and air and nutrients. And our fight on foam foodware, which seems a little unrelated, but also related because foam foodware is made out of styrene. Styrene is a waste product of the oil and gas industry.
And I can tell you the oil and gas industry is fighting against the ban real hard, because they want to continue to use this waste product in cancer plates that people eat off of. And so those are things that we want to see move forward in the future, but we got to keep continuing to build power, build education, build knowledge, to get to where we need to go in the state legislature.
Absolutely. And for our friends in health care who are going to be watching or listening to this, or have their chiefs of staffs give them the five main points quickly for it in between meetings, what do you want them to take from SB 3772? And how do you want them to think about it in relation to their practices and the POWER Act?
I want big businesses and big executives to understand that all communities deserve clean air, all communities deserve clean water, and I want them to be really cautious about the pollution that they're creating, the pollution that other people are ultimately paying for. Somebody else's lungs shouldn't be filtering out what you're putting in the air. That's your responsibility.
And so I do want them to take responsibility, but also, like we talked about, be imaginative about economic development. We don't need to have economic development that is creating this level of air pollution, and take the highest level of steps that you possibly can to keep a facility clean and healthy. You want to keep your workers healthy.
You want to keep your executives that work in those buildings healthy. And so those are all things that I want to, I want those big company executives to think about.
Absolutely. And as we close, what are one or a few things that come to mind that either from your background and your continuity with this keep you pragmatically hopeful and, you know, looking ahead and still empowered or either by imagination take us out on a few good points?
Well, when I look at things year by year, I can get very frustrated because in a year, you don't see a whole ton of progress except at certain key inflection points. But when I look at the arc of where we've come over my career, over even the last 50 years that IEC has existed, we have really made a difference. We've really come a long way when we look at the long perspective.
And so I want people to be in this for the long term. I want us to set goals together and know that we can reach them and we can solve big problems. This is something that we can do.
So encourage people to meet their lawmakers, hold them accountable, and make sure that they know environment is a key issue.
Well, Jen, thank you for, before I even say thank you for all you do, thank you for how you do it, thank you for keeping it generational and continuity minded, and continuing to make sure there's room for torches and continued interpretation and faith in these spaces. And thank you for your time and what you and your team do.
The Chicago Sustainability Series was founded in 2015 to explore the intersections of sustainability, inclusion, representation, and equity.
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