Volume 143, No. 128 covering the 1st Session of the 105th Congress (1997 - 1998) was published by the Congressional Record.
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“WHAT IS JUST ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE” mentioning the Environmental Protection Agency was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1822 on Sept. 23, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WHAT IS JUST ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
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HON. NEWT GINGRICH
of georgia
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, September 23, 1997
Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, I would like to insert into the Record and encourage Members to read the following editorial by Henry Payne which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, September 16, 1997.
`Environmental Justice' Kills Jobs for the Poor
(By Henry Payne)
Last Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency delayed its approval of a proposed plastics plant in the predominantly black southern Louisiana town of Convent. It was the EPA's first ruling based on the idea of
``environmental injustice'' or ``environmental racism''--the claim that polluting industries locate in minority areas because their residents are politically powerless to stop them. ``It is essential that minority and low-income communities not be disproportionately subjected to environmental hazards,'' EPA Administrator Carol Browner wrote in her decision obstructing Shintech Inc.'s plans for a
$700 million manufacturing facility.
But if Ms. Browner had bothered asking the residents of Convent what they think, it would have been clear that the injustice is being perpetrated not by industry but by environmental elitists and their political allies, who falsely claim to represent local citizens while promoting their own ideological agenda. ``None of these people are speaking for our community,'' says Carol Gaudin, a black resident of Convent and the organizer of a local pro-Shintech group, the St. James Citizen Coalition. ``These environmental groups never came here and asked me if I wanted the plant. They can't just come in here and take it from us.''
Gladys Maddie, a black mother who lives within a mile of the plant's proposed location, agrees. ``We have witnessed groups such as Greenpeace descend on [Convent] like a plague of locusts,'' she wrote to the local newspaper. `We find the exploitative use of the color of our skin and our socio-economic condition sickening and insulting.''
A recent poll by the local NAACP chapter found that 73% of the people in the black communities near the proposed plant favor it. But the Clinton administration is listening instead to the radical environmental group Greenpeace, which has waged a long war against the plastics industry. Greenpeace has offered its political and organizational muscle to the small group of mostly middle-class Convent residents who oppose the plant.
Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality--charged by the EPA to regulate state industry--found in May that Shintech's plans satisfied the state's demanding emissions standards. But Greenpeace and its allies, determined to stop the plant, invoked President Clinton's 1994 executive order on environmental injustice, which compels federal agencies to consider whether minorities bear an unfair burden in the location of industrial facilities.
In Convent, the charge of environmental racism is laughable. Louisiana has actually practiced economic affirmative action by declaring the area a state enterprise zone. The state encouraged Shintech to locate in Convent, offering it tax breaks in return for hiring 35% of its work force from the surrounding population. Shintech operates a similar plant in Freeport, Texas, a prosperous, mostly white Gulf Coast city south of Houston. When Convent residents, including Ms. Maddie and Ms. Gaudlin, visited Freeport earlier this year, they saw a standard of living they'd like to bring home.
Ms. Maddie's brother Roosevelt Teroud does backbreaking seasonal labor in Convent's sugarcane fields for $6 an hour. To him, Shintech's more stable $12- to $15-an-hour jobs look like an opportunity, not an injustice. And the cultivation of sugarcane entails environmental hazards of its own: fields sprayed with insecticides and the resulting runoff that pollutes local water. Convent residents understand that industrial development entails environmental trade-offs, but they also think industry is their key to a better future.
``The big plants up the river came in and gave those communities opportunities,'' says Nanette Jolivette, a lawyer representing Convent resident, ``My clients want the same opportunity.''
Forty-five miles away, the taxpayer-subsidized Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic represents plant opponents before the EPA. I asked Tulane lawyer Lisa Lavie what the citizens of Convent can do about economic development if her side wins. Her reply: ``That area has some beautiful old plantations. They could build a cultural tourism industry.''
``That's horrible!'' Carol Gaudin gasps. ``My ancestors were slaves on those plantations. These white opponents don't understand--we don't want to remember our past. We want a future.''
Aligned against media-savvy, full-time environmentalists and their Washington allies, Convent residents know they have an uphill battle. They're not getting much help from the national black leadership. Lobbied by Greenpeace, both the Rev. Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Joseph Lowry of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference spoke out against the plant this summer.
``They blatantly ignored the opinions of all the local elected African-American officials,'' says an outraged Ms. Jolivette, noting that neither Mr. Jackson nor Mr. Lowry contacted Convent's local councilmen, all of whom voted in favor of the plant.
The EPA didn't give environmentalists everything they wanted. They had hoped for a firm definition of environmental racism that would set a plant-killing precedent for other such cases. The EPA only called for more study; it did not kill the Shintech plant outright. But the opponents' strategy seems to follow a common pattern: Throw up enough bureaucratic roadblocks and Shintech will eventually give up.
Sadly, this strategy works. In Claiborne Parish, La., where the federal Atomic Energy Board held up construction of a
$850 million nuclear fuel enrichment facility this May on grounds of environmental injustice, one investor--Northern States Power--has announced that it will pull out after a seven-year (and counting) regulatory process. ``At some point these companies just throw up their hands in frustration,'' sighs Mary Boyd, a spokeswoman for the Claiborne facility.
For the residents of Convent, eager for the 165 jobs and
$5.6 million in school revenue that the Shintech plant will bring, the EPA's obstruction is unconscionable. ``Why do these people want to take away our jobs?'' asks Gladys Maddie. ``If we run Shintech away, we're finished.''
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