Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility

It won’t take a book like this to convince me of the points here. Throughout the world, it’s been common practice to dump garbage in poorer communities, and if not, the lower income resident usually live in the most polluted areas, near the dumps, coal bins, canals, and slaughterhouses. Take Vancouver’s “Low Track” as an example; it was a low-lying area that flooded easily, so you’d get sewage pollution whenever it rained, and who would want to live there? London’s Camden Lock is another example of low-income housing built near a polluted waterway. It may be stylish now, but in 1992, it was a mess. Tourists and locals came to the Camden Lock market to shop, browse, and take pictures, but you couldn’t be there at night. The smell from the canal made it the least desirable place to live.

    Toxic Communities turns things up a notch by studying how racism as well as poverty drives the “dump in the poor town” practice. Triana, Alabama, for instance, was polluted with DDT from the Tennessee River, and the locals were eating toxic fish, not out of a desire to “eat local,” but because they were hungry. Warren County, North Carolina, was the scene of a 1979 lawsuit to stop a PCB landfill. Love Canal is barely cited in this book, because it had nothing to do with racism or poverty. On the contrary, the dump was there before the houses were built, and the owners warned the town not to build there. The problem was that the town thought the canal was leak-proof, and it wasn’t. The residents were all white, so you can’t blame racism, but what if the town built low-income housing on the site? Could the town have force section-8 tenants to move in, so they could sell valuable land where existing housing projects were?

    Native American land in the USA is also in danger of pollution. The Skull Valley reservation in Utah is one example; a massive number of sheep died there in 1968 when gases escaped from a chemical site, and nowadays the US Army stores its waste there. The reason for Reservation pollution is simple; the Tribal Councils need money badly, and there’s so little oversight against corruption, so there’s little to stop someone from allowing tanker trucks full of sewage to dump things on the land. If there are mines on the Reservation, that’s also a problem. The Pine Ridge Reservation has radioactive tailings from the mines, and the local healthcare system is ill-equipped to deal with it. Mobility is probably half the problem. If Native American leaders let in the toxic waste, the residents can’t move away. Same thing in NYC, where NYCHA apartments often have black mold from leaking pipes (not to mention crime) and the residents can’t afford to live elsewhere.

    The book is well-written and researched, but it would’ve been better if there had been interviews with the residents of the communities that suffered from waste-dumping. Photos and maps would be welcome as well, because a lot of the places mentioned here are unfamiliar to the readers.