S1EP1: A Brief History of Environmental Injustice
In the first episode of This Toxic Land, Mickey discusses his intentions for creating the podcast and gives a brief history of the environmental justice movement in America. Join him as he covers topics including Dr. Robert Bullard's seminal book, Dumping in Dixie; redlining policies in the 1930s; the 1973 Warren County PCB scandal; and the creation of the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice.
Transcript
Hello, and welcome to the inaugural episode of This Toxic Land, a podcast dedicated to examining environmental issues of all forms. I’m your host, Mickey Snowdon. Before we jump into this episode, I want to briefly explain who I am and why I created this podcast.
I’m passionate about communicating the impact of environmental and social issues, particularly where they intersect. I earned my graduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Asheville where I studied environmental and cultural sustainability. My thesis examined the disproportionate impacts of climate change on vulnerable communities in the southeastern US–past, present, and future. I have worked as Communications Liaison for a nonprofit focused on climate tech, health equity, and other environmental solutions; I did a brief stint as an Adventure Therapy Mentor at a boarding school; and I studied Adventure Education and English as an undergrad. I’ve been working as a Copywriter for the last few years, writing advertisements and other marketing materials for ski resorts, plastic surgeons and home retail brands. Exciting, right?
I can’t pinpoint when I first developed a passion for the outdoors, but growing up in suburban Charlotte, I didn’t have much access to it. When I was 14 I attended a 2-week-long backpacking and canoeing course in Western North Carolina through the organization Outward Bound, which proved to be one of the most challenging things I’d done up to that point in my life. Though I struggled to make it through those two weeks, it must have planted a seed because a few years later I attended a month-long backpacking and sea kayaking course in Alaska’s Chugach National Forest and Kenai Peninsula with the National Outdoor Leadership School, or NOLS for short. Between NOLS and Outward Bound, I learned the basics of Leave No Trace (the ethics that allow us to explore the outdoors with the least amount of impact possible) and saw first-hand how human waste touches even the most far-flung corners of our planet.
Flash-forward to today. I’ve lived in Asheville, North Carolina, since 2017, and spend all my free time in the woods, hiking, biking, and running. The outdoors is where I go to recharge and to connect with the universe, as cheesy as that may sound. Though I love Asheville for its location, vibrant arts scene, and spiritual community, it is extremely divided both racially and economically, which I hope to examine either in this episode or a future one.
My reason for creating This Toxic Land is to bring awareness to the many forms of pollution and their impacts on plants, animals and humans. In full transparency, I haven’t given the trajectory of this podcast too much thought in terms of hosting it solo or having guests, so you’ll be along for the ride as it evolves. I also want to mention that this is a side project for me, and I am not putting any money into producing it, so be prepared for background noise, awkward pauses, and plenty of slip-ups. What can I say—it’s organic.
Okay. Now that you know a little bit about me and the direction of this podcast, let’s jump into the meat of today’s episode—a very brief history of environmental injustice.
Environmental injustice, also referred to as environmental racism, is the disproportionate impact of pollution and natural hazards on a community. It stems from, and is exacerbated by, factors such as race, gender, age, location, education, and physical and mental health. According to Dr. Lisa Cooper, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, poor and non-white communities are more likely to suffer from pre-existing health conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, heart and kidney disease, colon cancer, and obesity than are wealthy and white people. These health disparities make poor and non-white peoples’ baseline risk of infectious diseases and environmental hazards higher than wealthier and white individuals.
Living conditions can also affect one’s health. Poor and non-white populations are more likely to live in sub-standard housing conditions and multi-family housing, and are more likely to live in areas with higher air pollution and aeroallergens (which are exacerbated by air pollution), and suffer from asthma, COPD, and other respiratory illnesses.
Like all social justice issues, social inequalities hinder one’s self-determination, meaning not everyone has an equal playing field. Someone with underlying health conditions is at a disadvantage to adapting to pollution or a natural hazard than a healthy person is.
Though it has grown in awareness over the last few years due to the Black Lives Matter movement and COVID-19, environmental injustice isn’t a new topic. In America, environmental injustice can be traced back to redlining policies beginning in the 1930s, and urban renewal initiatives during the 1950s to 70s. By refusing to loan money to African American neighborhoods, banks forced Blacks onto the most undesirable pieces of land in the country. This process was called redlining because banks hired public and private firms to literally draw red lines around properties that were deemed too risky to provide mortgage support. Often, this land contained locally undesirable land uses—unwanted infrastructure, such as landfills, freeways, chemical plants, paper mills, power plants, and railroads—and was the only land that African Americans could afford. Urban renewal, which came around later in the century, was a wave of government-induced gentrification that displaced families from their neighborhoods, often relocating them to public housing units or lower-grade properties at a fraction of what their property was worth. Today, African Americans are nearly four times as likely to die from exposure to pollution than Whites.
While the first case of environmental injustice likely dates back to the beginning of human civilization, Warren County, North Carolina is often cited as the first case in the US. Here’s what happened.
In 1973, two businessmen began discreetly dumping waste contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyl (aka PCB) along roads in 14 rural North Carolina counties. The state quickly responded by burying 40,000 cubic yards of PBC-laden soil in a landfill located in Warren County, the poorest and blackest county in North Carolina. In 1979, local residents began to organize and join forces with civil rights activists, as well as national groups like the NAACP and the United Church of Christ, to protest the cover-up, pointing out that their drinking water, which came from the water table only 10 feet below the cancerous waste, would likely become contaminated. They also posited that this incident would undermine local economic development and health, and argued that the African American community lacked the power to prevent hazardous waste facilities from being developed in their neighborhoods.
During the six-week protest, more than 500 men and women were arrested, oftentimes in front of their children. The demonstrations soon gained national attention and charges were brought against the men responsible.
The men, both White, were convicted of committing an environmental crime. One was sentenced to a year in prison while the other was sentenced to two years in prison–grossly light punishments considering the health and economic impacts it caused generations of Warren County residents.
In 1983, ten years after the Warren County PCB scandal began, a Chinese American researcher named Charles Lee began studying the correlation between the location of toxic waste facilities and poor and non-white communities. Along with the help of the United Church of Christ, he eventually published this research in a report titled “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States”—a report that is widely considered to be the touchstone of the environmental justice movement. It found that three out of five Black and Hispanic Americans lived near what the EPA called an “uncontrolled toxic waste site”—essentially a closed or abandoned site that posed a threat to human health and the environment.
In 1990, African American sociologist Dr. Robert Bullard published “Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality,” a landmark book that examined the proximity of Southern African American communities to polluting industries. Bullard teamed up with Charles Lee to advocate for the EPA to formally address issues of environmental racism. The head of the EPA, William Reilly, agreed to create the EPA's Work Group on Environmental Equity, which, under President Clinton’s administration, became the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice in 1993.
Today, the EPA defines environmental justice as: “The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” Furthermore, it states that its mission is to provide all people with “The same degree of protection from environmental and health hazards, and equal access to the decision-making process to have a healthy environment in which to live, learn, and work.”
28 years after the PCB-dumping incident, the state and federal governments finally undertook efforts to detoxify the Warren County landfill. They paid a private contractor a total of $18 million to remove and burn the PCB-laden waste, re-bury it 15 feet below the surface, and seed over the top of the mound. Although these efforts were undoubtedly a step in the right direction, detoxifying the landfill does not fully restore the community. Not only are there still PCBs present within the soil, but Warren County’s reputation has been smeared, likely preventing it from recovering economically anytime in the near future.
According to an article published by the Environmental Justice Resource Center directed by Dr. Robert Buller at Clark Atlanta University, “Justice will not be complete until the 20,000 Warren County residents receive a public apology and some form of financial reparations from the perpetrators of environmental racism against the local citizens. How much reparations should be paid is problematic since it is difficult for anyone to put a price tag on peace of mind. At minimum, Warren County residents should be paid reparations equal to the cost of detoxifying the landfill site or $18 million.”
Should reparations be paid to Warren County residents? Let me know your thoughts in the comments, as well as any other thoughts or emotions this episode may have sparked.
We covered a lot of territory, so I’m going to say that’s a wrap for the very first episode This Toxic Land. I hope you enjoyed listening and found this brief history of environmental injustice to be useful and motivating. If you want to like, subscribe, rate, or comment on this podcast, I’d greatly appreciate it. Your feedback will help me develop better content moving forward.
Before we part, I want to leave you with one final thought: whatever side of the political spectrum you’re on, whatever your skin color, gender, or financial situation, what would you do if PCBs were illegally dumped in your community?
