Lessons in Environmental Justice. Группа авторов
cause in this town. We’ve got people with obviously catastrophic health complications as a result of the homes they’re living in, and they’re being stonewalled by the people who are supposed to protect them.” We decided to go out and see what the people in Carver Terrace wanted.
Preston was a “conscience constituent,” someone who supports a social change movement for ethical reasons, without directly benefiting (McCarthy & Zald, 1977). He knew schoolteacher Frances Shears in Carver Terrace, and they arranged a meeting in her living room. It was a small group conversation at first. Some residents were eager to meet, while others questioned the motivation of “these white men.” Some had become discouraged and didn’t show up at all. Several ministers in Carver Terrace were already brainstorming about how to move forward and were looking for the best strategy. Eventually the conversation grew into an extraordinarily effective, respectful collaboration between FUSE and what became the Carver Terrace Community Action Group (CTCAG). Patsy Oliver, who became one of the most outspoken (and globally oriented) CTCAG activists, told me, “It was really an inspiration to me to be part of FUSE because they were bi-state, bi-racial—and this was a first for Texarkana, you know.”
Zooming out even further, the organizers in CTCAG and FUSE would benefit enormously from the support of regional and nationally networked EJ groups, some of which were beginning to use the term environmental racism. With their help, and through their own dedication and persistence, Carver Terrace residents eventually won a federal buyout and relocation, over the EPA’s objections. I’ll return to their story later, but first, I’ll comment on my personal and scholarly connection to Carver Terrace. You’ll also learn about an emerging network of EJ organizations that offered advice and assistance to places like Carver Terrace.
Personal Intersections and Sociological Research
You might wonder how I came to be involved with this story as a sociologist, since I didn’t live in Carver Terrace myself. In graduate school I studied movements for social justice, especially affordable housing, tenants’ rights, and inclusive urban design. When I moved to Arkansas to take a position as an assistant professor at Hendrix College, I soon found out about some very disturbing environmental problems in the state, and my research turned in that direction. One site that taught me important lessons was Jacksonville, Arkansas, where Agent Orange had been produced for the Vietnam War, and where the highly toxic chemical dioxin was extracted and stored in barrels near the Jacksonville Air Force Base (Čapek, 1992). There were 29,000 leaking barrels of one of the most toxic substances created by human beings located near residential neighborhoods and environmentally sensitive waterways, and enormous disagreements in the community about what to do. The “city fathers” (the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce) wanted to hush it up, fearing damage to the business climate. Residents experiencing health issues, especially women with children, wanted the dioxin removed. Others (including some of their spouses) didn’t want to publicize the problem, fearing a loss of property values or even their jobs.
This complicated situation woke me up to the difficult realities of toxic environments. I started interviewing grassroots environmental leaders in Arkansas (grassroots refers to organizations that originate locally, rather than having a national top-down structure). I also tried to learn more about dioxin. It wasn’t easy—the EPA first assessed the dangers of dioxin to human health in 1984 but withdrew its document under pressure from the chemical industry. Astoundingly, it would take more than 20 years to reissue a public reassessment declaring dioxin to be a human carcinogen with other significant health effects. This lack of access to crucial health information taught me about the often politicized nature of federal scientific research. I became involved in an environmental organization, the Environmental Congress of Arkansas (ECA), and encountered some key national anti-toxics organizations that supported Jacksonville citizens who wanted the dioxin safely removed. I learned about the challenge of underfunded, reluctant, corporate-influenced federal agencies like the EPA, and how difficult it was for people without any political power to get something done about their situation. As an environmentalist and a sociologist, I could see that justice needed to be paired with the word environment, and that environment needed to include the people who inhabit it.
My first trip to Carver Terrace (located about three hours away) was for a national conference on environmental justice in 1989. A FUSE member and an ECA member had attended an inspiring meeting and demonstration in Wichita, Kansas, that brought together grassroots environmental leaders from many states. They suggested Texarkana as the next site. The Texarkana EJ conference brought in national leaders from the anti-toxics movement, including Lois Gibbs, a white working-class mother who had organized support to win the first federal buyout of a contaminated community in Love Canal, New York. She went on to become director of the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes (CCHW, later renamed the Center for Health, Environment & Justice), a resource base created to help other contaminated communities with scientific information and action strategies.
In addition to talks by national anti-toxic leaders and environmentalists, the program included a “citizen’s public hearing,” a rally with speeches by experienced activists from around the country, informal strategizing sessions, and a culminating march through Carver Terrace demanding a federal buyout. Lois Gibbs and other speakers strongly emphasized that legal strategies could go only so far and that, based on experience of grassroots anti-toxics groups around the country, political organizing and direct action tactics were more effective. She advocated putting a “face” on the problem—identifying specific politicians and others who were accountable. Environmental writers who attended publicized the story nationally, and Jim Presley of FUSE wrote an article for the Texas Observer titled “Toxicana, U.S.A.” As in Jacksonville, the “city fathers” were not happy.
The conference provides an early snapshot of this segment of the EJ movement, and how it envisioned (framed) environmental justice. Presentations focused on toxic chemicals, critiques of corporate capitalism, ineffective state and federal agencies, the need for more democracy, and building grassroots coalitions to challenge unequal treatment. Most of the speakers were white, including Larry and Shelia Wilson from the Highlander Center, an organization that had crossed racial lines for social justice since the 1930s, cultivating social change activists for the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and more (Marguerite Casey Foundation, 2015). Pat Bryant, of the Gulf Coast Tenants’ Association and one of the few African American environmental leaders at the conference, underscored the emerging EJ movement’s significance:
I’m looking here at a whole community of refugees—soon to be refugees from your own community! I live in New Orleans where there are many refugees from Central America who have been on the wrong end of the foreign and military policy of the United States government, and now I’m looking at the prospect that by the year 2000 all across this country, people who live and die to make this country will be refugees in their own communities. That is a very shocking, but real, understanding of what is happening. The numbers are so staggering, brothers and sisters, that you undoubtedly are part of the movement of the ‘90s. (Presley, 1989, 9)
I came to Carver Terrace to learn, and to express solidarity through my ECA involvement. Like Don Preston, I was a conscience constituent (but with much less knowledge and experience). Later that year, I represented the ECA at a Stop Toxic Pollution (STP) workshop at the Highlander Center and heard more firsthand testimony from residents around the country who had become anti-toxics organizers. Their stories had similar ingredients: toxic sites leading to suffering through illness and devalued homes and land; residents who weren’t high on the social hierarchy of power, whether they were white or people of color; local, regional, and federal authorities who were unresponsive or outright denied the problem; stigmatizing of (and sometimes violent threats against) residents for “stirring up trouble”; and overall a strong sense of injustice.
The next year, the ECA helped organize a Rally for the Environment at the state capitol in Little Rock to protest the state’s decision to burn the dioxin in Jacksonville. National organizations and grassroots activists from around the country turned up, since the decision was seen as setting a terrible precedent (in effect, “a toxic landfill in the sky”). From CTCAG and FUSE, I heard the latest updates about