Dumping in Dixie

"In Dumping in Dixie , Robert Bullard—a sociologist, and a towering figure in the field—documents the emergence of the US environmental justice movement, born from the Civil Rights movement, its networks, organisations, and framing. Through the story of one community in particular, he explains how pollution and racism operate together, and through one another. Here’s the outline of the story Bullard tells: In the late 1970s, just after the US Congress had curbed the production of polychlorinated biphenyl , or PCB, and placed stricter rules around the handling of industrial waste, a small company illegally unloaded PCB-laced oils along state roads in North Carolina. Clean-up ensued, but then there was the problem of what to do with all that contaminated soil. Where should it go? That somewhere, following the official selection process, was a community in rural Warren County, North Carolina called Afton—a majority African American region of the state and where nearly a quarter of residents lived in poverty. Here, it was determined, a special landfill would be constructed to receive the PCBs. Residents resisted, laid their bodies in the road to block the trucks. These events are imperative to keep in living memory, and why this book also remains a must-read though first published in 1990. Warren County continues to organise around issues posed by the landfill that was eventually built. (Last year, The New Yorker ran an article last year on Warren County; a recent book also revisits the place). Dumping in Dixie sparked a new genre of books, and a rich area of social scientific research to unpack the social, political and economic processes that underly how industrial facilities and landfills are cited, and why —time and again— transit corridors, and heavy industry and their wastes are put nearer poor communities, and communities of colour. And though books bring much needed attention to these often-invisible issues, sadly, so do natural disasters. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The hurricane that struck Houston and the Gulf Coast of Texas in August 2017 made these unjust juxtapositions strikingly visible and all the more dangerous for those communities sharing fence lines with that region’s dense network of petrochemical facilities. Bullard, who lives in Houston, spoke eloquently in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey about how natural disasters “widen and exacerbate” existing environmental inequalities. As a result of storm-related shut-downs (and later restarts), factories there released pollutants in excess of their already problematic releases. And more, floodwaters inundated the region’s Superfund sites, those polluted sites deemed significant enough to warrant federal oversight by the US government. These are places engineered to ‘contain’ pollution, and yet, in some instances, the floodwaters exposed what those sites harboured as well as the conceit of containment in the first place. “Bullard, who lives in Houston, spoke eloquently in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey about how natural disasters “widen and exacerbate” existing environmental inequalities. ” Which brings me to one final point, which is that Dumping in Dixie raised up the twin legacies of pollution and the systems for handling it—how these systems beget harms of their own. Building on this, The Center for Investigative Reporting did a fascinating investigation on this a few years back, tracking the flow of wastes ‘cleaned up’ from Superfund sites. Following the post-industry, post-remediation trail of pollution goes right to the heart of the dilemmas we are discussing. What becomes of policies/systems that focus at the proverbial ‘end of the pipe’ rather than upstream and earlier in the industrial process? This is something David Pellow has written very well about in Resisting Global Toxics . Flooded Superfund and industrial sites are yet another striking example of the mobility and fluid legacy of pollution"