Transcript
Into America
Sacrifice Zones
Trymaine Lee: You know, accident in East Palestine happens. The world, at least, America shifts its gaze to the terror of this one environmental incident, and I wonder what your thoughts were, given all the work you’re doing in the community and everything you’ve been through, what was like your reaction to that?
Katherine Ferguson: I actually should be ashamed of myself that I would laugh, but I did. I just sort of chuckled because I was just like this is nothing. Y’all getting a little bit of what we’ve been getting.
Lee: Kathy Ferguson lives in Institute, West Virginia, a small Black town that’s home to a factory that produces carcinogenic chemicals in an area of the state called Chemical Valley, for all its industrial plants. For decades, residents have struggled to get the company that owns the plant and the government to take their concerns seriously.
But in another small town, this one, majority white, and just four hours away, it’s been a completely different story. In February, a train carrying dangerous and volatile chemicals derailed near the village of East Palestine on the eastern border of Ohio.
Archival Recording: Tonight, emergency crews desperately trying to get control of a potentially deadly situation, with a controlled detonation. For three days, warning residents that burning wreckage of a freight train could explode, sending shrapnel and toxic fumes a mile in every direction over a rural Ohio community.
Lee: As the chemicals poured into the air and water in the area, and then residents complained of health problems and worried about the future of their hometown, Kathy Ferguson felt empathy. But there was also another emotion. Kathy watched as the disaster in East Palestine drew widespread media coverage, action from the Environmental Protection Agency, a bipartisan push to enact stricter regulations on rail safety and an apology from the train company CEO. This is from a Senate hearing earlier this month.
Alan Shaw: I am determined to make this right. Norfolk Southern will claim the site safely, thoroughly and with urgency. You have my personal commitment. Norfolk Southern will get the job done and help East Palestine thrive.
Lee: Kathy was incensed.
Ferguson: I’m like, what the heck, we’ve been here all this time. We’ve been suffering, you know, and under siege for eons, since the 1940s.
Lee: Kathy’s town, Institute, is what’s called a sacrifice zone. The term isn’t an official designation, but it’s a way for public health experts and environmental justice advocates to describe communities that have a high concentration of environmental hazards and health risks that come with that, all in the service of industry and money.
These communities are often close to factories, industrial plants or refineries that release toxic chemicals into the air and water, impacting the health of nearby residents. Infamous sacrifice zones include Cancer Alley in Louisiana and Port Arthur in Texas. And because of segregation, redlining and racist zoning policies, the people who live in these areas are disproportionately Black.
Vernice Miller-Travis: So it’s something that’s in the lexicon that people always say, on the other side of the railroad tracks, right? But what most people don’t know is that it’s an actual feature of land use planning in United States.
Lee: Vernice Miller-Travis is a longtime environmental justice activist. And just like Kathy, she had a visceral reaction to the attention that East Palestine has been getting.
Miller-Travis: I do not begrudge the folks in East Palestine not one bit of attention that they’re getting. I do not begrudge them at all. I just want to see every community that’s adversely impacted or imminently threatened by environmental harms and threats, I just want to see everybody get treated equally before the law. And that’s what the environmental justice conversation is about.
Lee: Studies showed that African Americans are 75% more likely than whites to live in close proximity to chemical plants. As a result, more than a million Black folks have a cancer risk above the EPA’s level of concern due to unclean air. And still these communities are largely ignored, communities like Institute, West Virginia.
Miller-Travis: Now, Black people could be blowing up. It could be fires raging. Hazardous substances can be wafting through the air, which happens on a regular basis. Ain’t nobody shows showing up like it’s, you know, the biggest emergency that ever happened. The perception around what has happened to these folks is so elevated, whereas I have not seen that happen in a community of color. Same laws. The laws have not changed, but the emphasis has absolutely changed.
Lee: I’m Trymaine Lee, and this is Into America. This week, in the wake of the environmental disaster in East Palestine, we head to Institute, West Virginia to learn how the health of this historic Black town had been compromised by air pollution and how its residents have spent decades fighting for justice. Plus, we dig into how deregulation and the powerful petrochemical industry continues to sacrifice communities for profit, why these areas are disproportionately Black, and what can be done to make things right.
Institute, West Virginia was founded by a formerly enslaved family in the late 1800s. The matriarch Mary Barnes, established a school to educate Black children and named it West Virginia Colored Institute, which gave the town’s name. It was known for its thriving Black community, its college, and later, its airport. That was until the 1940s.
Archival Recording: The United States is at war, and Union Carbide consolidates its chemicals and plastics operation. Again, the company is called to meet the demands of wartime. The government responds to the shortage of natural rubber by building three plants to produce synthetic Buna-S rubber from all things. One of those plants is located at Institute and the government selects Union Carbide to operate it.
Lee: from Union Carbide’s perspective, they were doing their part to win the war and help the region. But to Kathy Ferguson, whose family goes back generations in Institute, it’s not that simple.
Ferguson: You’re talking about like a patriotic endeavor, like there’s nothing more patriotic than folks doing that. But instead of getting that land back, the government finagled the school out of getting it’s just due (ph) and actually ceded that land and leased that land to Union Carbide. And that’s how they’ve got a foothold here.
Archival Recording: After the war, the government sells the plant to Union Carbide, and the company begins modifying operating units and building new ones to produce industrial and commodity chemicals.
Ferguson: For all of the billions and trillions of dollars that have come out of here, for all the investment that West Virginia has really given to the development of the United States even, there’s just nothing to show for it.
Lee: West Virginia Colored Institute changed its name to West Virginia State University. It’s still one of two HBCUs in the state, which today are both actually majority white. But back then, Kathy’s grandfather had a prestigious position at West Virginia State, and she has uncles who are in the school’s ROTC Hall of Fame, but Kathy was born in Harlem.
Ferguson: Well, you know, my father, like many people here, was educated at West Virginia State, could not really find decent employment. At that time he left, they were just starting to allow people to work in the chemical companies that were people of color. And so you had people that were graduating from West Virginia State who, you know, had their degrees in chemistry and in biology and physics, and all these different STEM type of programs, and the only thing that they could do at the company next door was sweep the floor.
Lee: So Institute had this plant in their town with good paying jobs, but the Black residents didn’t benefit much.
Ferguson: Most of the Black folks started to realize that they had to leave in order to achieve and continue their middle class. At the same time, we had immigration that happened, and then they started closing down the Black schools. And so, you know, there was a lot of transition during this time.
Lee: So Kathy’s father, Warren Ferguson, moved to New York City, and got a job teaching physical education in Harlem. When Kathy was about 10, the family moved back to West Virginia. In many ways, Institute was a great place to grow up. Kathy was the kind of kid who loved being outside. She climbed trees, hiked, rode bikes, and spent endless hours playing with her friends, and she was surrounded by family. But there was also the Union Carbide plant right next to West Virginia State, just looming over the community.
Do you remember what it would be like if they did release chemicals in the air? Could you feel it? Could you smell it? Were your eyes burned? Like, was there a physical thing?
Ferguson: Oh, yeah. I mean, the thing is that you sort of become a vigilant person. You did sort of develop this innate ability to sort of decipher like what was really toxic and what wasn’t. So if there was a smell that came from the sewer plant, then you knew that that was the sewage. But if you smelled like rotten eggs, you knew it was something coming from the chemical plants. You developed, I want to say, a smell palette I guess for trying to guess what was in the air and whether or not it was a hazard. Of course, if you smell something and it singed your lungs or burned your eyes, you knew it was problematic.
Lee: So residents dealt with these health issues for years, but Kathy says the community didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the danger until tragedy struck on the other side of the world.
Archival Recording: In Bhopal, India tonight, another horror story continues, the aftermath of that poison gas leak that has killed more than 2,000 people.
Lee: In December 1984, there was a massive chemical leak in Bhopal, India. Methyl isocyanate, known as MIC, escaped from a pesticide plant and spread into the neighboring areas.
Archival Recording: It is too early to call these people survivors. Some will die within six weeks as their livers, kidneys and lungs deteriorate. And there is also danger to those who escaped the poison gas. Dead animals litter Bhopal, raising the chance of disease.
Lee: Bhopal remains one of the largest industrial disasters in global history. The official death toll stands at nearly 4,000. But experts estimate that as many as 16,000 people died, and at least half a million were injured. Some people in India are still demanding justice.
Ferguson: Thousands of people lost their lives as a result of methyl isocyanate being released into the air. And we found out later that there was only one other place in the world where this was being manufactured and housed, and that was another community of brown people, Black folk in Institute, West Virginia.
Archival Recording: Today the Indian state government in Bhopal filed a criminal negligence suit against a subsidiary of Union Carbide, which has been operating the plant from which the gas escaped.
Lee: The factory in Bhopal was owned by Union Carbide, the same company that operates the plant in Institute and produced the same dangerous chemical there. The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal was, in fact, modeled after their plant in Institute.
Ferguson: That’s when things started to hit home, and my father, he was very concerned as he should have been. You know, one of the reasons why he wanted to make sure that we were in West Virginia was really a matter of safety. Drugs were starting to get bad in New York, and he just realized it was time to transition and had some opportunities to come back home and be closer to his mother and so forth. But this was a different type of threat and it wasn’t that one that I think he was anticipating, and he was outraged. He was very outraged.
Lee: Then in August 1985, just seven months after the disaster in Bhopal, the plant in Institute had its own chemical gas leak.
Ferguson: I remember going to the hospital. I remember them flushing my eyes. And to this day, I have a thing in my eyes because they put these things in your eye. It’s basically like a cup and it holds your eyes open and they force stuff in there, and it’s just like that was connected to your sinuses and it’s coming out your nose, just like all this different stuff. You’re hyperventilating. Your breathing is high and they’re like trying to make sure that your blood pressure is this and another. And seeing other people coming in in worse shape.
Lee: There were no deaths directly tied to the leak, but national news outlets reported that 135 residents were treated for eye, throat and lung irritations, and 28 of those people were admitted to the hospital with serious symptoms.
Ferguson: It’s traumatizing to be honest with you, and I carry that trauma, as do many other folks here in the area.
Lee: The community wanted answers, so Kathy’s father co-founded the environmental justice group, People Concerned About MIC, which organize community meetings, give logs of facility incidents and wrote letters.
Ferguson: And he began to activate and engage the community, at large, around this issue, to push back. And because of his response to that, it just trickled down to us as his children. You know, my sister was drawing posters of chemical disasters and saying things like, don’t kill us, you know, kids getting off the school bus, and I just became more mindful of those things.
Lee: Around this time, the public was also becoming more aware of carcinogens, the chemicals that cause cancer.
Ferguson: I remember my aunt, and to this day she can just go street by street and tell you this person had this cancer, this person had that kind of cancer, this person got cancer, then their sister got cancer, and then their brother got cancer. Like, she can literally go through the whole neighborhood and tell you that anecdotally, but this is at a time, maybe, when they weren’t keeping records like they keep these days.
Lee: In 2011, the plant, which was owned by another company at that time, stopped making MIC after a lengthy fight with the federal government. But years later, Union Carbide purchased it back and the plant still produces another dangerous chemical, ethylene oxide.
Ferguson: So ethylene oxide is a petrochemical derivative used in the manufacture of different types of things, plastics and other items that we use every day. But it is a carcinogen, and this is something that is coming into the area vis-à-vis pipes. It comes down on barges. We think it may be coming down on trains.
Lee: The EPA first designated ethylene oxide as a carcinogen in 2016. And just two years later, said it was even more dangerous than they had thought. Then in 2020, the agency said that Institute was a hotspot for cancer risk from the chemical. An analysis of the data by ProPublica found that people in the area, directly around the facility, have 36 times the EPA’s acceptable risk of getting cancer in their lifetime, but Kathy says it’s still hard to get the state to take her concerns seriously.
Ferguson: Whenever I talk to our Department of Health and Human Services, and I asked them about that, they’ll pull out data. Then they’ll say, we don’t see any clusters here.
Lee: The state’s Department of Health and Human Services told us that since 1993 the state law has required that any diagnosis of ethylene oxide-related cancers like breast cancer, leukemia and lymphoma, be reported to the state’s cancer registry. A spokesperson told us that compared to the rest of the state, this data shows Institute and the surrounding areas do not have higher rates of these cancers.
But Kathy still believes the government’s data doesn’t show the full picture. She cites people’s mistrust of doctors as a possible reason why. And according to the CDC, West Virginia has the second highest cancer mortality rate in the whole country.
Ferguson: The people that my aunt could go back and say this person, this person, this person, they’re all deceased, so we’ll never have that data.
Lee: The way we think about environmental racism now and structural racism now in Appalachia’s (ph) Appalachia there’s a bunch of poor white folks who were exposed to stuff, but there’s something different about Institute. When you think about it through the racial lens, what role do you think that plays in all this, the way it’s been handled?
Ferguson: It completely plays into it. So you know, my mom did eventually finish law school and so forth. She wasn’t as active as my father in this fight, but I remember them talking and saying, this would never happen in Danbury, Connecticut. I’m, like where’s Danbury, Connecticut. What’s up with that? And I’m, like, oh, it’s this very affluent place and it’s very levered (ph).
I learned early that there was a racial component to it, though we weren’t calling it environmental racism, but that’s certainly what it is. It is environmental racism. We are a town that’s unincorporated. People have tried to annex us. But I think part of the reason why they want to annex us is that they would then like to maybe tax these companies, but they’re operating here tax free. They’re operating here in our midst without any tax.
Lee: Wow.
Ferguson: It’s just so frustrating.
Lee: Kathy wasn’t always an environmental justice advocate, tangling with Union Carbide and West Virginia’s health department. She left Institute to go to the University of Maryland, and lived in Maryland for years, working on women’s rights issues as the Coordinator of the Domestic Violence Coordinating Committee for Prince George’s County. But in 2013, she came back home, just like her father did years before.
Ferguson: I came back because my father actually got diagnosed with cancer. He got diagnosed with a very rare sarcoma of the soft tissue of his belly. He was an athlete, didn’t drink, didn’t smoke. He had an incredible history, played with Earl Lloyd, one of his good friends, knew Bill Russell. Like you know, he was an athlete. And for him to get that, it was like, what? Of all the people here.
He attributed it to, you know, environmental hazards and things of that nature, but I came here and took care of him as he fought that. And even upon his death, I was just kind of like, well, I could just pack it up and go or I could maybe share some of my time and talents with the area.
Lee: So Kathy took up her father’s mantle, trying to get justice for community and people across the state. She even ran for office in 2020 for a seat in the West Virginia State House of Delegates. You can hear her passion in this get-out-the-vote video featuring kids in the community.
(Played out get-out-the-vote video featuring Katherine Ferguson and the kids in the community)
Lee: Although she didn’t win, the spirit of her father’s advocacy and her positive energy continues to shine through. She’s now the interim executive director at Our Future West Virginia, doing community organizing work, focused on civil rights, education and economic justice. She’s also still working to hold Union Carbide accountable, as she’s pushing the state to more deeply study the health outcomes in their community.
Meanwhile, Union Carbide recently signed a new agreement with the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, where they promised to further reduce their ethylene oxide emissions. In the agreement, the state notes that the plant is already meeting federal and state guidelines around ethylene oxide. Kathy says those guidelines aren’t strict enough. And while she may feel conflicted about the attention that East Palestine has gotten, Kathy says she does feel a deep connection with any community that’s experienced an environmental disaster.
Ferguson: I know what it’s like to be at home and then all of a sudden you see an evacuation order. You know, I’ve been there. I’ve experienced that. I’ve experienced it with being with my mother and having something happen, you know, her saying, I’m not leaving this time. I’m not going. And I’m pleading with her, please, mommy, please, let’s go. And my father saying, get in the car. And I’m like, you know, what do I do? And then there’s the dog. What we’re going to with Ebony (ph), you know, kind of thing.
So there’s just so many things that it brought back, and I hate that that tragedy happened, but I hope it can serve as a catalyst for change. It seems like it is, like, getting people more involved. So, yeah, I mean, I have lots of feelings about it, but ultimately, I’m in solidarity with those people.
Lee: After the break, we talked to an environmental expert to find out how these sacrifice zones come to be. And more importantly, what’s being done to fix them. Stick with us.
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Lee: As Kathy Ferguson fights for a better future in Institute, Dr. Sacoby Wilson is taking the macro view.
Sacoby Wilson: Across the country, in both urban and suburban and rural areas, you have places where there are hotspots, where you have communities that are hosting these multiple land uses and experience the cumulative impacts of those multiple hazards. So you think about, you know, those hazards in those communities tend to be disproportionately communities of color. They’ve been low income communities, and disproportionately, you know, working class communities.
Lee: And so I wonder, when you first got interested in the idea of environmental justice, like did you grow up with something else happening where that led you to it, or was there a moment we were exposed and it kind of clicked for you?
Wilson: So I’m from Mississippi. I’m actually from Vicksburg, Mississippi. So you know, growing up in Vicksburg, I always tell them, like, my story, I grew up near a major highway, grew up near a sewage treatment plant. My mom would always remind, son, don’t forget the landfill. I also grew up near landfill. So I grew up near these environmental hazards, but not really knowing as a kid.
And also I have alopecia. So I’ve had alopecia since I was age 7. Alopecia is autoimmune condition where your immune system attacks your hair follicles. So the combination of growing up near those hazards and then having this alopecia really inspired me to get into public health.
I went to historically Black college, Alabama Agricultural & Mechanical University. I was doing biology, ecotoxicology there. And at a conference Louisville City State (ph), I think in 1995, I met Dr. Benjamin Chavis, who coined the term environmental racism, and also Dr. Robert Bullock, who has been called the father of the environmental justice movement at that conference. And I knew from that moment in time, I’m going to do environmental justice work, when I met those two icons of the environmental justice movement.
Lee: Dr. Wilson went on to get his master’s and PhD, and now is professor of Applied Environmental Health at the University of Maryland, where part of his job includes studying health outcomes and sacrifice zones, and what makes these communities so dangerous to live in.
Wilson: It’s the total burden and exposure that can impact human health where many of these communities that are sacrifice zones, some of the chemicals that are emitted, it could cause cancer, some also could mutate the DNA, some could have respiratory impacts.
You think about if you’re burning fossil fuels, you’re burning things, so it produces particulate matter. Particulate matter is dust in the air, just the smaller particles that cause asthma, asthma attacks, heart disease, lead to Alzheimer’s, contributed to diabetes, birth defects, low birth weight babies, infant mortality, cause cancer, it elevates your blood pressure, premature mortality, and decreased life expectancy. That’s just one contaminant.
So you’ve been exposed to a whole mixture of chemicals. And then also, if you’re pregnant mother, if you live in a community that’s dealing with mercury or lead issues, right, those metals can bioaccumulate. So your developing fetus could be exposed to that and utero can be impacted, right? And then when you’re breastfeeding, you could be breastfeeding these contaminants to your child.
So it kills. People are being poisoned every day. So when you live in a sacrifice zone, you’re basically being poisoned every day. It’s impacting your individual health. It could be impacting your life course. It also could be impacting multiple generations. So it becomes the intergenerational cycle of poison and poor public health.
And then these communities that are sacrifice zones, it’s not just they’re overburdened by these hazards. They also don’t have access to good infrastructure, economic infrastructure, in many cases, sewer and water infrastructure. They may not have good housing infrastructure. So it’s the combination of being overburdened by hazards and also not having an infrastructure that these communities are really the sacrifice zones.
Lee: When you think about these communities and their proximity to all of these pollutants and polluting facilities, do they just happen to be Black and brown? They just happen to be poor? How do these sacrifice zones, these communities end up so close to these spaces in the first place?
Wilson: Yes. Interesting. Dr. Bullock likes to say some folks don’t have the complexion for protection. And then you have this whole thing about NIMBYism, Not in my backyard, but to even NIMBY, you got to have wealth. You got to have economic power, economic power in place to get political power. We don’t have political power, economic power, you have less of a voice.
So what happens is, you know, a lot of folks don’t have voice when it comes to the process and development when these facilities get cited. And also, zoning gets weaponized, right, where certain communities get zoned to have the industrial operations, get zoned to have the manufacturing, while other communities do their complexion or the income gets zoned to be more residential. So it’s how racism has been baked into our planning and our zoning, right? There’s inequities in planning/zoning development that drive environmental injustice, that create these sacrifice zones.
Lee: And so it’s one thing to consider zoning on a local level, but what’s the dynamic between big industry and government? How do those things work in tandem to create some of the perils that we see from these sacrifice zones?
Wilson: Yeah. What happens is you have these jobs versus environment argument. We are underserved, you know, economic disadvantaged area. So you have politicians who may, you know, being courted by big industry. And I always like to say no politician goes to politician school, right? They’re not really fully prepared to do that job. So you’re not in their ear whispering sweet nothings, somebody is and usually the one that has access to both ears is industry.
And it may be something that’s altruistic for the community, like, we want to bring in jobs. What they’re bringing is bad jobs because a lot of those jobs are on the construction phase of these facilities, right? And because of automation, there are not a lot of major jobs, in general, for a lot of these big operations. And then most of the folks who live in that community are not able to even work at the facility.
So there’s not a lot of benefits that come to the community from hosting these operations. And then if you’re unincorporated, it’s even worse. And so you got to have an environmental justice framework to undo the damage of sacrifice zones, to dismantle racism, environmental racism. You have to have an environmental justice framework implemented to help with that.
Lee: And I’ve reported on these issues for a long time off and on. And when you engage industry or a specific corporation, people have been complaining we’re getting sick. They’ll say, we monitor it. Everything is fine. Then the EPA, we can’t prove it’s connected. Are they just lying? How are they getting away with it or are there still not clear connections between what we see happening in these facilities and what’s happening in the communities right across the fence line?
Wilson: I mean, there is some truth to the causality argument. I call it a causality trap. So if you’re living in a sacrifice zone, you’re not being exposed to just one chemical, chemical A. You’ve been exposed to chemical A to chemical ZZ, right? So you may have, as I said, comorbid conditions or public health outcomes that people experience. Maybe it’s asthma, maybe it’s cancer, maybe it’s myocardial infarction, maybe it’s some rare neurological condition. So the science has to do a better job in understanding the multiple exposures, right?
But my point is if you are having high levels of pollution in a community, higher than an average for your city, higher than the average for your county, higher than the average for your state, that’s where you can act. You don’t have to prove causality. That’s part of the trap. Even if we can’t prove that this facility is the cause of it, the fact you have a lot of poor folk, Black folk, indigenous folks, Latinos, Asian Pacific Islanders who are sick should be enough to act. And you can prove that and show those patterns of exposure and risk scientifically to move to interventions, to move policy, to move to change.
Lee: You know, I wonder, another thing about racism and it’s bipartisan, right? Racism is racism, whether it’s Democrats, Republicans. Racism kind of still permeates everything.
Wilson: Yeah.
Lee: And I wonder if environmental racism operates the same way. Have we seen changes? When you think about some of the efforts in a regulation that President Obama put in, and then you see them undone by Trump, and here we are at the Biden administration, have things gotten any better? Are there administrations that had been better on this stuff than not, or is it baked in like everything else?
Ferguson: So this new administration, you know, I’ll give them some credit, and a lot of credit about what they’re trying to do around climate change, environmental justice. You look at the EPA Administrator, Michael Regan, he did this tour. He’s going down to communities across the country and dealing with environmental justice. He’s going to visit the folks who live in these sacrifice zones, right?
And you see President Biden’s executive orders on climate change. You see all the money through the Inflation Reduction Act. So you see a lot of dollars that are out there, that we can get communities to help get them that reparative justice. I’m going to say reparations. Get them some environmental reparations. I mean, there’s real talk, right? So that’s good, but it could be easily undone. As you saw what happened in Obama administration, it can be easily undone by the next administration. It can be easily slowed down by our divided Congress.
Lee: You know, certainly, the accident or the incident in East Palestine was big and dramatic and made for 24-hour coverage, but some folks tell you, you know, they’ll say there’s the equivalent of a crash every day in some of our communities. For decades, people have been breathing in toxic stuff and ridiculous chemicals. And I wonder if we’ve seen a kind of difference in the way the government and media has handled, say, in East Palestine, in a work class white community as compared to a place like Institute?
Wilson: Oh, no, definitely. No, definitely. You know, some people get that (ph). For those of you older (ph), some folks get the Pinto coverage and response, and some people get the Cadillac coverage and response, right? So that’s the procedural justice issue in the response, in the coverage. You can go back to Hurricane Katrina. Look at how we covered folks getting food and they were Black. Oh, y’all looting the white folks. Oh, they were gathering food.
Look at what happened to East Palestine, right? So you have folks who are impacted. You got a lot of coverage. You got the company came on to say you’re sorry. I think you even had the head of the Transportation Administration. Why aren’t those actors, those business leaders doing the same thing in Institute like you said? So, yes, they should not only apologize, when they should be paying for health services. They should be paying for mitigation because, you know, Dr. Bullock says that some folks don’t have the complexion for protection. You could also add when it comes to disasters, some folks don’t have the complexion for response and don’t have the complexion for recovery.
Lee: What can be done to protect these sacrifice zones, like, right now? There is big money in fossil fuels and all of these chemical plants. It’s hard to imagine that they go away. But in the meantime, there are whole communities that have been there for very long time and exposed to this stuff. Like, what can be done to help mitigate or just protect these folks?
Wilson: Federal Relocation Act. How can we relocate folks from these sacrifice zones to different communities and get them the resource and investments they deserve and they need to repair the long-term harm that’s been done? I would also say when it comes to all these federal dollars, right, to make sure that we put more investments in this infrastructure so doing more to make sure these facilities are at zero emission. So that, to me, is a job for the U.S. EPA to do more of when it comes to understanding and addressing the cumulative impacts of these operations.
And then I would say for the advocates out there, and I think this has happened in Louisiana and other communities in the country, start using Title VI of the Civil Rights Actbecause these facilities are causing disparate impacts on folks because of their race or some others are protected characteristic, right? So using the law to fight back against these operations.
A lot of these communities rely on these operations for jobs, and you may see some people who are reluctant to come out to fight because they may work at them. Let’s remove that, right? Let’s stop these facilities from polluting. Stop these facilities from getting tax breaks and subsidies. And then on the positive side, invest in an industry that’s clean, that’s green, that’s just, that’s of the community, for the community and by the community. That needs to happen.
Lee: Back in Institute, Kathy Ferguson says it’s all of these communities across the country, where she finds strength and solidarity.
Ferguson: Now, the only thing I will say here recently is because ethylene oxide, in particular, has been such an issue, folks in Louisiana have been working and fighting around this issue for quite some time in petrochemicals. Folks in Houston have been doing that. And these are all communities of brown and Black folk. That because of their size and because of their presence in America, the fact that these places are going through this type of turmoil, it brings us into the fold.
And so when our voice is typically with them aligned around these issues, it becomes stronger. And folks on a more national level, folks like you and others are able to sort of find us. You know, it’ like Horton Hears a Who, like we’re here and, you know, we’re getting killed and help us. But, you know, you have that kind of mentality, but they’re able to bring national attention to us. It filters through them, and so that’s a benefit. That’s helpful.
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Into America is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton and Max Jacobs. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer is Aisha Turner. I’m Trymaine Lee. We’ll be back next Thursday.