THE STORY OF STUFF
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In 1987, the budding EJ movement was bolstered by the first study to solidly document that the racial composition of a community was the most significant factor in determining whether or not a toxic waste facility was likely to be located nearby: Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, published by the United Church of Christ (UCC). This astounding report showed that three out of every five African Americans and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with uncontrolled toxic waste sites.149
I remember when UCC released the findings, during my first year working at Greenpeace in its Washington, D.C., offices. The report sent shock waves through traditional environmental organizations, most of which didn’t have industrial environments and racial justice on their radar screens. It was impossible to deny that the bulk of the issues that major environmental groups addressed—whales, forests, baby seals—utterly ignored the thousands of people living in the shadows of gigantic polluting industrial facilities and dumpsites. Sadly, some traditional environmental groups chose to downplay the report or to respond defensively. For others, the findings inspired some serious self-reflection. Some groups woke up to the fact that their boards, their staff, and their members were largely white, which meant they’d left a large segment of the U.S. population out of their strategic discussions and efforts. That is a pretty big oversight.
The UCC report helped inspire a powerful, diverse movement that saw environmental sustainability and social justice issues as inseparable. As civil rights and environmental justice activist Cora Tucker said, “People don’t get all the connections [when] they say the environmental is over there, the civil rights group is over there, the women’s group is over there and the other groups are here. Actually, all of them are one group, and the issues we fight become null and void if we have no clean water to drink, no clean air to breathe and nothing to eat.”150
With the movement gaining momentum globally, the first ever National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit was held in Washington, D.C., in 1991. Soon after, in 1993 President Clinton signed an executive order that created the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council to the EPA.151 So by then, there was solid evidence of a racial bias in the choice of locations for polluting and hazardous facilities; there was a growing broad-based movement for environmental justice; and there was a presidential executive order and a special advisory council to the national Environmental Protection Agency. But while all that ought to have solved environmental racism, at least in the United States, that’s not what happened.
Twenty years after the release of the first report, the UCC released Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987–2007, which found the problems persisting and, in some areas, growing worse. “Race continues to be an independent predictor of where hazardous wastes are located, and it is a stronger predictor than income, education and other socioeconomic indicators. People of color now comprise a majority in neighborhoods with commercial hazardous waste facilities.”152 As Steve Lerner, an author and research director at the environmental health institute Commonweal, writes, “More remains to be done to keep America from being divided into livable communities, where the environment is relatively clean; and “sacrifice zones,” where residents are exposed to the toxic by-products of a production process that keep goods artificially cheap and corporate profits rising. Many Americans do not realize [this is] part of the reason they are able to buy goods so cheaply.”153
The fact that twenty years later, environmental racism persists and, in fact, has increased is shameful for all of us. This cannot continue. Of course, the answer to environmental racism is not some sort of “equitable pollution” in which we all share the toxic burden equally; the answer is to clean up our production processes and environmental governance so that no one—regardless of age or race or income, regardless of whether they are living now or in generations to come—has to subsidize the creation of Stuff chock-full of chemicals with his or her health and well-being.
We need to demand strong environmental health laws for everyone and the elimination of double standards in which whiter or richer communities get preferred treatment. And when I say for everyone, I don’t just mean Americans. One of globalization’s worst trends has been wealthy (often predominantly white) nations exporting the filthiest, most poisonous factories and facilities to countries that have weaker environmental, health, and worker protection laws; less capacity to monitor and enforce those standards that do exist; and, very important, less public access to information and involvement in the decision process. Hazardous industries follow the path of least resistance; they go to those places perceived as lacking the political, economic, educational, or other resources to resist them. Metals smelting, electronics production, PVC production: all these industries are increasingly being shut down in the United States while the number of facilities is expanding in developing nations. We’re happy to take the products; we just don’t want the mess. That’s what is happening. And that is not okay.
If a particular industrial process is too toxic for U.S. communities, for American children, then it is too toxic for any community, for every child. Motivated both by a sense of global responsibility and justice, as well as by growing evidence that exported pollution still comes back to haunt us via air currents, food, and products, a growing number of communities are moving beyond NIMBY (not in my back yard) to NOPE: not on planet Earth. I’m right there with them.
Union Carbide on the Other Side of the Fence
From the massive chemical facilities in New Orleans to the diesel-exhaust-filled neighborhoods of the Bronx to the slums of Port-au-Prince to the belching refineries of Durban, I’ve seen for myself how communities that are poor, illiterate, and nonwhite are treated as expendable. But probably nowhere on earth is it more dramatically in evidence than in Bhopal, India. Bhopal, the City of Lakes and the City of Mosques, is best known today as the site of the world’s largest chemical industrial disaster ever. What a claim to fame.
Late on the night of December 3, 1984, the poisonous gas methyl isocyanate (MIC) leaked from a factory owned by the U.S. multinational Union Carbide Corporation. The gas killed more than eight thousand people immediately, with a death toll now at twenty thousand and still counting, as people continue to succumb to related health impacts, averaging one more death each day over the last two decades.154
The stories I heard from survivors about “that night” haunt me: People woke in the darkness to the sound of screams, with the invisible gas burning their eyes, noses, and mouths. At first some thought a neighbor was burning too many chili peppers. Others thought the day of reckoning had arrived. Many began vomiting and coughing up froth streaked with blood. Not knowing where the gas was coming from, they just ran. Whole neighborhoods fled in panic, families were separated, many who fell were trampled, and others convulsed and fell dead. Within hours, thousands of dead bodies lay in the streets. Many people never found their missing family members and could only assume the bodies were among those hastily thrown into mass graves.
Some accounts call what happened that night an accident, but I call it an inevitability. Cost-cutting measures and overall sloppy management at the plant led to reduced staff safety training, ignored warnings about dangerous chemical storage practices, and no community warning mechanism. That night, not one of the six safety systems designed specifically to protect against a gas leak like this was functioning. Not one! You can’t have a factory storing huge amounts of toxic chemicals and expect nothing bad to happen, especially if you run the place like you just don’t care.
The factory was located in a densely populated part of the city, with small huts jam-packed full of sleeping families just meters from the factory walls. When the gas began leaking from the facility, Union Carbide staff did not notify police or warn community residents; in fact, they denied being the source of the leak for those first critical hours, during which the community members frantically ran to escape the suffocating gas and authorities scrambled to understand what was happening. Many be
lieve that had the company admitted the leak and shared basic information, such as the importance of covering one’s face with a wet cloth, many deaths could have been avoided.
Unbelievably, today, twenty-five years after the disaster, the company still refuses to share its information on the toxic health impacts of MIC, calling it a “trade secret,” thwarting efforts to provide medical care to victims of exposure.155 To add insult to injury, the abandoned Union Carbide factory, now owned by Dow Chemical, still sits there, leaking hazardous chemicals and waste left behind in the aftermath of the disaster. On the gates local residents have painted skulls and crossbones with dollar signs for eyes and have scrawled “killer Carbide” and “The Real Face of Globalization.” Soil and water samples from around the plant, tested by Greenpeace fifteen years after the disaster, were full of heavy metals and other toxins.156 A February 2002 study found mercury, lead, and organochlorines in the breast milk of the local women.157 The children of gas-affected women are subject to a frightening array of debilitating illnesses, including retardation, gruesome birth defects, and reproductive disorders.158
Even having read a lot about that night, as soon as I arrived in Bhopal in 1992 for the first of many visits, I realized I’d underestimated the depth of the horror that occurred there. And I definitely was not expecting the many rays of strength and hope that abound among the survivors. They don’t call themselves victims, because they aren’t just sitting there taking it—they’re fighting back. In fact, a Bhopali friend, Satinath Sarangi, and I call the city the “Fight Back Capital of the World.” Two survivors, Champa Devi Shukla and Rashida Bee, were awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for outstanding courage and tenacity in the struggle for justice in Bhopal. In the award acceptance speech, Bee said proudly, “We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life.”159
Each year, on the anniversary of the disaster, the survivors hold a commemorative protest. I was there again in 1994 for the tenth anniversary of the disaster. Poets sang ghazals about the loss of loved ones and the fight for justice. Colorful banners demanded justice and called for “No More Bhopals” anywhere on earth. Heart-wrenching photo exhibits showed large black and white images of the morning after the disaster, with dead bodies, many of them children, lining the streets awaiting identification. I saw a haunting photo of a small girl being buried, her father wiping away the soil from her face for one last look. As a parent myself, it is almost unbearable to look at that picture and allow myself to feel what that must have been like. I know that as long as we continue to rely on the toxins in, toxins out model of production, disasters like this one are inevitable.
The culmination of the anniversary events each year is the construction of a giant papier-mâché effigy of Warren Anderson, the CEO of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster. Survivors demand that Anderson come to Bhopal and face charges for his role in the management decisions that lead to the disaster. The Indian courts have a warrant out for his arrest, which he ignores from his comfortable home in Connecticut. The year I was there, the two-story-tall effigy of Anderson resembled a villain from an old movie, in a grey suit and hat, with a sinister mustache. When evening came, thousands of people took to the streets, chanting, yelling, and marching to the gates of the Carbide factory, where they lit the effigy on fire. Disoriented by the masses of shouting people and watching huge chunks of the burning effigy break off and float over the crowded, highly combustible slum, I began to imagine what it must have been like that night in the dark and chaos and fear.
Meanwhile all year long, every year since the disaster, the local community and allies globally in the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal work to provide health care to the gas-affected and to fight for justice in Bhopal. The survivors’ demands include: a cleanup of the abandoned, leaking factory; the provision of clean drinking water, since theirs has been contaminated; long-term health care and economic and social support for those who lost family members or are unable to work due to gas-related illnesses; and justice for those responsible for the shoddy factory maintenance.160
Elsewhere, news of the Bhopal disaster made headlines internationally and got a lot of people worried, from corporate executives of other chemical companies to residents of communities living near chemicals plants. Union Carbide had a factory in Institute, West Virginia, which it had previously said was nearly identical to the Bhopal plant.161 After the Bhopal disaster, workers and residents in Institute and other chemical-industrial communities began asking questions. Which toxic chemicals was the local factory using? Were toxic emissions coming from the plant, and if so, how much? Was a Bhopal-like disaster possible elsewhere?
Then in 1985, U.S. representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Health and Environment Subcommittee, released an internal Union Carbide memo that stated that a “runaway reaction could cause a catastrophic failure of the storage tanks holding the poisonous [MIC] gas” at the West Virginia plant.162 The EPA confirmed that the Institute plant had experienced twenty-eight smaller gas leaks between 1980 and 1984.163 Understandably, people freaked out.
The Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA), now called the American Chemistry Council, responded with something they called the Responsible Care program and announced that its members were committed to a global voluntary safety program that would be self-audited and would “continuously improve their health, safety and environmental performance.”164 Based on this, CMA argued that more stringent regulations of their facilities weren’t needed. As one NGO working to increase public access to information put it, the program basically had zero measurable goals, timelines, or external validation for reducing chemical hazards and essentially said to the public: “Trust us, don’t track us.”165
The U.S. government’s response, by contrast, was surprisingly useful. In order to help residents find out what chemicals are being used and released into their communities, the feds established the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), which is a database of information about toxic chemicals releases, both via air and in waste. The TRI was created as part of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986.166 This law requires companies to report the amount and location of toxic chemicals they use in order to assist emergency workers in the case of an accident. In addition, the law requires that companies producing or using toxic chemicals above specific threshold amounts provide data on toxic chemicals released via the air or in waste. Currently about 22,000 industrial and federal facilities are covered in the TRI. In 2007, those facilities reported that 4.1 billion pounds of 650 different toxic chemicals were released into the environment, including both on-site and off-site disposal.167
The data compiled in the TRI is available to the public through both government and nongovernmental websites. My personal favorite is Scorecard (www.scorecard.org), which allows you to look up major pollution sources and chemicals by zip code. Scorecard provides information on health impacts, factory profiles, and even lets viewers send a message to their local polluters via the website.
I regularly check Scorecard to see how my own town is doing on the toxics front. It is a sobering experience. Berkeley is a city that prides itself on its high level of environmental awareness. Our public schools serve organic food. There are free parking places downtown for fully electric cars. Yet, my county ranks among the dirtiest 20 percent of all counties in the United States!168 The top polluters in my zip code include manufacturers of machinery and plastics as well as the stinky steel refinery just down the road from my house. The top twenty pollutants reported for my area are glycol ethers, xylene, n-butyl alcohol, toluene, 1,2,4-trimethylbenzene, methanol, ammonia, methyl isobutyl ketone, ethylene glycol, methyl ethyl ketone, styrene, barium compounds, m-xylene, N, N-dimethylformamide, lead, zinc compounds, ethylbenzene, cumene, n-hexane, and formaldehyde.169 Yuck.
The TRI is
a great source of information on local pollution sources and on trends in different industrial sectors, but it still needs to be stronger. Scorecard describes TRI’s five biggest limitations: (1) it relies on self-reporting by the polluters, rather than actual monitoring; (2) it doesn’t cover all toxic chemicals; (3) it omits some major pollution sources; (4) it does not require the companies to report the amount of toxic chemicals used in products; and (5) it does not provide information about the possible exposures people may experience as a result of the releases.170 Once these shortcomings are addressed, the TRI could be an even more powerful tool for the public, one we can use to pressure companies to find alternatives to the toxic chemicals they use.
Watching Out for Us (Or Not)
Maybe the TRI has you contemplating the role of the government in all this. Haven’t we elected or appointed someone to be in charge of making sure that we’re safe from dangerous chemicals? What about the Food and Drug Administration? The Environmental Protection Agency? The Occupational Safety and Health Administration? Well, the very sad and very scary fact is, our government’s regulation of toxic materials is riddled with holes.
For starters, the government’s regulation takes a fragmented approach. We regulate chemicals in consumer products, air, water, land, our food, and our factories separately. A fundamental problem with this division of roles is that it approaches the environment as if it were a collection of discrete units, rather than one complex interrelated system. Often the agency staff who regulate the same chemical compound in water, air, our products. and the workplace don’t even talk to one another, and when they do, they sometimes vehemently disagree.