"... but I've seen things here I'm just astounded exist in America."

[Sapphire Blue]

The world's a dirty place when you are poor
By DIANE ROBERTS, Special to the Times
Published September 9, 2007

One of our persistent national fantasies - right up there with having God's permission to do pretty much anything we want - is that America has no class system. We tell ourselves we're not like stratified, calcified Europe. Here it doesn't matter if you went to school at Andover or Dixie County High; if you drink chateau-bottled Burgundy or Schlitz; if you live behind a gate or behind the landfill. In America, we are all equal.

Well, to steal from Ernest Hemingway, wouldn't it be pretty to think so? But some Americans are clearly more equal than others, especially when it comes to the environment. The poor suffer disproportionately from the destruction of our wetlands, the poisoning of our waters and the degradation of our air and our soil. This is particularly true in the South, as Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, points out: "Historically, the South lagged behind the rest of country economically, and so would welcome any industry, no matter how dirty."

Bullard began to study the relationship of class and race to the environment 30 years ago, demonstrating a link between poor and minority communities and the placement of toxic materials. In 1987, the United Church of Christ issued a report on environmental racism that helped spur a movement. The UCC listed a plethora of examples of environmental injustices: hazardous waste sites parked next to minority neighborhoods in Houston; the PCB facility on top of an African-American community in Warren County, N.C.; and the tiny, mostly black town with the nation's largest hazardous waste dump. In 1978, when ground was broken for the landfill, the per-capita income in Emelle, Ala., was under $8,000. Residents had been told the 2,400-acre site was going to be a fertilizer plant, or maybe a potato chip factory. Bullard says, "There's a direct correlation between the exploitation of land and the exploitation of people."

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, it looked as though Washington might finally do something about pollution and the poor. The EPA established an Office of Environmental Justice, and Clinton issued an executive order that every federal agency must address the way in which the environment can harm the health and opportunities of people of color. EPA policy would, at last, take environmental justice into account.

But Clinton's environmental programs achieved far less than promised. And when George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, he rolled back toxic safeguards and stocked agencies supposed to regulate pollution with true believers from pollution-generating industries. Bush also sidelined class and race: "George Bush took race out of the environmental equation," says Beverly Wright, executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University in New Orleans. "The office became this little thing with no money in a corner of the EPA."

(snip)

Babich, whose clinic has taken on the likes of Exxon Mobil, says that one of the worst environmental injustices he's encountered recently involves the Industrial Pipe landfill in Plaquemines Parish, La.: "In a capitalist society you accept that poor people are more vulnerable than the rich, but I've seen things here I'm just astounded exist in America."

(snip)

"Mount Dioxin" rose up in Pensacola, a vast pile of dirt contaminated with a pestilential mix of arsenic, creosote, solvents and the potent dioxin TCDD. The area around the Escambia Wood Trading Co. had been a place where blacks could buy their own homes in the Jim Crow Florida of the 1950s and 1960s, an aspirational neighborhood with tree-lined streets and flower beds. But by 1992, the EPA knew that the very ground on which they walked was killing them.

(snip)

The county has long been home to a company many say is the state's most shameless polluter. Buckeye Cellulose, which spews pulp mill effluent into the Fenholloway River and the Gulf of Mexico, has been blamed for a host of environmental nightmares, including contaminated ground water, poisoned sediments and that rank odor (fainter now than it used to be but still present) announcing that you are nearing the river. The dioxins and endocrine disruptors Buckeye spits out kill marine life and even cause female fish to grow male genitals. Then there's that 10-square-mile dead zone in the gulf - all this along what is supposed to be Florida's "Nature Coast."


Continued @ http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/09/Opinion/The_world_s_a_dirty_p.shtml


(Diane Roberts, a former member of the Times editorial board, teaches English and writing at Florida State University.)

[il_lilac]

1. K&R

and thank you for keeping poverty in the forefront.

[nam78_two]

2. K&R.nt

[AZBlue]

3. K&R

Thank you for the thought-provoking post.