Minorities suffer most from industrial pollution

Seeing the clues
Mrs. Brown was interviewed at the home she purchased seven years ago on a tree-lined street neighborhood south of the plant, where the health risk from industrial pollution is one-fifth the level in Altgeld Gardens.

She said she never considered pollution the culprit in her son’s asthma, even after she left the neighborhood. It was only after she moved back into her mother’s home for several years that she began to realize how widespread breathing problems were in Altgeld Gardens. Two children who lived next door had asthma, and one used a breathing machine as many as three times a day, she said.

“You see things happening and then you say let me start investigating,” she said. “I found out a lot of people either had bronchitis or some kind of respiratory problem. Someone in each household seemed to have a respiratory problem.”

In Louisville, Ky., Renee Murphy blames smokestack emissions in the “Rubbertown” industrial strip near her home for the asthma attacks that trouble her five children. Her neighborhood, which is 96 percent black, ranks among the nation’s highest in risk from factory pollution.

“It’s hard to watch your children gasp for breath,” she said.

The Murphy family lives just a few blocks from Zeon Chemicals, which released more than 25,000 pounds of a chemical called acrylonitrile into the air during 2000. The chemical is suspected of causing cancer, and the government has determined it is much more toxic to children than adults.

Tom Herman, corporate environmental manager at Zeon, said the plant is reducing its emissions and is talking with area residents concerned about air quality to show that “there are real people working here concerned for them as well as our own health.”

Malcolm Wright, 43, operates power washing equipment in Camden, N.J., where several neighborhoods also rank among the worst nationally. He said he developed asthma after moving to the city in his early 30s, and he blames the city’s air pollution for attacks that sent him to the hospital four times last year.

Air pollution “works with many other factors, genetics and environment, to heighten one’s risk of developing asthma and chronic lung disease, and if you have it, it will make it worse,” said Dr. John Brofman, director of respiratory intensive care at MacNeal Hospital in the suburban Chicago town of Berwyn.

“Evidence suggests that not only do people get hospitalized but they die at higher rates in areas with significant air pollution,” he said.

Little change even after 1980s studies
Repeated studies during the 1980s and 1990s found that blacks and poor people were far more likely than whites to live near hazardous waste disposal sites, polluting power plants or industrial parks. The disparities were blamed on a lack of political clout by minorities to influence land use decisions in their neighborhoods.

The studies brought charges of racism. Clinton responded in 1993 by issuing an “environmental justice” order requiring federal agencies to ensure that minorities and poor people aren’t exposed to more pollution and other environmental dangers than other Americans.

Recent reports suggest little has changed:

• The Government Accountability Office concluded earlier this year that EPA devoted little attention to environmental equality when it developed three major rules to implement the Clean Air Act between 2000 and 2004.
• The EPA’s inspector general reported last year that the agency hadn’t implemented Clinton’s order nor “consistently integrated environmental justice into its day-to-day operations.” The watchdog said EPA had not identified minority and low income groups nor developed any criteria to determine if those groups were bearing more than their share of health risks from environmental hazards.
• The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded two years ago after an investigation that “federal agencies still have neither fully incorporated environmental justice into their core missions nor established accountability and performance outcomes for programs and activities.”

EPA Assistant Administrator Granta Nakayama disputed those reports, saying the agency has been choosing its enforcement initiatives to maximize the impact on minority and poor communities.

Obstacles to change
Environmental experts say most pollution inequities result from historical land use decisions and local development policies. Also, regulators too often focus on one plant or one pollutant without regard to the cumulative impact, they say.

Short of government action, citizens in high-risk neighborhoods have little legal recourse. They can file lawsuits under the 1964 Civil Rights Act but must prove intentional discrimination, a difficult burden.

And while some federal agencies have rules that ban environmental practices that result in discrimination, the Supreme Court has said private citizens can’t file lawsuits to enforce those rules.

Citizen complaints to EPA have had little effect. From 1993 through last summer, the agency received 164 complaints alleging civil rights violations in environmental decisions and accepted 47 for investigation. Twenty-eight of the 47 later were dismissed; 19 are pending.

“There is no level playing field,” said Robert Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. “Any time our society says that a powerful chemical company has the same right as a low income family that’s living next door, that playing field is not level, is not fair.”

Wednesday: The health consequences of heavily polluted communities
Thursday: The obstacles to getting government, business to clean up

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