TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/081390/0813104.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.5 KB | 198 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 46

Dumping on The Poor


America's dispossessed have lived for decades with toxic wastes
and garbage. Now they're fighting back.

By JOHN ELSON -- Reported by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles,
Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago and Lisa H. Towle/New York


    The name Altgeld Gardens evokes images of brilliant flowers
rampant in golden sunlight. But if you follow your nose into
the black ghetto on the Far South Side of Chicago, it will lead
you to a dilapidated housing project built atop a former
landfill whose fetid odors still rise from the basements after
more than 60 years. The plight of nearly 2,000 families is made
worse by tons of pollutants from a nearby sludge plant, a steel
mill, a paint company, a huge incinerator and an 80-ft.-high
landfill. Only a few miles away is a lot that should be a
playground. Instead it is a dump filled with 4-ft.-high mounds
of trash, broken glass, rusty nails and construction debris.

    In upstate New York, not far from the infamous Love Canal,
you can follow your nose to Forest Glen, a trailer-park
settlement built on heaps of foul-smelling hazardous waste that
the Environmental Protection Agency says may contain as many
as 150 toxic compounds. Under the streets of the densely
populated semi-industrial section of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn,
N.Y., the Mobil Corp. has begun recovering a sea of oil -- 17
million gals. -- that for decades has been leaking from
underground storage tanks and pipelines.

    Tens of thousands of impoverished people -- mainly blacks
and other minorities -- living in the countless Altgeld Gardens
and Forest Glens in the inner cities and rural pockets of the
nation are the victims of what critics call environmental
racism. The victimizers are mainly waste-management firms and
local politicians hoping to attract revenues to their towns.
They need cheap land where they can dispose of garbage and
build air-contaminating incinerators. That all too often means
land in poor areas with large minority populations. And those
people, burdened by drugs, poverty, crime, bad medical care and
joblessness, have long been too powerless or apathetic to
prevent their communities from becoming the repository of
everybody else's detritus. The result, according to a landmark
1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission for
Racial Justice, is that 3 of every 5 black and Hispanic
Americans live in areas with uncontrolled toxic-waste sites.
Many of the most notorious dumping grounds are located in the
South. Among the worst is "cancer alley," a 75-mile stretch
along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans,
that is lined with oil refineries and petrochemical plants.
The alley's abnormally high cancer rate has prompted one health
worker to call it a massive human experiment. A big mess in
Chicago is the work of "fly dumpers," unlicensed truckers who
collect filth from affluent neighborhoods and deposit it in
vacant lots in stealthy forays at night.

    Fearing that this appalling state of affairs can only get
worse, the victims at last have begun to strike back. Often
with the backing of ecological watchdog groups, grass-roots
organizations are taking on the waste managers, using public
relations and the law as their major weapons:

    -- In Altgeld Gardens, Hazel Johnson has organized a
movement called People for Community Recovery, which has
successfully crusaded against the establishment of yet another
neighborhood landfill.

    -- In Forest Glen, Terry and Kathy Freiermuth have shaken
up the Federal Government, which has responded by promising
buyout offers to residents as well as financial aid from the
Federal Emergency Management Agency.

    -- In the blue-collar Pennsylvania village of Yukon (pop.
1,100), Diana Steck is leading a protest organization of 600
members. Using roadblocks and other acts of civil disobedience
as well as the legal system, the group is trying to force
authorities to clean up six polluted lagoons that it suspects
are killing livestock and causing cancer among the populace.

    -- In Passaic County, N.J., freeholders decided to build an
incinerator in the city of Passaic on a site adjoining a
hospital, whose occupants, according to a group led by Marge
Gablehouse, would be the major beneficiaries of three tons of
lead emissions a year. The protesters have succeeded in
temporarily halting construction of the incinerator and hope
to persuade Governor Jim Florio to cancel it.

    -- In California, Juana Gutierrez and her 400-member Mothers
of East Los Angeles are fighting a proposed toxic-waste
incinerator slated for nearby Vernon, which every year would
spew some 19,000 tons of potentially health-threatening ash on
their community. Why, she asks, should East Los Angeles,
poverty-pocked and largely Hispanic, be subjected to this
environmental atrocity? "Why not Beverly Hills or Bel Air?"

    Waste managers deny they are picking on the poor. Some say
it is simplistic to attribute the environmental problems of
minority communities to racism, even though few challenge the
evidence that the poor have more environmental dangers to cope
with than do the wealthy. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians have
often inherited hazards by moving into older sectors of cities,
where decrepit factories and other facilities were built long
before anyone worried about pollution.

    Government officials have often spurned complaints from
low-income residents about the hazards posed by landfills and
incinerators. To bolster their credibility, waste-management
firms have hired dozens of former officials of the federal
Environmental Protection Agency and private conservation
groups. Former EPA chief William Ruckelshaus, for example, is
now chairman of Browning-Ferris Industries, one of the largest
waste-treatment outfits in the country. In October, after the
mostly Hispanic residents of Azusa, Calif., complained that
expansion of a BFI-operated landfill would poison the
groundwater, BFI offered to invest $20 million to clean up the
contamination. The expansion was approved.

    Sometimes dumping on the poor is a consequence of
self-exploitation. In their search for new disposal sites,
waste managers have discovered fertile ground on American
Indian reservations, which are considered sovereign entities
not subject to local or state environmental restrictions and
whose residents are perhaps the poorest of the nation's poor.

    Typical is the dilemma of California's Campo tribe of
Mission Indians, whose land lies 68 miles east of San Diego.
Leaders of the community of 250 people are negotiating with a
waste-disposal company to build a landfill and recycling plant
that would be fed up to 3,000 tons of garbage a day from San
Diego County. This would be a boon for the county, which is
running out of landfill. For the Indians, the project would
bring jobs and "millions" in income, says tribal EPA chairman
Michael Connelly-Misquish.

    Connelly-Misquish claims the tribe would write health and
safety codes at least equal to those required by California's
environmental agencies. But ranchers and farmers near the
reservation are not so sure. Concerned that the dump and
incinerator would contaminate the region, they have asked the
state legislature to make all California reservations subject
to state environmental regulations. If they succeed, the waste
companies can expect to come up against tougher environmental
rules at other reservations.

    The Campos' opponents are practicing a strategy that
wealthier neighborhoods use regularly with considerable
success. That strategy is encompassed in a now familiar slogan:
NIMBY (not in my backyard). With the help of money and
political power, such groups fight off unwanted facilities like
halfway houses for recovering addicts, prisons and incinerators,
which then almost invariably find homes that can least afford
to resist them. In well-to-do Greenwich, Conn., for example,
singer Diana Ross and 12 fellow residents launched a NIMBY
campaign to prevent the state from building a $6 million-plus
truck-weighing station on an interstate highway that runs near
their homes.

    For the nation's newly energized grassroots activists,
however, NIMBY is a fruitless answer. Theirs is a challenge
that the entire U.S. has yet to confront: it's spelled NIABY
-- not in anyone's backyard.

    Where, then? The activists aren't terribly helpful in
answering that question. They are, however, eloquent in arguing
that the nation's monumental waste-disposal problems can no
longer be solved by transferring toxic trash from a privileged
neighborhood to a less fortunate one; that even
state-of-the-art incinerators are costly and inefficient; that
a nation that produces 160 million tons of residential and
commercial solid wastes every year must find a way to deal with
them without destroying its communities; and that, finally,
pollution kills people. The rate of lung cancer among young
urban blacks is significantly higher than the national average.
Some experts persuasively suggest that this dismaying statistic
may be attributable not so much to rotten ghetto air as to the
fact that young blacks smoke too much.

    Regardless of the merits of that debate, one thing is clear:
the war to protect the environment has opened a new front in
gritty ghetto streets and downtrodden rural backwaters where
the endangered species is the poor.