Race and pollution

Brittany Fremion recently reviewed Ellen Griffith Spears, Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town (UNC Press, 2014) for H-Environment. From the review:

Even though scholars and activists did not begin identifying environmental racism until the 1980s, Spears reveals how the unequal allocation of environmental hazards extends across space and time. In the first four chapters, Spears explains how Anniston became a model city of the New South and home to the chemical industry, which developed close ties to the US military during the two world wars. In doing so, she unpacks the problematic relationship between the former by explaining how a lack of regulatory oversight led to the tragic contamination of human bodies and ecosystems. As the Cold War escalated, so too did the military’s involvement with chemical development and production, which found a new home at Anniston’s Fort McClellan in the 1960s, “the free world’s largest training center for chemical, biological, and radiological warfare” (p. 94). By placing the modern environmental justice movement within this historical context, Spears is able to show the ways in which privileged toxic knowledge developed among corporations and created hazardous landscapes in Anniston that reflected the legacy of social and environmental disparities in the United States.

***** 

But Anniston’s residents were not passive victims. In chapter 5, Spears explores the tradition of nonviolent protest in the city to demonstrate that residents owed much to the civil rights movement, which shaped contemporary environmental justice campaigns by linking social justice to environmental issues. Prior to the campaign to hold Monsanto accountable for PCB contamination and the initiative for safe disposal of chemical weapons, Anniston attracted national attention with the burning of the Freedom Riders bus on Mother’s Day in 1961. White and black residents were versed in the language and experience of protest—be it in support of equality or not. Thus the Anniston campaigns also revealed important challenges created by racial and class differences: white middle-class and professional people dominated the anti-incinerator fight whereas the African American community spearheaded the PCB initiative, largely as a result of residential geography. When activists in both efforts joined forces, they did so uneasily. For instance, Spears reveals that the Monsanto campaign linked whites whose relatives and friends had been mid-century instigators of racial violence with residents of color who had sometimes been the targets of that violence. Despite these conflicts, legal victory over Monsanto and the emergence of a national campaign that forced the army to both provide residents with protective equipment and operate with greater transparency revealed the the power of grassroots activism.

In the remaining chapters, Spears explores the rise of PCB as the world’s most notorious chemical and the factors that drove chemical policy reform in the early 1970s, most important, the passage of the Toxic Substances Control Act, which led to the end of PCB production. But as Spears reveals, the aftermath of those reform efforts bred citizen action. In Anniston, Monsanto began burying its chemical wastes and the army announced plans to build a hazardous waste incinerator to dismantle outdated Cold War-era chemical weapons at the Anniston Army Depot. In the late 1980s people locally began to question those practices. Thus, a grassroots, cross-class, and ultimately biracial and bipartisan movement emerged to challenge environmental injustice—activists used coffins to block Monsanto’s bulldozers, staged die-ins, filed lawsuits, and donned hazmat suits at rallies. In her final chapter and epilogue, Spears offers an assessment of their achievements.

Desegregation of national parks

Another article from Environmental History's virtual issue on environmental justice (other were noted here and here), Terence Young's "'A Contradiction in Democratic Government’: W. J. Trent, Jr., and the Struggle to Desegregate National Park Campgrounds", brings together environmental history and the history of desegregation, at the same time reminding us that desegregation in various contexts took place by administrative action before Brown v. Board of Education. The abstract:

Camping began in the nineteenth century as an elite form of pilgrimage to the wild, but the arrival of inexpensive automobiles in the early twentieth century greatly expanded camping's social diversity. The change was not universally embraced, especially when African Americans were involved, and the issue came to a head during the 1930s after two racially segregated national parks were opened in southern states. As complaints flowed in, William J. Trent, Jr., became adviser for Negro affairs to Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes. He had no special interest in the outdoors or national parks, but Trent championed increased African American access to the parks and an end to discrimination in them. NPS leadership resisted Trent's efforts until Secretary Ickes ordered them to create one nonsegregated demonstration area in Shenandoah National Park in 1939. The policy was extended to other areas in 1941 and the next year, with World War II shifting into high gear, campground and other forms of segregation were ended throughout the park system.

Shenandoah National Park (National Park Service)

The background to the Wilderness Act

The 50th anniversary of the US Wilderness Act of 1964 continues to spark interest. H-Environment recently posted a review by Sarah Mittlefehldt of The Wilderness Writings of Howard Zahniser, edited by Mark Harvey (Univeristy of Washington Press, 2014). Mittlefehldt writes:

These carefully selected writings demonstrate the power of the written word to turn ideals into policy, and ultimately, to turn policy into protected landscapes. Zahniser’s prophetic devotion to wilderness and his strong, skillful prose helped to codify a lofty vision and to successfully navigate a complicated political arena. These linguistic and political acrobatics ultimately yielded the 1964 Wilderness Act, the country’s strongest legal mechanism for protecting wild places.

*****

Several environmental historians have recently explored the impact that public designation has had on people who worked or lived in protected areas like national parks and federal wilderness areas, and although Harvey includes passages in which Zahniser spoke about the need for federal control, one wonders if he had  more to say about the local politics of wilderness designation. From the selections, it is clear that Zahniser believed that local and state officials were more vulnerable to the forces that threatened wilderness, and he frequently invoked the utilitarian language of wilderness being for all to enjoy—including both present and future generations. But what about those who lived in or near protected areas? Although the style and spirit of Zahniser’s writing often echoed that of civil rights advocates in the 1950s and ‘60s (perhaps a reflection of his upbringing as the son and nephew of Free Methodist ministers), his attitudes and thoughts about social justice issues, specifically in regard to federally designated wilderness areas, are left unexplored. Perhaps that is terrain for some future historian.