Environmental crises: What are the sources; who are the victims?

Scan page 8

Many social crisis or disaster is to be fought and resolved with The environmental crisis will be no 8 SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1992 Chevron Refinery In Richmond, (Part two of a series)

Following World War II, U.S. industrial expansion brought with it a vast increase in the generation of industrial wastes. Pollutants from smokestacks and effluent from outfall pipes were discharged, unchecked, in growing amounts into the environment.

The Cuyahoga River in Ohio, for example, contained so much oily waste that it caught fire. Thousands of new synthetic organic chemicals were introduced into the market place.

Episodes of damage to health and environment gave birth to the environmental movement. Examples were the Kepone pesticide tragedy at Hopewell, Va; contamination of the Hudson River by PCBs; and threats of stratospheric ozone depletion from fluorocarbon emissions.

Contamination of soil and groundwater by irresponsible hazardous waste-disposal practices was dramatized at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, N.Y.; at the infamous "Valley of the Drums" site in Kentucky; and at hundreds of other abandoned waste sites around the country. At Times Beach, Mo., scores of inhabitants had to abandon their homes due to the discovery of dioxin contamination in nearby roads after a flooding of the Meramec River.

A landmark United Nations Conference on the Environment took place at Stockholm in 1972. Reports were circulated predicting that industrial growth would come up against planetary limits. If world-wide production were not curbed soon, a global ecological collapse would occur in the mid-21st century.

Biggest polluter? The military As we read reports and statistics on pollution, it is important to bear a few things in mind. First, the biggest polluter on the earth is probably the war industry. This includes the military bases themselves as well as all of the generates hundreds in a class context. environmental crisis exception."

military contractors. Virtually every military base in the United States is a Superfund site. This means that they are among the 1200 or more most dangerously polluted sites in the country, which require long-term restoration.

The reason is because when you're in the destruction business, you have to store and use huge quantities of toxic chemicals. And since the destruction business implies a complete disregard for health and environment, the military has long employed practices like hosing down equipment with volatile organic solvents. Tons of these carcinogens have made their way into soil and groundwater, and pose a threat for generations to come.

Now, with many bases potentially slated for closure, who will pay for the cleanup? These hot-potatoes are being unloaded onto cities and counties, who undoubtedly will be hard-pressed to pay for remediation.

An example, in the San Francisco Bay Area, is Hunters Point, a Superfund site which the Defense Department wants to lease to the city. This is to say nothing of Moffitt Field, which will be tossed to NASA; or the Presidio, which will be unloaded onto the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

It is also important to remember that the military industry serves as a conduit for money to flow from workers' wages in the form of taxes, to highly profitable contractors-truly an example of welfare for the rich.

These contractors own facilities that are on the Superfund list of hazardous waste sites. The 10 largest military contractors alone have been cited for Superfund liability 221 times. These world-class corporate polluters include the likes of Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, Raytheon, General Electric, Westinghouse, McDonnell Douglas, and Aerojet General Corp.

Bailouts and cover-ups

Recently, after Lockheed negotiated a multi-million dollar settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cleanup one of their sites, a scandal surfaced. It was discovered that the DoD had agreed to reimburse Lockheed for their costs before the negotiations had even begun.

A similar bailout of AeroJet General, in Rancho Cordova, Calif., was reported. According to The Wall Street Journal, Aerojet's internal documents showed "that the company for 23 years poured toxic chemicals into unlined settling ponds at the rocket engine plant. The runoff, laced with such chemicals as trichloroethylene and ammonium perchlorate, percolated into underground water and made its way into nearby drinking water wells and the American River... The chemicals penetrated the site so thoroughly that fumes coming from the soil killed a plumber working in a trench near the settling ponds in 1957."

The Wall Street Journal article documents how Aerojet tried to cover their tracks-and their costs:

"Aerojet's ground-water tests indicated the pollution was spreading, but the company didn't report the findings to the you [California Regional Water Control] Board for years... When the cleanup bills for Rancho Cordova began coming in, Aerojet passed them on to the Dept. of Defense. In 1990, the Pentagon approved initial payments of $36.5 million for cleaning the site. The company has filed a claim for an additional $13 million...and it will request still more as cleanup costs rise."

A pattern emerged. It was revealed that DoD had indemnified their contractors, and was quietly reimbursing all of them, out of public tax dollars, for environmental cleanup costs. This policy of DoD would make the federal government a key underwriter of cleanups that are supposed to be financed by the polluters themselves.

The magnitude of the payout could exceed $1 billion, according to the General Accounting Office as reported in the Los Angeles Times. Once again, workers wages in the form of tax dollars are bailing out the large corporations.

There is another point to bear in mind when discussing the environmental crisis: For more than half of the world, the environmental crisis is not only a longterm struggle to save the planet for future generations, but a short-term struggle for survival now.

Contamination of food and water supplies, dangerous as it is, pales in significance for the poorest of the earth, who have limited access to them in the first place.

Over 500 million people are hungry, with 40 million dying of hunger and related diseases every year. Over 1.3 billion have no reliable source of clean drinking water and 23 million die from lack of drinkable water each year. Nearly 2.3 billion live without proper sanitation, and 40 million die from curable diseases each year; 1.7 billion live without a regular supply of electricity, etc.

Are we all in the same boat?

A third very important point is to debunk the myth that "we are all in the same boat together" when it comes to environmental crises.

The rulers and their media attempt to present the environmental crisis as an undifferentiated "human" crisis, affecting us all, owners and workers, equally.

Anyone who believes this would do well to remember the lesson of the sinking Titanic. Here, the question of which passengers would get into the lifeboats was decisively resolved: 75 percent of first-class passengers survived, and the same percentage of third-class passengers drowned.

In fact, any social crisis or disaster is bound to be fought and resolved within a class context. The environmental crisis will be no exception.

The Club of Rome, an international policy research group, published landmark reports on the environment in 1972 and 1974.

1 already mentioned the earlier report, which predicted that ecological catastrophe would be worldwide. But the 1974 report took a closer look and indicated the opposite. It differentiated developed capitalist regions from exploited regions. It concluded that the richest

Scan page 9

Richmond, Calif., residents marching on Chevron during March 14, 1992, protest.

"Each year, Richmond-area

Idustry generates 800,000 contaminants; nearly 18,000 pounds of toxic pollutants in aste water; and about 179,00 tons of hazardous waste."

SOCIALIST ACTION NOVEMBER 1992 9 countries, unlike the poorer ones, would forestall collapse by spending money to correct their most acute environmental problems.

The report predicted that the first region in the world to experience ecological collapse would be South-East Asia, including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. As a result, some of these countries would experience massive famines around the year 2025. How has Uu KE0M De T.гОy thм Environment ODIe MONT COVLKUE rppn...

Calif., residents marchi this prediction of environmental disparity been borne out in practice?

U.S. corporations put their most dangerously polluting industries in less developed countries where local capitalists and governments administer few environmental restraints. These governments often enforce submission to corporate interests in a brutal fashion.

A good example is the relocation of almost 2000 American factories to Mexico. Here they exploit Mexican labor, mainly young women, and then re-export assembled goods to the U.S. without paying taxes. These maquiladores are highly profitable, being based on the twin conditions of low wages and lack of environmental regulation.

Domingo Gonzalez is a labor organizer and grass-roots activist who works for the Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladores. In an interview in Image magazine, he said that, "what we have here are American corporations that come and want to pay low wages and not spend money on infrastructure that protects the environment."

The city of Matamoros has 93 of these maquiladores, employing 36,000 workers. Because conditions are crowded, with no running water, sewage facilities, or paved roads, Matamoros has been termed "a virtual cesspool" by the American Medical Association. Huge quantities of toxics are released to the environment, (rivers, land, and air) as part of daily business.

In the last few years in this region, on both sides of the border, there has also been a notably higher number of anencephalic births. This means babies born without brains who die within a few days. Despite an inconclusive study by the state and federal government, environmentalists are understandably suspicious and fearful of the health effects of the toxics spewing into their environment for the sake of American profits.

Dr. Margaret Diaz, an occupational health specialist in Brownsville, Texas, who first noticed the cluster of anencephalic births, concludes that "these were atrocities committed by two governments. They are the products of years of neglect."

Environmental racism

What about here in the U.S.? Are rich and poor alike "in the same boat"? Environmentalists are increasingly documenting the uneven distribution of health risk by race, and have dubbed this phenomenon "Environmental Racism."

TEYRON WITU In 1987, a study by the United Church of Christ found that hazardous waste sites (like landfills and incinerators) were located in minority communities; that is communities with a large percentage of Black and Hispanic residents. The report found that three out of five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in communities with properties contaminated by hazardous wastes.

A graphic example is the community of Richmond in the San Francisco Bay Area. A report by Citizens For A Better Environment looked at the immediate periphery of an industrial area where 350 facilities handle at least 210 different hazardous chemicals.

They found that the area is made up of neighborhoods that are 72-94 percent Black. In some neighborhoods, there are also large numbers of Hispanics. And in this area, 20 to 58 percent of families live below the official poverty line.

Each year, Richmond-area industry generates 800,000 pounds of toxic air contaminants; nearly 18,000 pounds of toxic pollutants in waste water; and about 179,000 tons of hazardous waste.

The largest industrial polluters include: the Chevron oil refinery, the Chevron pesticide plant, the Chevron fertilizer plant, the Chevron Research center, and many other chemical manufacturers and petrochemical processors.

You remember who Chevron is: they're the "farmers" down the road in the Central Valley, benefiting from the state water projects. [See October 1992 issue of Socialist Action.] Furthermore, these goliaths of profit-making have not wasted their stockholders earnings on extra safety precautions. Since November 1991, there have been eight accidents at the Chevron refinery alone. DONT St. pounds of toxic air The most recent accident was on June 23, 1992. A toxic plume of smoke was released because a new boiler water pump was installed without being fully tested.

Despite the fact that Chevron promised community groups that they would increase safety inspections, they have refused to pay for an independent health and safety inspector demanded by the community. They have also refused nearly 8000 claims by Richmond residents complaining of breathing difficulties, vomiting, and skin rashes.

This accident occurred only one day after the Rhone-Poulenc Chemical Co. in nearby Martinez spilled 80,000 gallons of sulphuric acid, setting off a fire that killed one worker and critically injured another.

(As the result of a just-concluded Cal OSHA investigation of the fatal fire, Rhone-Poulenc was fined $560,000 for numerous violations of worker safety regulations. The proposed fine, which may be appealed by the company, is the largest levy ever imposed in California history.)

According to the same report by Citizens for a Better Environment, between 39 and 94 million pounds of extremely hazardous substances are in storage at any given time in the Richmond area. These chemicals are classified as extremely hazardous because if they are accidentally released they pose an immediate danger to the life and health of workers and nearby residents.

Sitting on a time bomb Twelve of the hazardous chemicals in use in Richmond are more deadly than methyl isocyanate (MIC), the chemical released by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, which killed nearly 3000 people and injured tens of thousands more. The risk of earthquakes in the Bay Area compounds the threat and the immensity of the danger to local residents.

Similar scenarios to the one in Richmond appear in other California communities, like South Central Los Angeles, East Los Angeles, Kettleman City, Westmoreland and Bakersfield. These are all lower income areas with a high percentage of Black or Hispanic residents who have been involved in public protests against pollution.

While it is commendable that environmental activists have pointed out the unequal risk that minorities bear, they could take another step forward in agitating around the problem by positioning it in context.

Being at higher risk due to environmental hazards is an injury added to many other injuries. Environmental racism is only one part of an overall system of racism. Capitalism has long required and benefited from vast armies of superexploited workers such as racial minorities.

Unequal access to jobs has brought poverty and inequitable access to housing. This is why so many minorities are forced to live in more dangerous, though no less costly areas.

Only by linking environmental justice to economic justice can we adequately explain the problem and its solution. Unfortunately, neither environmental nor economic justice are attainable under capitalism.

Victimizing farmworkers

Another risk from toxic chemical usage that is borne disproportionately by minority workers is due to pesticides.

The farmworkers in the United States have long been protesting against the use of pesticides on food crops. They have spoken out on this issue as a workers' issue, and one that especially effects their children.

Growers routinely ignore chemical warnings by sending farmworkers into fields too soon after spraying. In some areas, the workers are even in the fields while they are being sprayed.

In a 1989 tragedy, scores of farmworkers were hospitalized after being sent into a Florida cauliflower field right after it was sprayed. Because the workers toil long hours for low wages, women often work in the fields straight through their pregnancies. Many of these pesticides, which are readily absorbed through the skin, are also absorbed through the placenta as well.

The greedy practices of the growers, in pursuit of ever more profits regardless of health and safety, has resulted in illnesses and cancers for farmworkers, and birth defects among their children.

The government has offered protection-not to the farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented and disenfranchised-but to the growers, through "benign" neglect. A very modest "right to know" type of pesticide regulation languished within EPA for 12 years before it was finally passed just recently.

So we are not all "in the same boat" when it comes to suffering the consequences of hazardous waste and environmental damage. The crises are largely caused by the naked pursuit of profit by the capitalists. They have not burdened themselves with the expense of caring for human health and the environment.

The risks, the damage, and the consequences, are borne disproportionately by workers, with the poorest and most oppressed suffering the most.

(To be continued)

Scan page 10

movements overnight. They were able to

----- pull-quotes -----

HEVRON STOP