Environmental justice is food justice, housing justice, and has its roots in Black liberation movements

Sep 12

PCB landfill protest in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (Jerome Friar/UNC Libraries)

On April 19, 1979, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned the production of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCBs had been used widely throughout industry for the previous 50 years, highly valued for it’s insulating properties. But the chemical had also been suspected of causing cancer and severely harming the skin and liver. By the time the EPA banned the chemical, the agency estimated that “150 million pounds of PCBs [were] dispersed throughout the environment, including air and water supplies; an additional 290 million pounds [were] located in landfills” and they hoped that outlawing the chemicals would “help prevent further contamination of our air, water and food supplies from a toxic and very persistent man-made chemical” (1).

This ban was different than anything the EPA had done before, because the agency had never really had teeth to enforce any of their decisions. The ban was put in place after the a major environmental disaster the previous summer, when a trucking company was caught spraying oil contaminated with PCBs along 240 miles of roads across 14 rural North Carolina counties at night (2). The three people responsible were arrested and convicted, and the national news pushed Congress to respond by strengthening the EPA, giving it the money and authority to respond to environmental disasters through the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), better known as Superfund. Today there are thousands of Superfund sites contaminated by hazardous waste and Superfund’s goals are to cleanup contaminated sites and make the responsible parties pay (3).

The EPA demanded that the State of North Carolina remove the contaminated soil from along the roadways. The State chose Warren County, on the North Carolina-Virginia border, as the location for the Superfund site, where they would make a landfill to dump 10,000 truckloads of the contaminated dirt on what was once a soybean farm. They chose the location because it was rural, largely poor, and had the highest percentage of Black residents in the state (4). The outraged community broke out in protest; throwing their bodies in front of the trucks for six weeks. Over 500 people were arrested (5). This is the beginning of the environmental justice movement.

North Carolina State Troopers pick up protestors on the road to the Warren County Landfill in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

But this was not the first environmental injustice. Systemic racism has long influenced where major sources of pollution are located within communities, beginning with the redline maps drawn by White government planners that identified Black and Latino neighborhoods as undesirable and unworthy of housing loans. Heavy industry was permitted to cluster in those places, the toxicity was all but guaranteed (4). This time, however, on the heels of the Civil Rights movement, the people of Warren County got nationwide support and attention.

Nonetheless, the State went forward with the plan and starting in September 1982, purposefully poisoned Warren County with a 22 acre toxic waste dump (4). Most people in the area drew drinking water from wells and the water table was only 10 feet below the surface (2). Community pressure did not subside and that same year the Governor was forced to promise to detoxify the site, “when the technology to do so was available”. But this would take 13 years to begin and 8 years to complete (5). What began as a crisis for health and safety in a poor Black community in 1982 would not be over until 2003. And unfortunately, this story is far too common.

People of color make up nearly half the population in fence-line zones – areas closest to hazardous chemical facilities. They are almost twice as likely as whites to live near dangerous chemical plants (6). And when industry does pollute communities, the government, specifically the EPA, remains incredibly slow to remedy the disasters, even as Superfund sites.

In another superfund site in Pensacola, Florida, the Escambria Wood Treating Company dumped cancer causing chemicals such as lead, dioxin, arsenic, and creosote in an 18 acre area of a Black community in 1987, poisoning the land and dumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of poison into the groundwater (7)(8). The harm was so bad that the entire surrounding community had to be relocated, and all their houses demolished, costing the EPA $70 million (9). But the last family was not moved out until 2009, 32 years later (7). And in 2015, the city considered building a jail on the superfund site (9).

One of the housing complexes that people were removed from was Escambria Arms, a 200 unit property subsidized by Section 8, and so the government was not able to just move people out, it was required to buy out this privately held business, on the business owners’ terms, to prevent more people that receive federal housing benefits from being harmed (10). This dynamic of toxic waste and public housing is unfortunately far too common. “The siting of federally assisted housing on or near environmental contamination was not accidental or isolated. From the programs’ inception, racism played a driving force in determining where federally assisted housing was built. In many cases, in concert with lawfully sanctioned segregation, federally assisted housing was intentionally placed near contaminated areas, and industry was often sited near existing federally assisted housing, without consideration of the public health implications for residents” (11).

Importantly, very few toxic waste sites and poisoned communities are granted Superfund status. Superfund sites “are far more documented than contaminated sites that are cleaned up under other federal or state laws. Those sites may be just as contaminated as CERCLA sites and may present equal concerns for low-income communities and residents of federally assisted housing.” (11) This means countless toxic lands go unremedied, unacknowedged, or are addressed by other, less public, regulations. Superfund doesn’t include commercial or industrial sites. The application and approval period is rigorous and lengthy. And, of course, the contamination must be identified and acknowledged first, something that poor and Black and brown people have unsuccessfully fought for again and again.

“Concerns about drinking water contamination among minority groups have been reported since the 1950s. Water quality is certainly still an issue today; for example, people of the Navajo Nation have dealt with water contamination since the 1950s uranium mining of the region, as well as the Gold King Mine wastewater spill in 2015. Today, one in three homes in the Navajo Nation do not have a tap or a toilet.” (6) And we cannot talk about poisoned water without mentioning Flint, Michigan, where the local and state government poisoned the majority Black community with lead when they switched the town’s water source in 2014. After the neurotoxin was released into the town’s drinking water, it took 5 years for the water to be considered safe again. Meanwhile atleast a dozen residents have died. (H) And even more recently, Hawaiians are fighting for protection of their water after a US Navy base “leaked nearly 20,000 gallons of jet fuel in November 2021. The leak impacted over 90,000 residents' drinking water and forced thousands of families to evacuate their homes for weeks.” Some of the fuel has been flushed out of the system, but “some of the fuel could be trapped in the soil, rock and water below the tunnels.” As of July 2022, nearly 5,000 gallons of leaked jet fuel remains unaccounted for. (12)

“Environmental injustices lead to disproportionate exposure to contaminated air, water, toxic chemicals, unsafe workplaces, and other environmental hazards, and poor, disenfranchised, and minority communities face (the most) health problems [and] children…are most at risk.” (6)

Richmond is no exception to the list of poisoned lands. “The Richmond metro area is home to four Superfund sites: The Defense Supply Center Richmond in Chesterfield County, where pesticides and other wastes were dumped or spilled; C&R Battery Co. in Chesterfield, which once removed lead from old batteries; Rentokil in Henrico County, a former wood preserver; and the H&H burn pit in Hanover County, where chemicals were dumped and burned.” (13) And in 2018, lead was found in the drinking water in eight Richmond Public Schools. (14)

But of course, these are just examples of toxics that have been found and proven. And even when sites have been proven harmful, clearly, it can take years and a lot of work for anything to happen. And oftentimes, nothing happens at all. So we must always be cautious. Poisoned soils can lead to poisoned plants and food, and toxic soils can make it dangerous just to walk around outside. But furthermore, we must demand that our lands, and therefore our communities, are tested, treated, and protected. The human connection to Nature and to the Earth is crucial and when it is stripped away by industry, government, and military wrongful actions, it can be more than toxic, it can be outright deadly.

Sources:

Images:

https://timeline.com/warren-county-dumping-race-4d8fe8de06cb

Steven Casanova

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