I'm probably not the best person to write this diary. My experiences with environmental justice as a discipline have been cursory at best. However, since I have been on the ground and seen this with my own eyes, I feel a certain sense of duty to share it with you all.
The place is Oakville, Louisiana. Some facts about Oakville: It is a small, African-American community in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where Katrina made landfall. It was founded by newly freed slaves after the Civil War. It is mostly lower class trailer homes. Everyone knows each other's name. There are over 100 children in the community. And not ten feet away from the community is the Industrial Pipe landfill, violating almost every law on the books, owned and operated by Kenny Stewart.
Continue on with me (there's pictures)...
In all the discussion over Katrina, there has been very little discussion of how much waste has been generated, and where it's all going to go. We gut houses, we put all the trash in a pile, and then it goes ... somewhere. Well, more than likely, it goes to a garbage dump in a poor, black neighborhood. These are the kinds of things we need to be thinking about and planning all the way through, or else problems become needlessly magnified. Why are most of the dumps in poor, black neighborhoods? I'll let the expert talk here.
Everyone who knows even a little bit about environmental justice (EJ) has heard of Dr. Robert Bullard. What Smith or Keynes is to economists, Bullard is to EJ'ers. From his article "Race and Environmental Justice in the United States," available in the Yale Journal of International Law, Vol. 18:319, 1993:
Despite attempts made by the US government to level the playing field, African American, Latino, and Native American communities have borne a disproportionate share of environmental and health risks. While both class and race determine the distribution of environmental hazards, racial minorities are more likely to be exposed to environmental threats than are whites of the same social class. Race is a powerful predictor of many environmental hazards, including the distribution of air pollution, the location of municipal solid waste facilities, the location of abandoned toxic waste sites, toxic fish consumption, and lead poisoning in children.
Communities of color have been systematically targeted for the siting of noxious facilities such as sewer treatment plants, garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, hazardous waste disposal sites, lead smelters, and other risky technologies, thereby exacerbating existing inequities. African Americans are especially hard hit by environmental racism, as they are by other forms of institutionalized discrimination. No matter what their education, occupation, or income level, African Americans suffer from less effective educational systems, lower quality housing, more dilapidated neighborhoods, increased mortality rates, and greater environmental threats than do whites. African American communities have long struggled to get paved streets, sidewalks, running water and sewer lines, street lights, and fire and police stations. They have also protested inadequate garbage collection and the construction of freeways through their neighborhoods. Nevertheless, many such protests have gone unheeded because African Americans are underrepresented in key decision-making positions.
The environmental problems facing communities of color are exacerbated by other institutional barriers, such as housing discrimination and de facto residential segregation, that make it difficult for African Americans and Latinos to buy their way out of health-threatening physical environments. Government policies and the practices of banking and housing industries have created communities that segregate African Americans, and to a lesser extent, Latinos and other minorities, from whites.
Why do some communities get dumped on while others do not? Although waste generation correlates directly with per capita income, few garbage dumps and toxic waste facilities are actually built in the suburbs. Following the NIMBY principle - "Not In My Backyard" - white homeowners have repeatedly mobilized against and defeated proposed sitings of so-called "locally unwanted land uses" (LULUs) -- such as garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, sewer treatment plants, garbage transfer stations, and recycling centers -- in their neighborhoods. Many have used the same approach to defeat proposed sitings of prisons, drug treatment units, low-income public housing, and homeless shelters in their communities. By contrast, it has been difficult for millions of African Americans in segregated neighborhoods to say "not in my backyard" when they do not even own backyards. Whereas two-thirds of all Americans own their own homes, only about 44% of African Americans do.
With me so far? If they can't own their own home, they have to rent in a cheaper area. If property values are low, industry moves in. Environmental degradation occurs, and property values fall even further, until the only "businesses" are the polluters.
Now what about Oakville? In the mid-1980s, Industrial Pipe opened the landfill, meant for construction waste. Over the subsequent decades, the owner-operator, Kenny Stewart, proceeded to weasel with the Louisiana DEQ for permits to do more and more, such as allowing other forms of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) and shortening the buffer zone from 150 feet to 50 feet. This means that his landfill only has to be 50 feet away from people's homes and yards, where their children play. And as you can see, he hasn't even put up a fence:
That dirt pile extends on for the entire length of the community. In between the pile and the homes is a small ditch, filled with oily, disgusting water. The kids play in there. The actual soil is most likely contaminated with carcinogens and other toxic substances. To get a better sense of this encroachment on their lives, here is my very tall friend standing on top of the landfill (technically trespassing, I think):
But the latest issue is the Katrina waste. Stewart has been hauling in Katrina waste, some of the smelliest, toxic garbage (think refrigerators fermenting for 6 months) you've ever experienced in your life, 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. And those trucks are noisy. The seagulls are even louder. The cranes never stop moving the stuff around. The whole picture ends up looking like this:
If you're not appalled yet, I've got more.
When I visited Oakville in March, at the insisting of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic (who has filed on behalf of the Oakville Community Action Group many times), my group from ND met with Rose Jackson, who works with both OCAP and LEAN, the Louisiana Environmental Action Network. Ms. Jackson has been fighting this landfill for 20 years. That morning, she said, there had been a fire in the back of the landfill that had poured out so much smoke that not only was she on the phone with the DEQ but people from neighboring communities (wealthier ones not directly next to the landfill) were on the phone with them as well. She said that the kids couldn't go to school, you could barely see down the road because the smoke was so thick. She'd been trying to get the Times-Picayune to come down and do a story for months. Well, they finally wrote one: Growing landfill fuels feud in Plaquemines community
Some choice exerpts:
Landfill president Kennett Stewart contends that in taking the material, he's performing a public service for a parish struggling to clear the way for rebuilding. But to residents of Oakville, who have fought for more than two decades to shut the facility, the landfill's rapid expansion is a direct assault on their community of 300 people.
They say an accidental fire that burned for several weeks in March at the back of the 66-acre site along Highway 23 caused respiratory sickness among children and adults living nearby. Also, lawyers from the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, which represents the Oakville Community Action Group, allege a massive new pile of dirt that lines Oakville's border with Industrial Pipe violates its state Department of Environmental Quality permit. That permit requires a 50-foot buffer between the two properties.
Standing in his backyard on Monday, less than a dozen feet from the base of the pile and with large dump trucks rumbling in the background, Oakville resident Walter Smith said he "would like to see this all just disappear."
"Like a nightmare, I'd just wake up and it would disappear," said Smith, 51, who works at the nearby ConocoPhillips refinery. "I planned on putting a patio back here. But with this stuff" -- he gestures toward the pile of dirt -- "I don't know. We've just got to suffer until someone brings him down."
Stewart rejected claims that the 50-foot buffer had been ignored. He said the levee-sized pile of dirt -- created during the excavation of a debris pit -- did not violate his permit. He also said he was careful to keep all debris at least 50 feet from the property line.
"Every roadblock that's imaginable they try to put up there to stop us," he said of his critics. "They can make all the wild accusations they want. I'm used to it."
Remember those pictures up there? Does that look like he's keeping a 50 foot buffer zone?
And even if he is within the letter of his permit, what a horrible neighbor! He's not acting in good faith, he's not giving anything back to the community, he hasn't even built a goddamn FENCE! So these kids have to play in toxic ditches or on their broken-down basketball court, and try and concentrate on their homework over the sounds of trucks and seagulls and cranes and the fumes from garbage fires.
We needed to be asking these questions 50 years ago - where do we put these things that no one wants in their backyard? But only those of us lucky enough to own homes got to make those decisions. The result is grave environmental injustice like this. And let me tell you, Rose Jackson is tired of it. She is tired of seeing the men in her community go to work for Kenny Stewart, only to die of cancer a few years later. She is tired of watching kids in her community contract asthma. She is tired of fighting with Kenny Stewart, only to have him dismiss her, saying she's a pain in his ass and she can talk to his lawyers. She is tired of it.
Wouldn't you be, too?
Well, maybe not if you were Kenny Stewart. Then you could go home at the end of every day, and forget about all the hurt you're causing, because if you were Kenny Stewart, you would be walking in this front door every night:
I promised Rose Jackson that I would tell everyone I knew about Oakville. Help me spread the word.