Dumping On The Poor

By John Elson

The name Altgeld Gardens evokes images of brilliant flowers rampant in golden sunlight. But if you follow your nose into the black ghetto on the Far South Side of Chicago, it will lead you to a dilapidated housing project built atop a former landfill whose fetid odors still rise from the basements after more than 60 years. The plight of nearly 2,000 families is made worse by tons of pollutants from a nearby sludge plant, a steel mill, a paint company, a huge incinerator and an 80-ft.-high landfill. Only a few miles away is a lot that should be a playground. Instead it is a dump filled with 4-ft.-high mounds of trash, broken glass, rusty nails and construction debris.

In upstate New York, not far from the infamous Love Canal, you can follow your nose to Forest Glen, a trailer-park settlement built on heaps of foul- smelling hazardous waste that the Environmental Protection Agency says may contain as many as 150 toxic compounds. Under the streets of the densely populated semi-industrial section of Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, N.Y., the Mobil Corp. has begun recovering a sea of oil -- 17 million gals. -- that for decades has been leaking from underground storage tanks and pipelines.

Tens of thousands of impoverished people -- mainly blacks and other minorities -- living in the countless Altgeld Gardens and Forest Glens in the inner cities and rural pockets of the nation are the victims of what critics call environmental racism. The victimizers are mainly waste-management firms and local politicians hoping to attract revenues to their towns. They need cheap land where they can dispose of garbage and build air-contaminating incinerators. That all too often means land in poor areas with large minority populations. And those people, burdened by drugs, poverty, crime, bad medical care and joblessness, have long been too powerless or apathetic to prevent their communities from becoming the repository of everybody else's detritus. The result, according to a landmark 1987 study by the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, is that 3 of every 5 black and Hispanic Americans live in areas with uncontrolled toxic-waste sites. Many of the most notorious dumping grounds are located in the South. Among the worst is "cancer alley," a 75-mile stretch along the Mississippi River, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, that is lined with oil refineries and petrochemical plants. The alley's abnormally high cancer rate has prompted one health worker to call it a massive human experiment. A big mess in Chicago is the work of "fly dumpers," unlicensed truckers who collect filth from affluent , neighborhoods and deposit it in vacant lots in stealthy forays at night.

Fearing that this appalling state of affairs can only get worse, the victims at last have begun to strike back. Often with the backing of ecological watchdog groups, grass-roots organizations are taking on the waste managers, using public relations and the law as their major weapons:

-- In Altgeld Gardens, Hazel Johnson has organized a movement called People for Community Recovery, which has successfully crusaded against the establishment of yet another neighborhood landfill.

-- In Forest Glen, Terry and Kathy Freiermuth have shaken up the Federal Government, which has responded by promising buyout offers to residents as well as financial aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

-- In the blue-collar Pennsylvania village of Yukon (pop. 1,100), Diana Steck is leading a protest organization of 600 members. Using roadblocks and other acts of civil disobedience as well as the legal system, the group is trying to force authorities to clean up six polluted lagoons that it suspects are killing livestock and causing cancer among the populace.

-- In Passaic County, N.J., freeholders decided to build an incinerator in the city of Passaic on a site adjoining a hospital, whose occupants, according to a group led by Marge Gablehouse, would be the major beneficiaries of three tons of lead emissions a year. The protesters have succeeded in temporarily halting construction of the incinerator and hope to persuade Governor Jim Florio to cancel it.

-- In California, Juana Gutierrez and her 400-member Mothers of East Los Angeles are fighting a proposed toxic-waste incinerator slated for nearby Vernon, which every year would spew some 19,000 tons of potentially health- threatening ash on their community. Why, she asks, should East Los Angeles, poverty-pocked and largely Hispanic, be subjected to this environmental atrocity? "Why not Beverly Hills or Bel Air?"

Waste managers deny they are picking on the poor. Some say it is simplistic to attribute the environmental problems of minority communities to racism, even though few challenge the evidence that the poor have more environmental dangers to cope with than do the wealthy. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians have often inherited hazards by moving into older sectors of cities, where decrepit factories and other facilities were built long before anyone worried about pollution.

Government officials have often spurned complaints from low-income residents about the hazards posed by landfills and incinerators. To bolster their credibility, waste-management firms have hired dozens of former officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and private conservation groups. Former EPA chief William Ruckelshaus, for example, is now chairman of Browning-Ferris Industries, one of the largest waste-treatment outfits in the country. In October, after the mostly Hispanic residents of Azusa, Calif., complained that expansion of a BFI-operated landfill would poison the groundwater, BFI offered to invest $20 million to clean up the contamination. The expansion was approved.

Sometimes dumping on the poor is a consequence of self-exploitation. In their search for new disposal sites, waste managers have discovered fertile ground on American Indian reservations, which are considered sovereign entities not subject to local or state environmental restrictions and whose residents are perhaps the poorest of the nation's poor.

Typical is the dilemma of California's Campo tribe of Mission Indians, whose land lies 68 miles east of San Diego. Leaders of the community of 250 people are negotiating with a waste-disposal company to build a landfill and recycling plant that would be fed up to 3,000 tons of garbage a day from San Diego County. This would be a boon for the county, which is running out of landfill. For the Indians, the project would bring jobs and "millions" in income, says tribal EPA chairman Michael Connelly-Misquish.

Connelly-Misquish claims the tribe would write health and safety codes at least equal to those required by California's environmental agencies. But ranchers and farmers near the reservation are not so sure. Concerned that the dump and incinerator would contaminate the region, they have asked the state legislature to make all California reservations subject to state environmental regulations. If they succeed, the waste companies can expect to come up against tougher environmental rules at other reservations.

The Campos' opponents are practicing a strategy that wealthier neighborhoods use regularly with considerable success. That strategy is encompassed in a now familiar slogan: NIMBY (not in my backyard). With the help of money and political power, such groups fight off unwanted facilities like halfway houses for recovering addicts, prisons and incinerators, which then almost invariably find homes that can least afford to resist them. In well-to-do Greenwich, Conn., for example, singer Diana Ross and 12 fellow residents launched a NIMBY campaign to prevent the state from building a $6 million-plus truck-weighing station on an interstate highway that runs near their homes.

For the nation's newly energized grassroots activists, however, NIMBY is a fruitless answer. Theirs is a challenge that the entire U.S. has yet to confront: it's spelled NIABY -- not in anyone's backyard.

Where, then? The activists aren't terribly helpful in answering that question. They are, however, eloquent in arguing that the nation's monumental waste-disposal problems can no longer be solved by transferring toxic trash from a privileged neighborhood to a less fortunate one; that even state-of- the-art incinerators are costly and inefficient; that a nation that produces 160 million tons of residential and commercial solid wastes every year must find a way to deal with them without destroying its communities; and that, finally, pollution kills people. The rate of lung cancer among young urban blacks is significantly higher than the national average. Some experts persuasively suggest that this dismaying statistic may be attributable not so much to rotten ghetto air as to the fact that young blacks smoke too much.

Regardless of the merits of that debate, one thing is clear: the war to protect the environment has opened a new front in gritty ghetto streets and downtrodden rural backwaters where the endangered species is the poor.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles, Elizabeth Taylor/Chicago and Lisa H. Towle/New York