Who Gets Polluted?
Rosen, Ruth
"All communities are not created equal" Robert Bullard, Sociologist, U.C. Riverside During the last decade, a grass-roots, minority-led movement against environmental racism (more recently...
...Nor do these women actively seek media attention...
...African-American families who had scrimped and saved to own their own homes happily bought up the plots in this new suburb...
...Its "worst case" scenario predicted that a toxic plume would not extend further than its property line—a preposterous assumption...
...On December 17, 1993, the day demolition of homes began in Carver Terrace, Patsy Ruth Oliver died of a heart attack...
...A series of "smoking gun" leaks to the public have helped make charges of environmental injustice credible...
...It's exploiting the fears of communities that have a high unemployment rate...
...For if industrial America cannot dump its waste in minority communities, or if these communities exact too high a price, Americans must decide what kinds of toxics they will tolerate anywhere...
...Any job is better than no job...
...Four months after the toxic emission, California state health environmental epidemiologists called a community meeting at which they announced that they had changed their minds and could not design a study to measure the health impact of the toxic release...
...The agency also promised to launch a public awareness campaign targeted at minority groups...
...Furthermore, by promoting their own NIMBYism, minority communities offer a profound challenge to past corporate and governmental environmental practices...
...For unexplained reasons, government officials allowed waste to be stored only fifteen feet above the water table, instead of the usual fifty feet required for PCBs...
...Although largely ignored by the national media, the leaders of this grass-roots movement have quietly challenged the corporate right to endanger the health of poor people...
...But they also know that authorities would address any middle-class white community's complaints more seriously...
...The EPA never even bothered to interview the residents...
...Still hoarse and coughing, mothers described the terror they felt as they watched their families and homes gassed...
...In addition, the initiative sets in motion an unprecedented data-gathering effort across the federal government to document the impact of pollution on low-income and minority communities...
...During the last decade, scholars, journalists, and activists have been busy proving—and tracking the impact of—environmental injustice...
...Oliver, who joined the board of Friends of the Earth, then went on to publicize the environmental hazards faced by poor communities in the Southwest...
...If the wind had driven the plume south into Berkeley's white middleclass gourmet ghetto, where activists sit in cafes sipping cafe latte discussing environmental racism, would the media have minimized the terror of a toxic cloud gassing an entire community...
...Job blackmail, which has hit most American workers, makes efforts to organize against industrial pollution particularly difficult...
...Use WordPerfect 5.1 if possible...
...They're an indicator species of the health of the community...
...And when poor communities accept monetary repaSPRING • 1994 • 229 Green Politics rations from polluting industries, mainstream environmental activists sometimes charge them with being "bought off" by industry...
...The truth did not emerge until 1979, one year after residents discovered leaking barrels of dioxin beneath Love Canal, New York...
...Some movement activists hailed the executive order as a great success...
...A documentary film titled Chemical Valley (1991) recounts how Union Carbide blackmailed the community with loss of jobs and how both the company and the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stonewalled efforts to investigate the community's health complaints...
...The tragedy of Bhopal, India, on December 3,1984 intensified American minorities' awareness of environmental dangers...
...Not content to fight against health hazards, most of the groups embraced a multi-issue agenda, organized around the principles of social justice and economic equity...
...Spearheaded by Ben Chavis, now the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the study discovered that three of five African Americans live in communities endangered by abandoned toxic waste sites and commercial hazardous waste landfills...
...The magnitude of the chemical nightmare of Bhopal captured international attention and cast the media's spotlight on the predominantly African-American community of Institute, West Virginia, the site of the only Union Carbide plant in the United States that manufactured MIC...
...In the last decade, minority-led-groups like the North Richmond West County Toxics Coalition have redefined environmentalism to emphasize the protection of urban residents from toxic pollution...
...It could have been worse...
...In some cases, minority communities agreed to accept such facilities in return for jobs and contracts that never appeared...
...One sign of the movement's success came in February 1993, when the Clinton administration issued an Executive Order requiring federal agencies to "make environmental justice a part of all they do...
...The community has the highest rate of HIV-infected African-American drug users in the state...
...But their insistence upon decent jobs as well as a clean environment is a legitimate and radical demand that challenges the distribution of wealth and racial discrimination in America...
...Had a toxic cloud of ammonia erupted, it would have left hundreds, if not thousands, of dead bodies on the ground...
...6) Please bear with us—we have accumulated quite a backlog of material, and you may have to wait for a few issues before you see your article in print...
...Such allegations, however, miss the radical potential of grass-roots environmental activism...
...Much of the local media trivialized their complaints, accusing residents of seeking to establish fake liability claims, as though they hadn't been injured or traumatized...
...Some local government agencies argue that it is zoning, not racism, that has dumped the worst toxic substances into minority communities...
...When a toxic gas known as MIC leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, the poisonous cloud killed close to four thousand people and permanently disabled another fifty thousand residents...
...Most minority communities in the United States are poor, and low income people can't vote with their feet and move wherever they choose...
...No dot matrix submissions, please...
...Some minority activists trace their movement to 1982, when North Carolina decided to build a PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) disposal site in Warren County...
...People wheezed and coughed, their eyes and lungs scorched by the toxic cloud...
...The report concluded that all socioeconomic groups resent and resist the siting of hazardous wastes in their neighborhoods (NIMBYism or Not In My Backyard Syndrome) but that lower income groups have fewer resources to fight government decisions...
...Five months after the incident, the county office of emergency services still had not designed a long-promised evacuation plan for North Richmond residents...
...What motivates these women is an outrage born of the desperate desire to hold together already fragile families and communities...
...North Richmond, California, for example, has developed an intricate infrastructure of community organizations that is challenging industry's ability to threaten their community...
...Outraged, Oliver and her neighbors formed the Carver Terrace Community Action group, and with the assistance of local environmentalists, residents soon discovered that the EPA had failed to inform them of two other studies that showed that Carver Terrace did indeed pose immediate risks to the community's health...
...Three hours passed before the explosion could be capped...
...True enough...
...The community group decided that its members—like the residents of Love Canal— wanted the government to buy them out...
...The report also revealed that the nation's largest hazardous waste landfill, which receives toxics from forty-five states, is situated in Emelle, Alabama, whose population is 78.9 percent African American...
...Hardly a startling conclusion, but when leaked to the public, the study helped galvanize the growing environmental justice movement in California...
...The neighbors dispersed...
...But the EPA investigates specific causation, rather than evaluating the aggregate risks that assault a community...
...The film also traces the community's growing political sophistication, including its awareness of its collusion in the creation of an endangered valley...
...Vogue magazine recently featured a rare profile of one of these unsung heroines...
...Over the next few days, more than twenty thousand residents sought medical treatment from nearby hospitals...
...The EPA brought in a small army of scientists, outfitted in full protective gear, who declared the soil contaminated, but then, in an arcane and baffling twist, concluded that the SPRING • 1994 • 227 Groan Politics area posed no immediate danger to residents' health...
...If there's one thing I know," she said, "it's racism...
...It is a community whose history stretches back to slavery...
...Outraged by what they viewed as racial discrimination, sixteen thousand residents, mostly African Americans and Native Americans, organized a series of marches and protests that resulted in over five hundred arrests...
...The federal government offers yet more obstacles...
...All communities are not created equal" Robert Bullard, Sociologist, U.C...
...What is environmental injustice...
...Some mainstream environmentalists charge that minority grass-roots organizations aren't sufficiently concerned with the environment, that they seek only a fairer distribution of environmental dangers— "environmental equity...
...5) We're usually quick in giving editorial decisions...
...In 1984, Cerell Associates, a private consulting firm hired by the California Waste Management Board, issued a report titled "Political Difficulties Facing Waste-to-Energy Conversion Plant Siting...
...Peter L. Reich, a legal expert on environmental race discrimination, argues—perhaps a bit optimistically—that "When the pollution costs of industrial development can no longer be shifted to the powerless, greening the ghetto will be the first step in greening our entire society...
...The candor of the memo— "Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries...
...On July 26, 1993, while the rest of the nation watched the rising waters of the Mississippi drown people's homes and dreams, a ruptured railroad car at General Chemical's plant in North Richmond, California, spewed a fifteen-mile long toxic plume of sulfuric acid through surrounding residential communities...
...Bullard also proposes a Fair Environmental Protection Act to redress the intended and unintended effects of public and industrial policies...
...The national media, for example, haven't grasped that all these local organizations constitute a new movement—despite the large number of citizens who have marched, demonstrated and been arrested...
...These are not traditional environmentalists...
...When I look outside the window, how will I know if it's another toxic cloud or just summer fog...
...It also refers to the well-documented fact that local governments have excluded minority communities from environmental planning and that toxic sites have destroyed many traditional minority communities...
...To outsiders, the siting of toxic waste facilities or refineries in minority communities may seem like a coincidence, or the consequences of the poor's political marginality...
...It's no accident that the nation's most toxic sites are surrounded by black and Latino communities...
...POSTSCRIPT: The residents of North Richmond have patiently waited...
...Awareness of environmental discrimination has grown in fits and starts...
...Why hadn't General Chemical installed safety technology so that, if an accident occurred, toxic emissions would be vented into alternative containment systems, rather than into the atmosphere...
...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...
...The citizens of North Richmond, for example, know that it is their poverty and political vulnerability that allow their neighborhood to be polluted...
...On recent weekends, drive-by shootings have routinely injured as many as twenty people...
...Eventually, over the objections of the EPA, Patsy Ruth Oliver and her neighbors forced the government to buy them out...
...Or take a chance and send us your article...
...Until recently, many minority communities had been willing to choose between jobs and environmental pollution...
...Robert Bullard, who has studied the local leadership of these campaigns, explains that "Patsy typifies what's happening in the environmental justice movement in communities of color...
...Disaster and trauma are nothing new to the residents of North Richmond, California, one of the poorest and most devastated AfricanAmerican neighborhoods in the United States...
...revealed the kind of cavalier cynicism the World Bank expresses toward third world countries...
...Although they lost the battle, the 224 • DISSENT Green Politics Warren County residents may have begun the battle against environmental racism...
...They feel dispensable—and discriminated against—as African Americans, not only as poor people...
...Carl Anthony, Director of Urban Habitat Te movement for environmental justice, led by grassroots activists like Patsy Ruth Oliver, is offering a serious challenge to government and corporate environmental policies...
...Which words most accurately describe the casual indifference authorities have demonstrated...
...Over the last decade, a series of studies and reports have amply documented the fact that impoverished racial groups—Native Americans, Mexican migrant workers, and AfricanAmerican and Hispanic inner city residents— have endured the greatest industrial pollution...
...She is right...
...In 1984, Texas officials asked the federal EPA to place Carver Terrace on the Superfund list, the $1.3 billion trust that congress established in 1980 to clean up toxic waste dumps...
...q (1) Be sure to keep a copy of your manuscript...
...Environmental activists charge that it's no accident that the population in this ZIP code, where eighteen companies discharge five times as much as pollution as they emit in the next worst ZIP code, is 59 percent African American and 38 percent Hispanic...
...Both Citizens for a Better Environment and the Sierra Club have offered their assistance to these groups...
...It's the path of least resistance whether it's a municipal landfill, an incinerator, a toxic-waste dump or a chemical plant...
...And please remember that we can't return articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...
...In its 1990 report, "Environmental Equity: Reducing Risks for All Communities," the EPA finally agreed that minority communities have borne more than their share of environmentally undesirable hazards...
...Labor organizers and environmental activists have been seeking ways to unite their movement on the issue of removing toxics from the workplace...
...Environmental pollution is not merely a problem that affects people of color...
...In the process, a budding suburban African American community was saved, but also destroyed...
...Employing a "scientific" method of risk assessment—which selects from dozens of variables—EPA environmental epidemiologists invariably fail to demonstrate a link between a particular pollutant and a specific disease...
...Under the order, every agency would have to consider the impact of its policies on minority communities...
...Bureaucratic bumbling, environmental racism, or environmental injustice...
...they're the author's responsibility...
...Investigative journalists have publicized the fact that the dirtiest ZIP code in California, a one square mile section of Los Angeles County, is filled with waste dumps, smokestacks and waste-water pipes from polluting industries...
...When an internal memo written by a chief economist from the World Bank was leaked to the public in 1991, it touched off a global scandal...
...As mothers and grandmothers of the community—often veterans of the civil rights movement—they organize to protect the health of their families and communities...
...At least thirty-eight industrial sites store as much as ninety-four million pounds of forty-five different chemicals, including some of the most dangerous—ammonia, chlorine, hydrogen fluoride and nitric acid...
...The movement for environmental justice has also had more success in forging a multiracial coalition among community groups than in joining forces with established labor organizations or national environmental groups...
...The EPA's Office of Environmental Equity, which opened just last year, now plans to initiate several demonstration projects at cleanup sites in poor communities...
...In response to the demand for healthy jobs as well as a clean environment, many American companies have chosen to relocate...
...Housing developers and their friends, not the residents whose homes are just across the street from refineries and landfills...
...When community residents demanded an explanation for the chemical odors that saturated the valley's air, company inspectors somehow couldn't detect the same odors...
...The community of North Richmond will, no doubt, hand down its own verdict...
...Such workers would receive displacement benefits while training to reenter the work force with new skills...
...The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International, for example, proposed a new federal "superfund" for workers displaced by the removal of toxics from the workplace...
...Wendel Brunner, public health director of the county in which North Richmond's refineries are located, "is the only thing that makes economics look like a science...
...An unusual cluster of medical problems further terrified the residents of this community...
...Poor people worry more about starving to death from unemployment than about the health risks they may face from industrial pollution...
...Then, without skipping a beat, she quickly adds that Union Carbide and the government probably would have treated poor—but not affluent— whites with the same indifference...
...In April 1990, for example, the SouthWest Organizing Project drew together thirty organizations from the Southwest, mostly minority representatives involved in environmental and economic justice issues...
...But the obstacles are daunting...
...Check all your figures, dates, names, etc...
...Based on the precedents of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, such federal and state legislation would prohibit environmental discrimination based on race and class...
...Oliver knew that it was racism, not the soil, that distinguished Carver Terrace from Love Canal...
...As residents testified before an open microphone in a cavernous church, I heard little grandstanding, just the voices of people who felt hurt and frightened...
...In one interview, an African-American male worker sadly concedes, "I sold my soul to Union Carbide...
...The study further demonstrated that the greatest concentration of hazardous-waste sites in the United States is in the predominately black and Latino South Side of Chicago...
...After the accident, community and environmental activists asked questions that never seemed to get answered...
...and that impairing the health of people with the lowest wages made the "greatest economic sense...
...West Virginia's Kanawha Valley—dubbed by residents "the chemical capital of the world" —would never be the same...
...In 1983, Robert Bullard, a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside and author of Dumping in Dixie, demonstrated that, from the late 1920s to the late 1970s, Houston placed all of its city-owned landfills and six of its eight incinerators in largely AfricanAmerican neighborhoods...
...Why did the General Chemical plant's accident prevention plan— required by law but barred from public scrutiny—fail to identify such a possible incident...
...Meanwhile, their organized movement has won one major victory: As reparations, General Chemical has agreed to build and support a medical clinic in the community...
...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...
...These are people talking about survival...
...A small but important triumph in the long struggle for environmental justice...
...Without a high-profile national reputation that can capture the media's attention, they are easily ignored...
...Although mainstream environmental organizations have occasionally provided minority organizations with invaluable expert testimony, research, technical assistance and legal advice, no real coalition between the established national groups—whose membership is largely white and middle class —and minority community organizations has so far developed...
...Several weeks later, the community of North Richmond gathered to hear a lame apology from a General Chemical representative, and to SPRING • 1994 • 223 Green Politics testify about the trauma they suffered...
...In a very real sense, these activists come from different worlds and are concerned about different worlds...
...I have a master's degree in Jim Crow...
...Among its most important findings were that two million tons of radioactive uranium tailings had been dumped on Native American lands and that cancers of the reproductive organs among Navajo teenagers had climbed to seventeen times the national average...
...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...
...If there's a delay, it's because a few editors are reading your article...
...Riverside During the last decade, a grass-roots, minority-led movement against environmental racism (more recently described as the movement for environmental justice) has been spreading across urban America...
...To Our Contributors: A few suggestions: Let's hope he's right...
...THE EDITORS 230 • DISSENT...
...At best, the large, mainstream environmental groups focus on the health of the planet— the wildernesses, forests and oceans that cannot protect themselves...
...Let me begin with a true story, an incident that escaped most of the country's attention...
...From farm-worker communities to Native American reservations, from urban landfills to waste dumps, minority activists are expanding environmentalism to include the 226 • DISSENT Green Politics protection of urban and rural communities endangered by industrial toxic substances...
...Journalists dutifully interview leaders for the evening news, but they leave as soon as they count the bodies and collect their sound bites...
...Still, people of color are likely to be endangered because their neighborhoods are not only poor but also relatively politically powerless...
...After speaking, one woman sat down beside me, still gasping for breath...
...They want results, not public glory...
...Their tactics focused on local targets: they demonstrated and marched, held hearings and public workshops, initiated fact-finding research, and filed suits against local and state governments...
...But such joint efforts are few and far between, particularly in minority communities...
...that such countries were relatively still "under-polluted...
...What they fail to report is that the community's demonstrations, marches and meetings are part of a movement that transcends traditional civil rights or environmental concerns...
...Community activists believe that higher rates of asthma, cancer, and respiratory diseases in poor neighborhoods may be linked to air, water and soil pollution from industries...
...In part, one can blame the media's racist and sexist attitudes for this truculent indifference...
...African American families began to notice dark patches of "gunk" seeping through their withered lawns, around puddles and into the cracked center of the street...
...Arguing against risk-assessment methods, Robert Bullard proposes that the burden of proof should shift from communities, which now have to prove the existence of health hazards, to industry, which should have to prove that their operations do no harm...
...Risk assessment," says Dr...
...Soon after the Bhopal tragedy, conflict broke out between those Union Carbide workers who feared for their their jobs and those who feared for their lives...
...When another manufacturer tried to construct it a few miles away in a large Latino community, Concerned Citizens joined with the largely Latino Concerned Mothers of East L.A., sued the government and won...
...Te environmental movement used to conjure up an image of white middle-class people concerned with conserving a pristine wilderness, backpackers seeking to protect a contemplative sanctuary, and conservationists who sought to protect the forests, rivers, and species of the Earth...
...Environmental injustice, then, refers to the fact that poor communities are disproportionately harmed by industrial toxic pollution and that corporations and government—intentionally or unintentionally—build their worst toxic sites and store their most hazardous chemicals in and around these low-income neighborhoods...
...A more recent study published by the National Law Journal in 1992 concluded that government agencies treat polluters based in minority areas less severely than those in largely white communities and that toxic cleanup programs under the federal Superfund law take longer and are less thorough in minority neighborhoods...
...In a study of nine of these community resistance movements, Bullard found that eight of them began as environmental groups and that six were led by women who were grass-roots activists...
...True, local media arrive in herds when a toxic explosion threatens lives...
...In contrast, the movement for environmental justice, led by the poor, is not concerned with overabundance, but with the environmental hazards and social and economic inequalities that ravage their communities...
...Robert Bullard, whose most recent book Confronting Environmental Racism provides an excellent overview of the movement for environmental justice, explains, "These [communities] are ideal because of their powerlessness and their lack of education and vulnerability...
...Yet these activists, by weaving together ideas and tactics of the civil rights and environmental movements, are creating one of the most potentially radical movements in recent American history...
...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...
...others thought the order evaded the need for an environmental justice impact statement to accompany every agency's policy...
...Fifteen serious industrial accidents at Contra Costa county's chemical plants and refineries in the past five years have endangered this area...
...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...
...Patsy Ruth Oliver was a former resident of Carver Terrace, a polluted black suburb in Texarkana...
...Some companies, like North Richmond's Chevron, defensively point out that they built their plants long before the growth of a residential community...
...Angry but determined, one African-American woman turned organizer tells the filmmaker, "I often wonder, if it had been a white neighborhood, would they have done the same thing...
...When Koppers Company closed the plant in 1961, it bulldozed over most of the operation, including the creosote tanks...
...And why, asked residents, had neither industry nor county government established a siren warning system...
...Rather than protecting these communities, the Environmental Protection Agency has been slow to acknowledge the existence of environmental injustice or to investigate minority communities' health hazards...
...North Richmond is a disaster waiting to happen...
...In the last decade, however, a growing number of minority communities have refused to choose between jobs and the environmental health of their families and communities...
...People hold their families and lives together with faith and a prayer...
...Ask the poor white citizens in Yellow Creek, Kentucky, who formed Concerned Citizens to stop a tannery from dumping toxic wastes into the creek that flowed through their community...
...Another serious problem is the way the EPA evaluates health hazards...
...In 1985, Concerned Citizens of South Central (Los Angeles), one of the nation's first African-American environmental groups, defeated an effort by a manufacturer to build one of the country's fourteen toxic waste incinerators in their neighborhood...
...As the journalists who briefly parachuted into North Richmond all reported, the residents were lucky this time...
...Crack babies are the spotted owl of East Oakland...
...I'm afraid to go home," she said crying softly...
...Unemployment, in fact, is the greatest public health problem," says Dr...
...It is a community injured every day by the effects of poverty...
...State and local officials, after all, appeared to listen attentively to their complaints...
...For half a century, it turned out, Koppers' old treatment plant had used creosote (a known carcinogen) to coat railroad ties...
...To people who live in these communities, however, the very decisions that dump toxics in and around their homes seem, at best, like de facto racism...
...Community leaders, after all, are often local women who speak on behalf of minority populations...
...Poor communities, already ravaged by drugs, violence, and unemployment, have only the slimmest resources to protect their own health from industrial waste...
...Yes, but who sits on—or influences— the local city councils and county boards that carve out industrial zones...
...North Richmond, California is only one of dozens of low-income communities that feel victimized by industrial pollution and have organized a grass-roots movement to fight for what they call environmental justice...
...About 500,000 pounds of ammonia is stored at Chevron's fertilizer plant in Richmond, for example, just two miles from schools and homes...
...Led largely by local women of color, the movement for environmental justice has received scant national attention...
...In 1986, for example, the Center for Third World Organizing in Oakland, California issued a report called "Toxics and Minority Communities...
...Many residents are descendants of former southern sharecroppers, lured to Richmond during World War II by the higher paid skilled jobs created by the defense industry...
...joined with community organizations...
...But Chevron's plants are the exception, not the rule...
...No more...
...As one community activist recently said about a proposed waste incinerator: "I don't want these things in my back yard, and I don't want them in any back yard...
...they have observed the 228 • DISSENT Green Politics EPA's grudging interest in the Kanawha Valley and other community battles against industrial pollution...
...In April 1987, the United Church of Christ SPRING • 1994 • 225 Green Politics Commission for Racial Justice released a widely quoted study that documented environmental racism throughout the United States...
...Congress ordered the country's biggest chemical firms to identify their hazardous waste sites, and the Pittsburgh-based Koppers Company placed Carver Terrace high on its list...
...In the Los Angeles struggle, the wildernessfocused group Earth First...
...Other communities, too, have begun to challenge corporate and government environmental discrimination...
...Activists had longed suspected—and in some cases documented—that the industrialized world intentionally dumped toxic wastes in third world countries...
...It's mostly women who get involved to protect family, home, and community...
...Even more frustrating was the fact that the EPA kept revising its risk assessment methods until no health hazard could be determined...
...Wendel Brunner, county director of public health...
...it disproportionately threatens the poor in general...
...As we're not an academic journal, we prefer that they, wherever possible, be dropped altogether or worked into the text...
...Six months later, industry still had not installed an early warning siren system...
...They asked public health officials when their children's asthma would improve...
...After documenting a series of health problems and unraveling ties between local government and industry, a slate of concerned citizens successfully took over the city council...
...Minority activists, however, aren't holding their breath...
...Nor do the poor have the political clout to challenge the local zoning boards that protect wealthy communities...
...We will not consider manuscripts submitted simultaneously to several publications...
...The memo offered further ammunition to activists because the author cited three reasons for dumping toxics in Third World nations: the fact that their citizens already had a lower life expectancy...
Vol. 41 • April 1994 • No. 2
