Sweet home Alabama

E: The Environmental Magazine, August, 1995 by Sean Reilly

Even by the free-wheeling standards of Alabama politics, John M. Smith seemed an unlikely choice for the post of the state's top environmental watchdog. In the early 1980s, he served as spokesman for an abortive scheme to export hazardous waste abroad from the Birmingham area. A few years ago, state auditors questioned his computer company's performance in fulfilling state contracts.

But Smith was a longtime friend of outgoing Alabama Governor Jim Folsom, Jr. And before Folsom -- defeated in last November's election -- left office early this year, a board stacked with his appointees named Smith director of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM).

The uproar was immediate. The Alabama chapter of the Sierra Club quickly filed a lawsuit seeking Smith's ouster on the grounds that he lacked the legally required environmental background. The state's newly elected attorney general and governor are also scrutinizing several Folsom appointments to the board that hired Smith. The matter is now tied up in the state courts, and Smith continues to insist that he is fully qualified for the post. Whatever the legal outcome, Smith's critics call his appointment dismally symptomatic of the importance that Alabama politicos assign the environment.

"I think what it very clearly states is that for too long the environment has been this sort of ugly stepsister," says Sheila Holbrook-White, the Sierra Club's Alabama coordinator. "That while you have had top qualified directors for every other agency, ADEM is the exception."

Indeed, since ADEM's creation in 1982, a dearth of environmental knowledge has practically been a prerequisite for the job of running it. Smith's predecessor, for example, was a former state legislator and college administrator whose eight-year tenure at the agency was marked by stormy battles with citizens groups and the environmental community. While observers say ADEM has competent staff members, the agency's problem has been leadership. "We wanted to send a very clear signal," Holbrook-White says. "What concerns me is that if we wait around for the politicians to get a clue, we're going to be waiting until infinity."

The power of state regulators is likely to grow, not diminish, under the new Republican Congress, which is busy shutting federal agencies and funneling responsibilities to the states. And state agencies are as susceptible to influence peddling as are their federal counterparts. Activists around the nation say that well-heeled industry and farm groups often wield sizable clout with state lawmakers and regulators. Bill Craven, legislative coordinator for the Kansas Sierra Club, says, "We are non-partisan in giving agribusiness a free hand to pollute in this state." According to one study, Kansas ranks last in the nation in meeting surface water use designations. In New York, the new chief of the Department of Environmental Conservation is a former vice president of Tenneco Oil. In Connecticut, the incoming environmental appointee is a former state legislator with a long history of opposition to green initiatives.

Evidence of official neglect is not hard to find in Alabama. In a survey last year, the North Carolina-based Institute for Southern Studies ranked Alabama 40th among the states in per capita spending on the environment. In the report's overall "Environmental Health" index, the state place 46th.

Part of the explanation may lie in the legacy of a poor, rural state traditionally eager for industry at any price. Another may be the political power of timber, mining and other well-heeled special interests that often bridle at the prospect of strong environmental regulation. And the grassroots activism that has typically powered the environmental movement has little precedent in the state's clannish political system.

The practical impact of such neglect can be found about 120 miles north of ADEM's Montgomery headquarters. Choccolocco Creek meanders through a large swath of northeast Alabama before emptying into Logan-Martin Lake east of Birmingham. For more than a year, the last 25 to 30 miles of the creek have been under a no consumption" fish advisory because of contamination by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

In itself, that's not unusual: Choccolocco Creek is now only one of many waterways and lakes tainted by toxic chemicals. Once a staple of the electrical industry, PCBs are a suspected carcinogen and have also been linked to reproductive problems. Their manufacture and most uses are now banned.

And their presence in the creek should have come as no surprise, only as a rueful irony. What has become one of the world's most widespread environmental hazards was first commercially produced in Anniston.

More remarkable is that the potential dangers apparently aroused little concern at the state level for more than two decades after they were first recognized. In 1970, tests showed that Choccolocco fish contained PCB residues up to 72 times federal guidelines. Any worries at the time were downplayed by state environmental officials and managers at the Monsanto plant in Anniston that produced the chemical.