Right in Our Backyard

Are certain communities targeted for environmental contamination?


By Daniel Faber

In the movie Erin Brockovich, the title character’s outrage over chemical dumping in a California town leads her to investigate a giant utility company. Now, recent findings about race- and class-based environmental inequities may be spurring similar grassroots crusades in neighborhoods throughout Massachusetts.

Racial and class biases seem to determine levels of exposure to hazardous waste sites and chemical emissions within the Bay State. Communities of color and low-income neighborhoods deal disproportionately with hazards ranging from midnight dumping of chemical wastes on vacant lots, to lead contamination in building materials, to toxic air and water pollution. To uncover the magnitude of the disparities, Eric Krieg, an assistant professor of sociology at Buffalo State College, and I conducted a study that led to our report “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

All U.S. citizens suffer from inadequate environmental protection. Although the nation boasts one of the world’s most stringent systems of environmental regulation, grave problems remain unsolved. For example, more than 41 million people live within four miles of at least one of the approximately 1,500 highly dangerous National Priority List (or Superfund) toxic waste sites. According to the National Research Council, these residents demonstrate a disturbing pattern of elevated health problems, such as heart disease and miscarriages, and death rates. Children in these communities suffer greater-than-average incidences of leukemia, seizures, central nervous system damage, Hodgkin’s disease, and a host of other health problems.

In addition to these dumps—which are the worst of the worst—the federal government estimates that as many as 439,000 other waste sites exist in the country. The resulting “chemicalization” of our environment is believed to be a prime contributor to a cancer epidemic that now kills half a million Americans each year, including, for the first time in history, more children than any other disease.

The Bay State’s environmental record is equally troubling. Large industrial facilities in Massachusetts released chemical wastes weighing more than 164 million pounds—more than the doomed ocean liner Titanic’s weight—directly into the air, ground, and water between 1990 and 1998. In fact, concentrations of certain chemicals that cause numerous health problems—including neurological disorders, birth defects, reproductive disorders, and respiratory diseases—exceed by up to 80 times the health-risk standards set by every Massachusetts county.

More than 3,380 of the state’s 21,000 hazardous waste sites are considered by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection to pose serious environmental or human-health threats. Each year, nearly 1,300 deaths in the state are caused by particulate air pollution. Cancer rates in Massachusetts now exceed the national average.

Elevated rates of leukemia (particularly among children) have been linked to the industrial chemical trichloroethylene, found in the town of Woburn’s drinking water, and tetrachloroethylene, present in drinking water on upper Cape Cod. How serious is this? Imagine A Civil Action’s depiction of the toxic legacy in Woburn becoming the rule rather than the exception. Another grim statistic: The state now has one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the country; more than 4,400 women are diagnosed with and 1,000 die of the disease each year.

It’s clear current federal and state environmental policy is failing. The U.S. system of environmental regulation may be among the best in the world, but it’s still grossly inadequate for safeguarding our health and the integrity of the environment.

Yet not all Americans bear the ecological burden equally. Industries and state agencies regularly adopt pollution strategies that promise the path of least political resistance. So the less political power a community possesses to defend itself, the more likely it is to suffer arduous environmental and health problems.

The evidence indicates such targeting is premeditated. For example, a 1984 Cerrell Associates report for the California Waste Management Board recommended that industries and the state locate hazardous-waste facilities in “lower socioeconomic neighborhoods” (which they defined as primarily minority, poor, rural, and/or Catholic), because there was a lower likelihood those communities would oppose such plans.

Apparently, such recommendations have been heeded all too well. According to a 1987 report by the United Church of Christ’s Commission on Racial Justice, three out of five African Americans and Latinos nationwide live in communities that have illegal or abandoned toxic dumps. A follow-up study in 1994 found the risks to be even greater: People of color are 47 percent more likely than whites to live near health-threatening facilities. The National Law Journal has reported that Superfund toxic waste sites in communities of color are likely to be cleaned up by the government 12 to 42 percent later than sites in white communities.

In response to such ecological racism and classism, a new wave of grassroots environmentalism is building. All across the country—from African-American and Latino neighborhoods of the inner cities to white working-class suburbs and small towns, from depressed Native American reservations to Chicano farming communities—people who have traditionally been at the periphery of mainstream environmentalism are now challenging the ruination of their land, water, air, and community health. Fusing the struggles for civil rights, social justice, and a healthy environment, community-based movements for environmental justice are committed to reversing how business and the government disproportionately place the ecological and economic burden on working-class families and communities of color.

Efforts by citizens and government agencies to address environmental injustices in Massachusetts, however, have been hampered by a lack of public attention and research on the issue. How significant are the state’s environmental injustices? To pinpoint some answers, Dr. Krieg and I developed a method—the first of its kind—for ranking the environmental burden of every community. Our report was also the first to measure cumulative exposure to environmental hazards of all kinds (most other environmental justice studies focus on a particular type of hazard or facility), thereby conveying a better sense of the total impact to communities.

Our findings demonstrate that environmentally hazardous facilities and sites—such as toxic waste dumps, polluting industrial plants, incinerators, power plants, and landfills—are disproportionately located in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. Statistics present a stark imbalance. We found that communities of color average an incredible twenty-seven hazardous waste sites per square mile (psm), while low-income communities average fourteen waste sites psm. In contrast, middle-to-upper-income white communities average only three sites psm.

Similarly, between 1990 and 1998, large industrial facilities released an average of 110,000 to 123,770 pounds of chemical pollutants psm into communities of color, compared with 22,735 pounds psm for predominantly white communities. In fact, if you live in a neighborhood of color in Massachusetts, the chances are nineteen times higher that you live in one of the twenty-five most environmentally overburdened communities in the state. Such disparities are not so much the failing of law or science as they are the result of political disempowerment and economic abandonment.

The conclusions from our report hit the Massachusetts environmental community like a bombshell. A Boston Globe editorial said that “any doubt that heavy polluters tend to be concentrated in areas with high populations of minorities or the poor was put to rest . . . with [the study’s] release.” In response, the state’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs has drafted an environmental justice policy for implementation within the year. The legislature is considering an Areas of Critical Environmental Justice Concern law, which would address these disparities for the first time. No small victory, considering only a handful of other U.S. states currently have environmental justice legislation of any kind.

After hosting a presentation on the report, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials have talked with us about how to address environmental injustice. Furthermore, city councils in Boston and other towns are considering regulatory changes. More heartening still, the study has made an impact at the grassroots level: Citizens groups throughout the state are using the report to press for improvements in their own communities.

The Massachusetts constitution guarantees the right to clean air and water. But the state must be accountable to all its residents. It’s time for the state to address the profound environmental disparities that exist and enforce environmental justice regardless of race, class, or creed. We hope policy makers, scholars, community advocates, and ordinary citizens will continue to use our research to help realize this goal.

Daniel Faber is an associate professor of sociology. The report “Unequal Exposure to Ecological Hazards: Environmental Injustices in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts” is available at <www.ace-ej.org>.