ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE KILLS JOBS FOR THE POOR
September 16, 1997
by Henry Payne
Copyright 1997 The Wall Street Journal

In delaying approval of a southern Louisiana plastics plant Sept. 10, Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Carol Browner sounded properly compassionate. "It is essential the minority and low-income communities not be disproportionately subjected to environmental hazards," she wrote in her decision frustrating Shintech, Inc.'s proposed $700 million manufacturing facility outside Convent, La.

The ruling was the EPA's first regarding "environmental injustice," an issue promoted by environmentalists in and outside of the Clinton administration who claim industries locate in minority areas because their residents are politically powerless to stop corporate polluters.

But one need only speak to local black residents to realize that the injustice is being perpetrated not by industry, but by environmental elitists and their political allies who falsely claim to represent local citizens while forwarding their own ideological agenda. In Convent, Browner and Co. look less like heavenly angels than circling vultures.

"None of these people are speaking for our community," says Carol Gaudin, a black resident of Convent and the organizer of a local, pro-Shintech group, the St. James Citizen Coalition. "These environmental groups never came here and asked me if I wanted the plant. They can't just come in here and take it from us."

Gladys Maddie, a black mother who lives within a mile of the plant's proposed location, agrees. "We have witnessed groups such as Greenpeace descend on (Convent) like a plague of locusts," she wrote to the local newspaper. "These people . . . have become modern-day abolitionists _ anointing themselves our champions and protectors. We find the exploitative use of the color of our skin and our socio-economic condition sickening and insulting."

A recent poll by the local NAACP chapter found that 73 percent of the people in the black communities near the proposed plant favor it. And polls of surrounding St. James Parish, host to a number of chemical industries along the Mississippi River, show solid support for the new facility.

But the Clinton administration has turned a deaf ear to the people of St. James, choosing instead to listen to the radical environmental group Greenpeace.

In its long war against the plastics industry, Greenpeace has enlisted both the EPA and Vice President Gore. Chlorine-based polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics, like those that would be manufactured in Convent, find uses in consumer and construction products like charge cards, computer keyboards, piping, and vinyl siding. Greenpeace claims that chlorine and its industrial byproduct, dioxin, can cause endocrine disruption and cancer in humans.

The EPA has been sympathetic to this view, and Gore himself wrote the forward to "Our Stolen Future," an apocolyptic 1996 book warning that synthetic chemicals pose a threat to human reproduction and development. But recent scientific studies have discounted the "endocrine disrupter" theory, and scientists have never established a dioxin link to cancer.

Though environmentalists have won tight regulation of these substances by Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality (charged by the EPA to regulate state industry), activists no longer seem to view the regulatory process as a means to ensure safe industries; they want a process rigged to kill them. When the LDEQ found that Shintech satisfied demanding emissions standards, the ruling hardly sent environmentalists into a Mardis Gras mood. Instead, they determined to find new means to stop the plant.

They found one in a President Clinton's 1994 executive order on environmental injustice, which compels federal agencies to consider whether minorities bear an unfair burden in the location of industrial facilities.

In Convent, the charge of environmental racism is laughable.

The plant's location near other chemical plants on the Mississippi River, with access to railroads and a salt dome necessary for chlorine production, is an obvious site for a plastics facility.

Shintech already operates the world's largest PVC plant in Freeport, Texas. Like the St. James area, Freeport is a major chemical manufacturing center; unlike St. James, it is overwhelmingly white _ and prosperous. When Convent residents like Gladys Maddie and Carol Gaudlin visited Freeport this year, they saw a standard of living they'd like to bring home.

Environmental injustice? Louisana has actually practiced economic affirmative action in Convent by declaring the area a state enterprise zone. Under that program, Shintech was encouraged to locate in Convent with tax breaks in return for hiring 35 percent of its workforce from the surrounding population.

Blacks in the poor Freetown community have worked closely with Shintech to make sure those jobs materialize. "They've made us a promise, and we believe them," says Gaudin.

Maddie's brother does back-breaking, seasonal labor in Convent's sugar cane fields for $6 an hour. To him, Shintech's more stable $12-$15 an hour jobs look like an opportunity, not an injustice.

Freetown's people already face environmental hazards. For years, they have accepted the health risks that attend the sugar cane crop: fields sprayed with insecticides and the resulting runoff that pollutes local water. And they accept the pollution that would come from Shintech. Neither choice is a garden path. But they think industrial manufacturing is their key to a better future.

"The big plants up the river came in and gave those communities opportunities," says Nanette Jeaulevette, a black lawyer representing Convent's residents. "My clients want the same opportunity."

Forty-five miles away, the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic represents plant opponents before the EPA. When asked what job development alternatives remain for the citizens of Convent have if her side wins, Tulane lawyer Lisa Lavie says "that area has some beautiful old plantations. They could build a cultural tourism industry."

"That's horrible!" Carol Gaudin gasps. "My ancestors were slaves on those plantations. These white opponents don't understand _ we don't want to remember our past. We want a new future."

Like every state, Louisiana is adapting to a new era of welfare work rules, and the poor in Convent hope the Shintech plant is their way out. But by delaying Shintech's construction in the absence of a substantial alternative, the administration threatens to sabotage its own welfare reform there.

Aligned against media-savvy, full-time environmentalists and their Washington allies, Convent residents know they have an uphill battle. Their climb has not been aided by national black leadership.

Lobbied by Greenpeace, both Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Joseph Lowry of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke out against the plant this summer.

"They blatantly ignored the opinions of all the local elected African-American officials," said an outraged Jeaulevette, noting that Convent's councilmen all voted in favor of the plant's location, but were never contacted by Jackson or Lowry.

True, the EPA's Sept. 10 request for further study mildly disappointed environmentalists. They had hoped for a firm definition of environmental racism that would set a plant-killing precedent for other such cases. Yet the resulting delay is a victory for opponents. Throw up enough red-tape roadblocks, activists hope, and Shintech will eventually move on.
Sadly, this strategy works.

In Claiborne Parish, La., where the federal Atomic Energy Board held up construction of a $850 million nuclear fuel enrichment facility this May on grounds of environmental injustice, one investor _ Northern States Power _ will pull out after a seven-year-long (and counting) regulatory process. "At some point these companies just throw up their hands in frustration," sighs Mary Boyd, a spokeswoman for the Claiborne facility.

For the residents of Convent, who salivate at the 165 jobs and $5.6 million in school revenue that the Shintech plant will bring, the idea of delay is puzzling. "Why do these people want to take away our jobs?" asks Gladys Maddie. "If we run Shintech away, we're finished."