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Houston's population, 82 percent of the solid waste sites (public and private) were located in African American neighborhoods.

African American neighborhoods from South Central Los Angeles to Southeast-side Chicago to Rahway, New Jersey, are vulnerable to waste facility siting. As recently as 1991, Residents Involved in Saving the Environment, or RISE (a biracial community group), challenged the King and Queen County (Virginia) board of supervisors for selecting a 420-acre site in a mostly African American community for a regional landfill. From 1969 to 1990, all three of the county-run landfills had been located in mostly African American communities.

Siting inequities are not unique to facilities where household garbage is dumped. The findings I recently published in Dumping in Dixie revealed that African Americans bear a disparate burden in the siting of hazardous waste landfills and incinerators in South Louisiana's "Cancer Alley" and Alabama's "blackbelt." The nation's largest commercial hazardous waste landfill, the "Cadillac of dumps," is located in Emelle, Alabama. African Americans. make up 90 percent of Emelle's population and 75 percent of the residents in Sumter County. The Emelle landfill receives wastes from Superfund sites and from all 48 contiguous states.

Few government studies have examined siting inequities. A notable exception is a 1983 U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) study. GAO found four off-site commercial hazardous waste landfills in EPA's Region 4 (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee). Three of the four landfills were located in mostly African American communities, although African Americans made up only one-fifth of the population in the region.

Siting inequities in EPA's Region 4 have not disappeared. In 1992, African Americans still make up about one-fifth of the population in the region. However, the region's two currently operating off-site commercial

hazardous waste landfills are located

in zip codes where African Americans are a majority of the population. For

The Issue

those who would dismiss this pattern

as a function of social class, it is important to note that there has never been a shortage of poor white communities in Region 4 (not that anyone is advocating siting waste facilities in low-income white areas).

Siting disparities are not unique to African American communities. In California, the mostly Latino East Los Angeles and Kettleman City have come under siege from companies trying to site hazardous waste incinerators. Kettleman City, a rural farmworker community of perhaps 1,500 residents, of which 95 percent are Latino, already has a hazardous waste landfill. With the aid of the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, local residents have contested the construction of the hazardous waste incinerator. (See article on page 47).

Siting inequities are national in scope. The Commission for Racial Justice's landmark Toxic Wastes and Race study found race to be the single most important factor (i.e., more important than income, home ownership rate, and property values) in the location of abandoned toxic waste sites. The 1987 study also found that:

Three out of five African Americans live in communities with abandoned toxic waste sites

Sixty percent of African Americans (15 million) live in communities with one or more abandoned toxic waste sites

Three of the five largest commercial hazardous waste landfills are located in predominately African American or Latino communities and account for 40 percent of the nation's total estimated landfill capacity in 1986

African Americans are heavily overrepresented in the population of cities with the largest number of abandoned toxic waste sites, which include Memphis, St. Louis, Houston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Atlanta.

Communities with hazardous waste incinerators generally have large minority populations, low incomes, and low property values. A 1990 Greenpeace report, Playing with Fire, confirmed what many environmental justice activists had suspected all along:

The minority portion of the population in communities with existing incinerators is 89 percent higher than the national average

Communities where incinerators are proposed have minority populations 60 percent higher than the national average

Average income in communities with existing incinerators is 15 percent less than the national average

Property values in communities that host incinerators are 38 percent lower than the national average

In communities where incinerators are proposed, average property values are 35 percent lower than the national average.

Native American lands have become prime targets for waste disposal proposals. More than three dozen reservations have been targeted for landfills and incinerators. Because of the special quasi-sovereign status of Indian nations, companies have attempted to skirt state regulations. In 1991, the Choctaws in Philadelphia, Mississippi, defeated a plan to locate a 466-acre hazardous waste landfill in their midst. In the same year, a Connecticut company proposed to build a 6,000-acre municipal landfill on the Rosebud reservation in South Dakota-a project dubbed "Dances with Garbage." The Good Road Coalition, an alliance of grass-roots groups, blocked the proposal to build the giant municipal landfill on Sioux lands.

A new form of environmental activism has emerged in communities. of color. Activists have begun to challenge discriminatory facility siting, biased local land-use policies, illegal redlining practices, housing discrimination, and other problems that threaten public safety. People of color have formed groups and begun to build a national movement against what they defined as environmental injustice. A national policy is needed. to begin addressing environmental inequities.

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World Resources Institute estimates that
313,000 farm workers in the United States
suffer from pesticide-related illnesses each
year.

By EPA's own estimate, each year U.S.
farmers use about 1.2 billion pounds of
pesticides at an expenditure of $4.6
billion. More than 600 active
ingredients are combined with other
ingredients to form approximately
35,000 different commercial
formulations. Yet, full evaluation of
their hazards lags far behind the
development of new products. Less
than 10 percent of the products in
current use have been fully tested for
potential health effects; of the 600
active ingredients in these products,

Copyright John W. Emmons.

EPA was recently able to provide full safety assurance for only six.

Those who suffer most directly from the chemical dependency of U.S. agriculture are farm workers, who are working in the fields while some of the most toxic substances known to humans are sprayed. The World Resources Institute has estimated that as many as 313,000 farm workers in the United States may suffer from pesticide-related illnesses each year. Another source estimates that 800 to 1,000 farm workers die each year as a direct consequence of pesticide exposure.

Ninety percent of the approximately two million hired farm workers in the United States are people of color: The

majority are Chicanos, followed by Puerto Ricans, Caribbean blacks, and African Americans. This primarily minority population has among the least protected jobs of all workers. Farm workers are intentionally excluded from the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), which governs health and safety standards in the workplace; from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which governs minimum wages and child labor; and most importantly, from the National Labor Relations Act, which guarantees the right to join a union and bargain collectively.

The exclusion of farm workers from OSHA regulations has particular relevance to the pesticide issue. Under OSHA's principles of environmental hygiene, when workers are exposed to a toxic substance in the workplace the priority course of action is to eliminate the substance from the workplace altogether or to replace it with a non-toxic or less toxic substitute. If this is impossible, the option next in priority is to separate the workers from the toxic substance. The last option usually involves provisioning workers with some protective measures (e.g., protective clothing, masks, glasses, etc.).

Not being covered by OSHA, and therefore not able to legally petition the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, farm workers are forced to petition EPA, which is the agency in charge of regulating pesticides. But such petitioning offers few formal legal remedies, leaving farm workers virtually unprotected against pesticide hazards. Under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, which is intended to regulate pesticide use, "re-entry" times (the interval that must elapse between the application of a pesticide and workers' re-entry into the fields) have been set for just 12 pesticides. Moreover, there is no provision to assure that these regulations specifying re-entry times of either 24 or 48 hours are enforced.

In fact, it is not uncommon to see farmers spraying while workers are in the field. A study conducted by the Florida Rural Legal Service in 1980 reported that 48 percent of more than 400 farm workers interviewed had been sprayed at least once while harvesting. Seventy-five percent of the

The Issue

workers surveyed said they had experienced one or more symptoms of pesticide poisoning while at work. In addition, many growers do not provide workers with protective masks or gloves and do not inform workers when and what chemicals are being used.

Furthermore, evidence indicates that for some acutely toxic pesticides, extant protective measures are ineffective. A case in point is the deadly pesticide ethyl parathion, a leading cause of farm worker poisoning in the United States and worldwide. In 1986, EPA found that parathion caused poisoning among all categories of workers who came in contact with it. In addition, EPA admitted that parathion was associated with unacceptable risks to farm workers and that poisonings occurred even under the most stringent protective conditions. In other words, little or no margin of safety exists for parathion use. Nevertheless, it is still legally used on nine major crops in the United States.

Parathion is only one of many acutely toxic pesticides belonging to the organophosphate family. These pesticides came into wide use approximately 20 years ago, when environmental awareness called for limitations on persistent pesticides that were contaminating the environment and damaging wildlife. Many of the persistent pesticides belong to the organochloride family and have been associated with chronic health effects, including cancer, reproductive malfunctions, birth defects, and a broad range of developmental and behavioral growth problems. The organophosphates, on the other hand, degrade much faster and therefore reduced the risk for wildlife and for consumers.

However, for farm workers the switch from organochlorines to organophosphates meant exposure to more acutely toxic pesticides, since many of these rapidly degradable pesticides (parathion is one of them) are characterized by acute toxicity, which can cause dizziness; vomiting; irritation of the eye, upper respiratory tract, and skin; and death. There is an irony here that has not escaped the attention of farm workers: The new wave of environmental consciousness, which forced welcome changes in

production technologies, may have actually made things more precarious for farm workers, substituting acute symptoms for chronic ones.

In the past, the EPA has operated under the assumption that these chemicals are essential for high productivity in U.S. agriculture. This notion was recently challenged by a 1989 report of the National Research Council, which concluded that low input agriculture was not significantly less productive than chemically intensive agriculture. As noted in this report, pesticides are not the only option for pest control. Integrated Pest Management, for example, is a strategy that combines alternative methods of pest control (including biological and cultural controls) to achieve a significant reduction in chemical pesticide applications.

Public awareness of these issues is burgeoning, and, consequentially, pressure on agencies like EPA is likely to intensify. Farm workers, the vast majority of whom are people of color, are building their consciousness and are taking their place alongside industrial workers in demanding a safe workplace. Environmentalists, heeding the call for environmental justice, are being challenged not to stand by and allow environmental policies that solve problems for some, yet leave others at risk-and they are responding. Consumers, while insisting on safe produce, are increasingly unwilling to allow others to be poisoned in their stead.

All this is occurring in the context of new revelations that chemical pesticides have not been all that successful in the first place and that alternatives are already available which could lead to a new agriculture. Such an agriculture-call it sustainable or ecological or low input or simply rational-is now on the horizon. The time seems ripe to reject the anachronistic notion that chemical poisons must be part and parcel of modern agriculture and redefine the meaning of "modern" to include the health and safety of farm workers, farmers, consumers, and the environment.

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The

Inter-Tribal Fisheries and Assessment Program photo.

here is concern that Native Americans may consume much greater amounts of Great Lakes fish than the general population and hence be at greater risk for dietary exposure to toxic chemicals.

To date, most studies of fish consumption have looked at licensed sport fishermen; they inadvertently exclude reservation-based Indian subsistence fishermen, who, by treaty rights, are not required to obtain state fishing licenses. The few studies that have been completed so far provide only indirect evidence that Michigan Great Lakes reservation Indians may

(Dr. West is Associate Professor of Natural Resource/Environmental Sociology and Samuel T. Dana Professor of Outdoor Recreation at the School of Natural Resources, University of Michigan.)

have disproportionally high fish consumption levels.

One study of a traditionally oriented subsistence tribe in Alaska indicates high levels of fish consumption; and a fine study of the Grassy Narrows band of Ojibwa in Ontario, Canada, indicates that they were exposed through fish consumption to higher levels of mercury from a spill than was the surrounding white community. However, there is scant evidence on the fish consumption patterns of Native Americans in the lower 48 states, and the applicability of these northern-tribe studies to southern tribes could be questionable.

Not all tribes may be as traditionally resource based as the Alaska and Ontario tribes studied, and certainly not all are fishery based. The Blackfeet in Montana, for example, traditionally refuse to eat fish. But others, such as

certain Northwest tribes, and Michigan and other Great Lakes based tribes, have a long cultural tradition of fishing-based economies similar to the tribes discussed above. For these tribes, we might expect higher than average fish consumption.

The Michigan Great Lakes tribes of the Bay Mills, Grand Traverse, and Sault Ste. Marie bands of Chippewa all have a long and well documented fishing culture. When they ceded the lands of Michigan in the Treaty of

1836, they carefully reserved their most important resource, the Great Lakes fishery. (These rights were recently upheld by the courts.)

With this resource so highly valued both culturally and economically by these tribes, we would expect to find high levels of fish

consumption-especially on the Bay Mills reservation, where high levels of poverty prevail and subsistence small-skiff fishermen are common. Even for the commercial fishing sector of the economy, it has been well established that much extra fish is distributed among crew members for subsistence consumption (as part of labor compensation) and as part of cultural ritual and tradition.

In addition to these historical and cultural indicators, we have evidence that off-reservation Native Americans in Michigan consume more than whites or than other minorities. Off-reservation Indians do need state fishing licenses, and in our recent statewide survey of consumption by Michigan sport fishermen, we picked up a significant subsample of off-reservation Native Americans. The sample was spread over 18 randomly drawn cohorts, from mid-January to early June 1988; respondents were asked to recall detailed fish-consumption patterns for the seven-day period prior to filling out the survey.

The current State of Michigan standard used to regulate point discharge of toxic chemicals into surface waters (Michigan Rule 1057) assumes a fish consumption rate of 6.5 grams/person/day. The formula is very complex. However, the important thing to emphasize here is that the greater the fish consumption assumed in the formula, the tighter the standard becomes in other words, the lower the levels are set for toxics permitted

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to be discharged by industrial and municipal drain pipes. If assumed consumption is too low, toxic emissions may be permitted that are a danger to public health.

In our study, the average consumption for the full sample was 18.3 grams/person/day, quite a bit higher than the 6.5 gram assumption currently used in Rule 1057. Further, when the sample was broken down by ethnic groups, non-reservation Native Americans consumed 24.3 grams/person/day compared to 20.3 grams/person/day for other minorities, and 17.9 grams/person/day for whites. In an analysis involving multiple variables, we found that middle-age Native Americans had the highest rates of consumption of all Native Americans, or 30.6 grams/person/day. We would expect on-reservation subsistence fish consumption to be even higher than these levels, especially on poorer reservations, such as Bay Mills, where poverty dictates subsistence fishing as a protein source that is also sanctioned by traditional culture. For all Great Lakes tribes with high fish consumption levels, there is strong reason for concern for the public health of the reservation. By way of illustration, studies have found a high correlation between high levels of consumption of Great Lakes fish and high levels of PCBs in the blood of the

consumers.

In sum, a great deal of concern is warranted for the health of Michigan Great Lakes Indians based on studies done elsewhere; based on our sport fish consumption study that includes. off-reservation Indians in Michigan; and based on studies tying high Great Lakes fish consumption with high toxic loads in the human body. However, direct studies of on-reservation fish consumption are badly needed for Great Lakes tribes as well as for those in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. A major study is about to get underway in the Pacific Northwest, and Michigan tribes have approached EPA about the need for studies on their reservations. These will be key studies not only for assessing the potential impact of fish consumption on the health of Great Lakes tribes but also in terms of protecting their Great Lakes fishing rights.

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t Argonne National Laboratory, scientists have been studying the relative potential for exposure of minority population groups to substandard outdoor air quality. The studies have focused on areas identified by EPA as failing to attain national ambient air quality standards. Under the Clean Air Act, EPA has established standards for ground-level ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, lead, and particulate matter and annually identifies areas having excess levels of these pollutants. These so-called "nonattainment" areas generally consist of counties of many square miles, and residents' exposure to air pollution surely varies depending on where individuals live and work within an area. Nevertheless, the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the population in these areas can imply differences in potential exposure to pollutants and may suggest directions. for research and remedial action. So

(Wernette is a sociologist and Nieves is an economist in the Environmental Assessment and Information Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory. The research described in this article has been supported under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Minority Economic Impact.)

far, scientists have examined these differences for African Americans, Hispanics, and whites (non-Hispanic). In the United States, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, higher percentages of both African Americans and Hispanics live in areas with reduced air quality than do whites. For instance, 52 percent of all whites live in counties with high ozone concentrations; for African Americans, the figure is 62 percent, and for Hispanics, 71 percent. Population group distributions were found to be similar for the other pollutants cited above.

These differences in potential exposure to pollutants may be due in part to minority population distributions across regions. Hispanics, for example, are more concentrated in the West, where there is a greater tendency than elsewhere for the population as a whole to be exposed to high levels of ozone. However, the different regional concentrations of population groups do not account for all of the differences in their potential exposure to reduced air quality. Not only are percentages of minorities living in substandard air quality areas higher for the country as a whole, but they are higher when the four U.S. census regions are considered separately.

For example, 50 percent of whites in the Northeast census region live in areas with excessive carbon monoxide. In contrast, 85 percent of northeastern African Americans and 88 percent of northeastern Hispanics reside in those

areas.

In 1990, 437 of the 3,109 counties and independent cities in the United States failed to meet at least one of the EPA ambient air quality standards. Of these counties, 136 had excessive levels of two or more pollutants, 29 exceeded standards for three or more pollutants, seven exceeded standards. for four or more pollutants, and one exceeded standards for five pollutants. To what extent do the proportions of whites, African Americans, and Hispanics living in these counties differ? As the bar chart shows, 57 percent of all whites, 65 percent of African Americans, and 80 percent of Hispanics live in the 437 counties with. substandard air quality. Out of the whole population, a total of 33 percent of whites, 50 percent of African

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