“We noticed that things were changing – how the garden wasn’t producing as much,” Landrum recalled.
The kids would write “wash your car” in the grime that showed up on the cars in the neighborhood – there was so much pollution, people were washing their cars every day, but the grime would be right back there the next morning, for kids to write in again. Sometimes the stuff would be sticky.
The trees in the neighborhood started to die off, and not only that, the neighbors started getting sick. By the time Landrum was 9 years old, her own mother was making frequent trips to the hospital, and was diagnosed with throat cancer a few years later.
But it was the 1980s when Landrum really began to find her footing as a neighborhood activist. She learned that the new owner of an old salt mine located beneath the neighborhood wanted to convert the mineshaft into storage space for toxic waste.
“Many of the older people had taken a tour and wanted to go along with it. But I was wait-wait-wait,” Landrum said. “Salt is a corrosive. You start throwing plastic containers of a toxic substance into a corrosive environment, what’s going to happen? They said, ‘OK, young lady, why don’t you go down and talk to the city council?’”
So she did, successfully presenting an argument that her densely residential neighborhood needed to be protected from this threat. Time marched on.
In the 1990s, her neighborhood began to experience mini-earthquakes. There were rumblings underfoot and the sound of explosions on an almost daily basis. People started finding cracks in their chimneys and foundations. Sinkholes started appearing in yards. And nobody knew why this was happening.
Landrum started nosing around and found out that the salt mine had been sold again, and the city council had given the new owners the right to blast under their houses, because people unknowingly had sold off their mineral rights.
She started reading all the fine print in the permits and discovered that the company was using the same mixture of explosives that Timothy McVeigh had used in the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
She convinced the city council to drop their agreement.
By the turn of the century, Landrum was involved in another fight – this time with Marathon Oil, the oil refinery that had installed dozens of storage tanks within view of their residential neighborhood and, it turned out, was emitting unregulated poisons .
But that company is hardly the only offender – there are more than 30 heavily polluting industries surrounding Landrum’s community, spewing more than 150 different kinds of chemicals into the air.
The neighborhood is a nonattainment area for both ozone and sulfur dioxide – that means the air quality in the place she has lived her whole life persistently exceeds allowable standards for human health. And as health experts will tell you, the cumulative effect of exposure to multiple toxins can shorten lifespans significantly.
In an effort to restore health to her neighborhood Landrum has, at this point, engaged in decades of environmental activism – protesting, marching, and attending hundreds of meetings. She’s fought a system that has allowed the worst polluters to do “self-reporting,” and she’s outraged now that the current administration has been rolling back all of the hard-won regulations that were supposed to protect people.
It’s safe to say she is not a Trump supporter.
But she also knows where the most essential test lies: it’s with the people.
“How culpable are we for this climate crisis? We have been greedy takers. We have not been good stewards of Mother Earth,” Landrum said. “Our carbon footprint must be reduced.”