Toxic targets: polluters that dump on communities of color are finally being brought to justice - environmental racism - Cover Story

E: The Environmental Magazine, July-August, 1998 by Jim Motavalli

On September 10, 1997, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Carol Browner issued a simple but unprecedented order: She disallowed the state of Louisiana's approval of an enormous polyvinylchloride (PVC) plant in Convent, a small, mostly African-American community already inundated with 12 other toxic waste producers. This by-no-means fatal blow to the Japanese-owned Shintech plant (the state can snmply amend the filings) was nonetheless a shot across the bows of the waste industry, which has never before suffered such a setback at the hands of the federal government.

Still pending against the Shintech application is a legal complaint, filed by the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, charging that the state of Louisiana is in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits any agency receiving federal funds from practicing racial discrimination. Does such prejudice exist in Convent? The average American is subject to 10 pounds of toxic chemical releases per year. The average Convent resident is exposed to 4,517 pounds, and that's before Shintech.

In his office at Tulane University, Bob Kuehn, the tall, ascetic lawyer who heads the law clinic, doesn't look like a "vigilante" or one of the "big, fat professors who are drawing the big salaries," but that's what an enraged Governor Mike Foster, the recipient of a $5,000 Shintech campaign contribution, called him. "As goes the Shintech complaint, so goes many others," Kuehn says, pinpointing just why this case is so important and has mobilized such intense scrutiny. "This is the most watched and most significant case ever involving environmental racism," says Damu Smith, the southeastern regional representative of Greenpeace, which has worked closely with local activists.

The term "environmental racism" wasn't in the vernacular until it appeared in a 1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice entitled Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. Ben Chavis, the commission's director, stated simply that "race is a major factor related to the presence of hazardous wastes in residential communities throughout the United States" and a new field of study was born.

The pillars that allow pervasive environmental racism are beginning to crumble. In April, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission denied a license to a uranium enrichment plant impacting the African-American communities of Forest Grove and Center Springs, Louisiana. The prospect of a newly active federal government intervening to force environmental justice has led to increasingly desperate reactions from industry. Two prominent activists, Terri Swearingen, who fought tirelessly against a giant waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, winning the Goldman Environmental Prize for her work, and Phyllis Glazer, whose work is widely credited with helping close a toxic injection well in Winona, Texas, were hit with lawsuits by the companies involved. Such suits, designed to quieten crusaders, are known as SLAPPS, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation.

It's not a coincidence that both SLAPPed activists are women, as are most of the people profiled in this special issue. Ask them why this is and you'll get a variety of answers, but the most common one is that women are nurturers who feel most deeply about building a future for their children and their community.

And the stories told here are hardly unique: There are Convents and Winonas all over America. The WTI plant in East Liverpool, now up and running as one of the largest toxic waste incinerators in the U.S., is 1,100 feet from an elementary school. In New Orleans, activists are trying to relocate residents from the Agriculture Street Superfund site, where houses sit on top of a polluted landfill. In South Memphis, the dosed and highly toxic Defense Depot is suspected of causing a cancer cluster among the African-American residents. In California, Florida and other states, migrant agricultural workers ingest unsafe levels of pesticides while working for subsistence wages. In many states (particularly Texas and Louisiana), state environmental departments compound the problem by seeing themselves more as extensions of industry than watchdogs for clean air and water.

It can be disheartening to learn that, 28 years after the first Earth Day, such conditions still exist, but the good news is that people are fighting back, and--for once --the law may be on their side.

ALSEN AND CONVENT, LOUSIANA: On Cancer Alley

If ever a road was misnamed a "Scenic Highway," it's the route to Alsen, Louisiana, an unincorporated corner of north Baton Rouge. The two distinguishing features are boarded-up retail businesses and gigantic chemical plants, most with manicured lawns. In Alsen, a low-income community of 1,500 that is 98.9 percent African-American, Rollins Environmental Services built in 1970 the fourth-largest hazardous waste landfill in the U.S. According to Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color by Robert Bullard (see Conversations this issue), the now-closed facility was cited for violating state and federal environmental laws more than 100 times between 1980 and 1985. Alsen residents began reporting headaches, chronic fatigue, cancer and spontaneous nosebleeds. According to one study, 80 percent have respiratory problems, and 21 percent have asthma.