OLD KING COAL
Environmental Management, or
ADEM, which she says did little
to protect them. As it happens,
a coalition of environmental and
public health advocates sued the
EPA in April for failing to develop
rules for coal ash handling.
“They would protect an animal
before they’d protect humans and
I think that’s terrible,” Calhoun
says of environmental regulators. “They came down here, and
we rode around. We took them
on the whole tour. We took them
down and around. And I said ‘We
gonna show ‘em!’” she continues.
“Didn’t hear nothing else from
them. We poured our souls out
and everything to them. They just
take what we got and then you
never hear anything. ADEM? They
didn’t do anything. They think
we’re a joke or something.
“But the thing of it is,” she
adds, “we just can’t give up.”
Lawsuits claiming that authorities discriminate when choosing where to locate industrial
facilities — whether landfills,
toxic waste repositories, chemical facilities, or other potentially
polluting enterprises — typically
face a tough road. Courts have
traditionally set very high bars
for proving that a company or
regulator was intentionally biased in the selection of a site.
But Robert Bullard, dean of the
HUFFINGTON
06.17.12
Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland
School of Public Affairs at Texas
Southern University, suggests that
the practical realities of wealth and
power dictate that discrimination
happens all the time, and he grows
animated when talking about cases
like the Perry County landfill.
“The fact is that after more
than two decades of intense empirical study and evidence, it is
very clear that environmental racism and discrimination is real,”
says Bullard, who launched his
career in the late 1970’s combating the placement or “siting” of
landfills in predominantly minority neighborhoods of Houston.
“There’s lots of data — hundreds
of studies establishing relationships and correlations between
race and class in environmental
disparities. When you start looking at these studies, particularly
over last 10 years — whether it’s
about siting or industrial pollution, chemical use or accidents
and explosions, discoveries of old
waste sites, air quality, dirty air —
the trends are undeniable.”
Even without the data, the mechanics of this sort of de facto
discrimination aren’t difficult to
understand. Affluent communities, after all, have more resources
to either fight off the arrival of
an unwanted industry or facility;
are less likely to need whatever