Our society has often drawn the line between what is good for the environment and what is good for people. This is, however, a false dichotomy. I grew up in Cass Lake, Minnesota; a small town far removed from factories or power plants, but it is still home to one of the most polluted locations in the state. This calamity has poisoned Cass Lake’s people, weakened its social fabric, and put into question the morality and legitimacy of the state and federal governments.
Our society has often drawn the line between what is good for the environment and what is good for people. This is, however, a false dichotomy. I grew up in Cass Lake, Minnesota; a small town far removed from factories or power plants, but it is still home to one of the most polluted locations in the state. This calamity has poisoned Cass Lake’s people, weakened its social fabric, and put into question the morality and legitimacy of the state and federal governments.
First a little background. In 1955 the St. Regis Paper Company set up business in Cass Lake. Their plant was built to produce railroad ties for a railroad that was being built to transport coal from the east to the coal fired power plants in the Dakotas and others further west. When making the railroad ties, the St. Regis Paper company dipped the logs into several deep holes in the ground filled with toxic chemicals (dioxins, fluoranthene, and arsenic among others) where they soaked in order to preserve them from the elements. The soaking pits were not lined with any protective barrier to keep the chemicals from soaking into the surrounding soil or the deeper ground water. This continued for 30 years until 1985, when the St. Regis Paper Company was sold to International Paper, which closed down the plant and filled in the holes with no clean up to speak of.
When I started Elementary School, on my first bus ride to school I drove over the superfund site and I drove over it every school day for the next twelve years. It looks like an empty field, which is itself a curiosity seeing that most of the area is heavily forested. There are no markers of any kind suggesting its history or the danger that it poses to those who enter the contaminated area. When passing by, I often saw kids playing in the long grass, eating mud pies, and hiding in the pits that once held the toxic morass. It was no surprise to me then to learn that the area has extremely high rates of birth defects, cancer, and several other much rarer diseases. The dioxin has even found its way into the ground water and the nearby lake of Cass Lake, causing the EPA to declare the lake’s Whitefish as unsafe to eat.
Observers have asked why people would choose to live so close to the Superfund site. The fact is that they don’t. The town itself has been described by visitors as a scene from a third world country, with obscenely high unemployment and poverty rates. The median income of a resident of Cass Lake is $22,000; more than 50% lower than the state wide median. The city has an unemployment rate of 11.7% and considering that the Bingo Palace, the city’s largest employer, has been having trouble turning a profit, the number may go higher in years to come. The matter does not come down to choice but to money; most residents of the homes near the contaminated area would move if they could, but they lack the financial means to do so.
Even though the contaminated area was later classified as a federal Superfund site, the efforts to remove the toxins have been at best thoughtless and wasteful, and at worst criminally negligent. The first clean up attempt involved the excavation of several piles of contaminated material. The material was then transported several thousand feed from the worst contamination and was then dumped on another field where it remains to this day. The International Paper Company did conduct ‘cleanup’ efforts in which thousands of tons of toxic top soil were removed from the 125 acre contaminated area. However, after further testing done by the EPA it was found that the site was still contaminated and that over 40 nearby homes contained dangerous levels of the cancer causing chemicals dioxin and arsenic. The EPA then decontaminated the homes, an act that residents called ‘futile.’ Their children are always playing outside and the loose contaminated dust is nearly impossible to keep from being brought in on shoes and the wind. The only option that would protect the 40 families and their children is relocation from the contaminated area and yet the EPA balks at the $2.5 million price tag to protect those families and their children.
Now, the citizens of Cass Lake, many of which now live on the contaminated Superfund site have not taken their situation laying down. In 2003 Cass Lakers expressed their frustration by electing Elaine Fleming, who ran as a candidate from the green party primarily on the superfund site issue. Also, the town has been organizing a community cleanup project to remove garbage that clogs the streets of the much of the gutters and ditches. Despite the community’s efforts it is beyond Cass Lake to finance a substancial cleaning of the 125 acre contaminated area. Thus far the EPA hasn’t viewed actual cleanup or relocation as a viable options, and has instead opted to continue to provide homes located on the contaminated soil with free, periodic decontamination of their homes.
The EPA has justified it’s inaction with two arguments. The fist of which is cost. It costs $220,000 a year to clean the 40 homes while relocation would cost upwards of $2.5 million. While this may seem to be a rather cold cost/benefit decision against the people, there is a reason behind their decision. The Superfund program’s funding has dropped by 25% as a result of it being the target of President Bush’s spending cuts and as a result it is cleaning up 50% fewer sites a year. The EPA’s second reason is the "lack of imminent danger" to the nearby residents. Apparently they don’t consider increased cancer, child mortality, and disability rates to pose an imminent threat to Cass Lake.
Their inaction is a part of a larger problem for sure but it does not remove them or the International Paper Company responsibility. I am sick of looking back on my years in Cass Lake High and Elementary Schools, remembering all of the special ed students with the knowledge that for many of them their suffering had a preventable cause. How many more years must go by, how many more children must suffer from mental disability, how many more men and women must die early deaths from a lifetime of exposure to deadly toxins?
If I have learned one thing from my 17 years of living in Cass Lake it is this: if you want to heal communities you have to heal their environment as well. Poverty and environmental degradation are two sides of the same coin that feed off of each other in a vicious cycle of degeneration. If we are to save Cass Lake and the hundreds of other towns with Superfund sites around the country we need to tackle both the poverty and the environmental destruction because so long as there is one the other will always be there.