That it is the repetitive refrain from a powerful column by Charles M. Blow in today's New York Times titled Inequality in the Air We Breathe?. The occasion of the column the was plan to do use "open burn" trayss to dispose of millions of pounds of explosive propellant at a Superfund site in rural Louisiana, not too far from Shreveport, Louisiana, and very close to the community in which Blow grew up, and the communities where members of his family still live. As he notes in the first sentence of his concluding paragraph,
I have skin in this game. My family would fall in the shadow of the plume.
His part of Louisiana is poor and it is Black.
The repeated refrain is because the story of what happened at that site has changed over time, each time more information coming out the situation becoming worse.
Please keep reading as I explain what that means.
The site was a place where military munitions were manufactured, the Louisiana Army Ammunition Plant, only a few miles from where his family lives.
The Environmental Protection Agency eventually listed the plant as a Superfund site because for more than 40 years “untreated explosives-laden wastewater from industrial operations was collected in concrete sumps at each of the various load line areas,” and emptied into “16 one-acre pink water lagoons.” It was determined that the toxic contamination in soil and sediments from the lagoons was a “major contributor” to toxic groundwater contamination.
That is the FIRST of the pieces of information, and that paragraph is followed by the expression I used for the title of this post:
But wait, it gets worse.
The Army hired a company to safely dispose, "demilitarize," millions of pounds of leftover propellant. The company, Expo,
conducted “operations” there “until a 2012 explosion sent a mushroom cloud 7,000 feet high and broke windows a mile away in Doyline,” another small community in the area.
But the story continued to worsen.
I will not go through all the iterations and repetitions of the expression that is my title.
The plan, originally approved by the EPA, was to do an emergency burn of 15 million pounds of the propellant. This is a method that environmental advocates note has been outlawed in many other countries.
Blow quotes an environmental toxicologist who wrote in the Shreveport newspaper that
"... without a doubt the open-tray method is not safe. The E.P.A. has produced no data to the safety of such a burn and repeatedly ignores requests for such data from media, citizens, state officials and environmental professionals. In addition to the air contamination risk, we have three other issues: explosive detonation, groundwater contamination and soil contamination.”
A local TV station has reported that there are many more that 15 million pounds of material on the site. Why is that important?
At 15 million, the open air burn would be up to 80,000 pounds daily for about year, spewing toxic fumes into the air.
Protests have lead to a 90 day delay in the plan while alternative methods are considered.
It is important to note the racial and class dimensions to this issue. That area of Louisiana is Black. It is also poor.
Two paragraphs of the column place this in context:
We have to stop and ask: How was this allowed to come to such a pass in the first place? How could this plant have been allowed to contaminate the groundwater for 40 years? How could the explosives have been left at the site in the first place? How is it that there doesn’t seem to be the money or the will to more safely remove them? Can we imagine anyone, with a straight face, proposing to openly burn millions of pounds of explosives near Manhattan or Seattle?
This is the kind of scenario that some might place under the umbrella of “environmental racism,” in which disproportionately low-income and minority communities are either targeted or disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous materials and waste facilities.
There is a history of what some have described as environmental racism. Blow quotes thje work Robert Bullard who notes that nearly 60% of nation’s hazardous-waste landfill capacity is in 5 states: LA, AL, SC, OK and TX,
and that “four landfills in minority ZIP codes areas represented 63 percent of the South’s total hazardous-waste capacity” although “blacks make up only about 20 percent of the South’s total population.”
He also quotes a study from Yale that further emphasizes the point.
Blow notes in his penultimate paragraph,
Among the injustices perpetrated on poor and minority populations, this may in fact be the most pernicious and least humane: the threat of poisoning the very air that you breathe.
Then after noting his having skin in the game because of the proximity of his family, he concludes that
everyone should be outraged about this practice. Of all the measures of equality we deserve, the right to feel assured and safe when you draw a breath should be paramount.
That the environmental damage of the past has fallen disproportionally on communities of poor people of color was no accident: it is evidence of how the lack of political power allowed gross injustices of harmful effects on health and safety to continue for decades.
That an agency of an administration headed by the first President of color would even consider a method of "remediation" that would continue that practice of disproportionate impact on poor people of color should turn your stomach.
I remember a speech of Dr. King with the refrain of "How long? Not long."
How long will our nation continue to allow this kind of injustice to continue? It if does, is that yet another way of silently asserting that Black lives DON'T matter?
I wonder.