Environmental Injustice

How green ideology denies poor blacks good jobs

Henry Payne from the August/September 1997 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Enterprise zone aside, one need only listen to CANT activist Tony Johnson to understand the shallowness of the environmental racism charge. When asked if any white communities are affected by the plant, Johnson, who sells homes along Lake Claiborne just five miles south of the site, admits he is concerned "that my [white] lakefront estate clients would see their property values plummet." Why? Because, explains Johnson, "the plant's wastewater would irradiate the lake." This fear has no basis in fact: Treated after it's used as a cleaning agent, plant water contains 0.1 millirem a year of radioactivity, while the normal human dose of radioactivity from the earth alone is 360 millirems a year. More to the point, if CANT considers whites threatened, how is the plant's location discriminatory?

Activists are excited about the NRC board's decision because it sets a precedent not only for the nuclear industry but for the chemical industry as well. As the Sierra Club's Walker explains, "We see this [directive] being used to block any toxic waste facility that requires federal approval." She casts a wide net. In the United States, "toxic waste" industries are big employers. Fortune 500 behemoths like Monsanto and Union Carbide operate chemical plants that employ thousands of Americans, as do oil refineries, incinerators, and other facilities targeted by the environmentalists. The Claiborne plant precedent will discourage those industries from opening new plants. They will at least be located far from black neighborhoods, and therefore far from blacks seeking jobs. At worst, they will not be located in the United States at all.

In 1994, Prof. Schoenbrod worried that Clinton's order would "significantly delay many environmental decisions and increase the cost of agencies making them." The Claiborne case has proved him right. And it raises another concern expressed by the NRC board itself: Clinton's executive order demands that regulatory agencies such as the NRC pass civil rights judgments they are ill-equipped to make. "Because this agency's primary responsibilities historically have dealt with technical concerns, investigating whether racial discrimination played a part in a facility siting decision is far afield from the [NRC] staff's past activities," the board wrote. "Indeed...this is an area in which the staff has little experience or expertise."

It is fashionable to speak of racial unity these days, but in Claiborne Parish, the enrichment facility promised something real. Howard Gordon, a Presbyterian minister in Homer for many years, wrote the NRC in 1993: "Racial tension invades everything in the parish. It is a small parish with the traditional southern residential integration of big white homes, surrounded by small black homes....The presence of [the enrichment facility] is one of the best solutions to the hereditary racism of Claiborne Parish. The plant will increase the value of property around it and the parish as a whole [and] will allow the people to rise above the racist and provincial control of the past. Ecologically the plant is not a threat. Economically the plant is a tremendous asset. Societally the plant is a dramatic change for the better." Yet 200 miles away in Baton Rouge, NAACP State President Daniel Wilson organized a June 21 rally to celebrate the NRC board's decision. "We're glad at what happened in Homer," he crows.

In appealing the board's ruling on May 27 (the NRC staff has also appealed), Louisiana Energy Services President Roland Jensen said, "It is clear that the regulatory process is broken when seven years of `streamlined' licensing [is] not sufficient to license a facility employing an advanced technology that has been used safely in three European countries." Citing Louisiana's efforts to attract the plant, Jensen concluded, "[L]eft standing, the decision is tantamount not only to canceling a project for cost-competitive enrichment services but also to further distancing low-income minority families from the mainstream of American commerce."

Emma Hilliard, one of many parish residents who accepted the consortium's invitation to visit Europe's enrichment facilities in 1990, was impressed by what she saw. "I spoke to people near the plant [in Gronau-Epe, Germany]," she says. "They were suspicious at first, but now they've seen how many jobs the plant brought. They are so glad it came." She is concerned that the Claiborne plant's troubles bode ill for her own county's economic future. "If the Claiborne plant goes down, what other company is going to try and locate here?" she asks. As the Minden Press-Herald in neighboring Webster Parish puts it, "We await the Sierra Club's $855 million job development plan for Claiborne Parish."

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