Hello friends, it's the Environment Show and welcome. We are not dumping in minority communities.
Not in Dixie, nor anywhere else for that matter. A new study finds hazardous waste facilities
are not anymore likely to be located in minority communities than elsewhere. Dr. Robert
Bullard, whose book Dumping in Dixie suggests otherwise, suggests otherwise, will have the
story. Also, your newspaper, computer paper, and cereal box, they may be destroying forests in
the south. And our national parks are not just for fun. From an ecological perspective, our parks
truly are our barometer, our litmus test to see what's happening in the rest of the country.
The Environment Show, a national production made possible by Heming's motor news, the monthly
Bible of the Old Car Hobby, 1-800-C-A-R-H-E-R-E. And this is Bruce Robertson.
We did not find any evidence of environmental discrimination in the sighting of facilities
on the basis of race or ethnicity. Professor Douglas Anderton, speaking of the conclusions of a
recent study on the sighting of hazardous waste treatment facilities. What we did find is that
these types of commercial hazardous waste facilities, it's a small number of facilities around the
country around 500 or so, were located in predominantly white, lower income working class neighborhoods.
Dr. Anderton is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
where he also directs the Social and Demographic Research Institute. The study grew out of a 1985
report by the Commission for Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ. That study,
and a similar one from the government accounting office, concluded that hazardous waste facilities,
indeed toxic industries in general, were more likely to be cited in minority communities than
elsewhere. But Anderton found that economics, not race, is more likely to be the determining factor.
He reached these conclusions using census-stract data and not the earlier method of checking
zip codes. This way he says he was able to eliminate areas in the country where he knew these
facilities are not located. That's necessary because if you just compared for any industry,
indeed any feature of predominantly urban life, if you compared it to all other areas in the country,
you would be comparing it to what you'd get largely as urban rural differences rather than
differences that might be associated with where those facilities are located.
In other words, it would prove nothing to compare communities where one had such a facility and
the other did not by looking only at communities that had similar facilities could Anderton examine
whether race or economics played a role in how the facility was cited. Anderton was involved in
the earlier UCC study report and had expected the same conclusions this time. Even though the study
was funded by waste management technologies, Anderton was prepared to go back to them with the
results condemning their policies. He says he was very surprised when a different, more industry
friendly picture seemed to emerge. Dr. Robert Bullard once studied this issue and came to very
different conclusions in his 1990 book Dumping in Dixie. His findings were more in line with the
UCC and the GAO reports finding disparity in citing criteria. He says he too is surprised by Anderton's
recent report. The study attempts to equate environmental injustice with the very narrow area
of waste facility fighting. And I think environmental justice, environmental racism is much more
broader than than where a land or landfill or an incinerator or disposal site is located.
Bullard says the other problem he has with Anderton's report is that census tracks were developed
by the Census Bureau after 1980 for use in urbanized areas. And this leaves out of the study
whole areas of rural communities in a Mayo, Alabama, for example. The nation's largest
hazardous waste facility is located in the heart of Alabama Black Belt. And there are no census
tracks for that area prior to 1990. And that facility is located in the 70s. Anderton says he
recognizes that we are wondering how to square his report with the earlier studies showing just
what Dr. Bullard has indicated. The facilities we studied are again a relatively small number of
commercial hazardous waste facilities. They are the same ones that were studied in the UCC report
and are talked about in for the most part in Dumping in Dixie. But they don't include all the kinds
of locally undesirable land uses or lulus that the environmental justice movement as a whole is
concerned with. That's that's a very broad group of things, everything from land fields to
chemical production plants. All sorts of things that would not be included in this in this group
of facilities or the facilities originally studied by the UCC. Dr. Bullard says the larger issue
needing attention is what are our land use policies and who is involved in the decisions on those
policies. He says we need to examine why there is not a greater minority representation on zoning
boards, for example, especially in those communities under scrutiny for a facility location.
Dr. Robert Bullard is Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta
University in Atlanta, Georgia. Dr. Douglas Anderton is Sociology Professor at University of
Massachusetts Amherst and Director of the Social and Demographic Research Institute. In order to pursue
the study in a more independent way, Anderton recently received a grant of $260,000 from the
federal environmental protection agency. This to move away from the appearance that the waste
management funded study was biased. This is Bruce Robertson.
In the Pacific Northwest, the issues are the timber of the old growth forests,
critical habitat of species such as the spotted owl and the salmon, and the vitality of lumber mills.
Debate over how best to balance all of these elements often has erupted in violence and rarely
ended in accord. Always though, the debate has captured our attention, symbolizing the best and the
worst of our forestry practices. Meanwhile, across the southeast, another debate is evolving,
this over chip mills. Denny Halldemann, a forest expert and environmental activist, says the story
of the chip mills is not well known. Halldemann is a member of Tegger, Tennesseans,
Alabama's, and Georgians for Environmental Responsibility. And he's been fighting the chip mill issue
in the Chattanooga Tennessee area. What we've been facing with in the southeast is an invasion of
what are called high capacity remote woodchipping operations. They essentially take the whole tree,
most of these are bowl oriented, they just take the trunks, but they take the whole tree, run it
through a chipping operation. It's generally exported out of the region without value added,
taken to ports either hundreds of miles further south and lower Alabama where they've over harvested,
or to Pacific Rim countries for manufacturing the paper and pulp products.
So this is essentially using the trees for only pulp or paper and not for
boards for construction? Right. In theory, they were touted as taking care of the problem of
the high grading that has gone on in the forest of the south, the hardwood forest of the south,
where they've taken the best and left the rest supposedly. But in reality, what they're doing is
they're taking the growing stock, they're taking nice straight trees because they stack on a trailer
better. Trees that in 15 or 20, 30, 40 years would have been trees that would have fed local
economies, industries and economies of scale, high value added, high employment type of industries.
These are being taken down a river and turned into paper.
Haldeman says many of the same companies operating in the Pacific Northwest are also running
mills in the southeast. Boise Cascade, Warehouseer, McMillan-Bloodell, champion international to name
a few. In fact, he says most of these companies were clear cutting across the south in the 1920s,
and then left for the Pacific coast when the trees in the south gave out. And now they are returning,
just as the mixed hardwood forests are beginning to recover from the cutting 70 years ago.
Haldeman says if the same practices are employed, the same scenario will develop. Only this time,
with our increased demand for paper and paper products, the effects will be more severe and longer
lasting. There is an over harvesting situation for softwoods in the south all over the country,
but in the south on all lands in the south, all southern states are overharvested to the
tune of 12 percent since the year 1991, meaning removals of softwoods have exceeded growth since 1991
by 12 percent. So drawn out over the timeline that 12 percent per year, what are we looking at
into the next century? They are projecting softwood shortages for a few decades.
They are assuming that the area of pine plantations in the south are going to double from the
present 23 million acres to 45 million acres by the year 2030. Operating on that assumption,
they expect to, well at the same time, the US Forest and Paper Association is projecting a 40
to 60 percent increase in consumption. So I don't anticipate in forest service data has not shown
that we are going to be seeing an adequate supply of softwoods for our paper and pulp demands.
So what is it going to take to meet that need then? Well what they are proposing,
champion international friends is coming in with a huge chip mill to feed their
Canton North Carolina mill. This chip mill up in northern Tennessee will be cutting hardwood
forest, diverse hardwood forest, on a clear cutting fashion over a 30 to 35 year rotation. Every 30
to 35 years they'll go in and cut this dump sprout. In this way says Holderman, the trees will
barely get larger than a sapling before they are cut down again and he says this style is not
limited to the traditional softwoods for paper pulp. More and more hardwood trees are also being
cut for paper pulp. Clearly not a sustainable practice, but wait there is more according to
Holderman. What about our recycling? If we have been recycling more and more paper each year
and traditionally paper has been the most recyclable product, how is it then that the pulp mills
are having to scramble to meet our growing demand for virgin fiber? According to Holderman, here's how.
A lot of the pulp and paper industry has got into a huge overcapacity problem around the early 90s.
Around 1990 the consumption curve was going up around 1990 because of the so-called global recession
and Earth Day awareness 20 years later increased recycling beyond their expectations. There was
huge overcapacity at US paper mills. As a result, in order to play Kate, there are stockholders,
many of these industries like warehouse or Scott paper and others have resorted to exporting raw
wood chips. Hardwood forest, pines forest, it doesn't matter, they're exporting raw wood chips to
other Pacific Rim and European trans nationals to pad their quarterly bottom lines for their stockholders.
They're essentially exporting their resource base to keep their quarterly bottom lines looking
healthy. So now we're putting a situation where we not only cannot feed our own consumption in
this country, we're expected to feed the global consumption of pulp and paper products.
Holderman says, while we have focused our sites on the Pacific Northwest,
meanwhile chipmills have been grinding away in many other places in the country and he says
these mills have the same problems the lumber mills have in the Northwest.
They represent over harvesting, very rapid deforestation. They represent high degree of mechanization.
It only takes 10 to 12, 8 to 12, maybe 15 people to operate a chipmill that can process 400
truckloads of logs through it a day. And they also represent export out of the region without
value added, meaning you're sending the jobs elsewhere. Chipmills represent those three things
in the most most perfected form that we've seen so far, the most destructive, perfected form.
In the Chattanooga area, in 1990, while the city and the county were embarking on a mission to
clean up the environment and create of the city and environmental masterpiece,
a showpiece to the world, meanwhile, Holderman says up to 24 chipmills were about to move into the
region. Holderman says he and more robust environmental began a campaign to stop the move.
The first public hearing that was held on Donghae Pulp of Korea, there's only two people in
the audience that were opposed to this operation. Three weeks later, because of the efforts of a few
people, three weeks later, the next hearing for Boise Cascade, we had over 700 people in the
auditorium, the vast majority opposed to this sort of woodchipping operation. In the meantime,
the hardwood using industries in the Tennessee Valley, there's over 90,000 people in the Tennessee
Valley already employed in wood processing jobs, and they're very high value added local employment.
Generally done to scale, we have a relatively healthy forest compared to what would happen if the
chipmills invaded. They organized the hardwood using industries, organized as the Tennessee Valley
hardwood alliance, and came out opposing both massive clear cutting and the chipmills themselves.
We also had the Tennessee tourism officials, Chattanooga tourism officials come out vastly opposed
to the woodchipping operation, seeing the destruction of tourism industries in the Northwest,
chambers of commerce, city council, the mayor, the county executive, virtually every fast of Chattanooga
came out opposed to these high capacity remote woodchipping operations. As a result of that and the
fact that we forced the Tennessee Valley Authority and the US Army Corps of Engineers, the permitting
agencies that would allow these things on the river, they were forced to uphold the intent of NEPA,
which was to do a full environmental impact statement evaluating what the impacts would be on the
sourcing area, not just the physical plant location, which is what they wanted to do. We forced
an EIS on the full sourcing area, including 90% of which was privately owned land.
In this case, you're meaning where the timber would actually be cut.
Where the timber is going to be pulled into the chipping mill.
For instance, in our 75 mile radius sourcing area that they used, we were looking at over half
of the remaining forest cover being removed within 10 to 20 years by just four woodchipping
operations wanting to cluster within a 12 mile stretch of river here. The representative mass
deforestation, and this was already the time when half of our forests in this area are already
under 50 years of age. The forests are very young. We have already present a self from other
paper industries and local hardware using industries. So the forest age is young and getting younger,
the forest health is declining, and over half the remaining forest cover being removed within 10
to 20 years would have had serious effects on both the environment and the economic health.
For the life of the remaining native forests of the east, this particular target area is the
southern tip of the mixed Mesophytic Forest, which has served as the genetic library for the
entire eastern US for the last 100 million years plus as glaciation and inland seas receded.
So we have a very significant forest here that we're fighting to serve.
Denny Holdenmann, a forest expert and member of Tagger, Tennessee, and Zalabamans, and Georgians for
environmental responsibility, Holdenmann says he recognizes the efforts being made by many in
the Chattanooga area to turn things around and set the city and its environs on a new sustainable
course. He supports their efforts, but he says as long as the environment is being discussed,
why not talk about the entire environment, not just selected issues, whereas you can rebuild a
waterfront relatively easily. He says you don't grow a forest overnight. This is Bruce Robertson.
Congressional budget proposals cut deeply into our nation's heritage. Both the House of
Representatives and the Senate, continuing a campaign to cut, trim, and reorder federal spending
practices, would eliminate 16% from the Department of Interior. With inflation factored in,
this would equal nearly 30% by the year 2002. The National Park System, operated by interior,
likely would close some of its facilities and scale back operations at others. In some cases,
these cutbacks would threaten our national heritage, such as the case at Saratoga Battlefield National
Park in Saratoga Springs, New York. Gina Johnson is Program Director at the Park.
Saratoga is one of the 15 most decisive battles in world history. It has international significance,
not to mention national significance, but it is most notably known as the turning point of the
American Revolution, wherein 1777, a small, well not a small group, but an ill-prepared group of
rebels defended the landscape or the land from a very well-organized British force that was
basically they didn't think they would be able to win. Undefutable I guess is what they would
think, but they did. They won here right on these grounds. The National Park at Saratoga was
established in the 1930s in keeping with the mission of the Federal Park Service,
charged with conserving for future generations the natural and historic qualities of locations
in the nation. Johnson says this concern for the future was central to the early mission of the
Park Service, and she says today we interpret that mission no less differently. Because to establish
these areas is America's best gift to its future, and I think although they may have initially been
noted by artists and poets and gentlemen like John Muir who saw them for the scenic and aesthetic
qualities, they have now become in many ways the the ecological barometer for the rest of the
country. We do much science at our parks even though this is a historic park we we are engaged in
a number of scientific studies. So from an ecological perspective our parks truly are our barometer,
our litmus test to see what's happening in the rest of the country. Johnson says the research
being conducted on the battlefield includes work on a threatened species the Henslow Sparrow.
Our primary purpose on the resource management end is to restore the scene to historical to the
historical landscape of 1777. So that's really our primary purpose or primary function is to
preserve the cultural resources and to preserve the cultural landscape. But in along with that
we certainly do a lot of studies in terms of grassland bird species our deer studies were doing
swallow studies or were engaged in cooperating on swallow studies on the Hudson River. We're also
going to do a we're going to partake in a butterfly monitoring project this summer. So we actually
do a lot of what we're doing surveying monitoring the interesting thing with the grassland bird
studies is that we have a threatened species here called the Henslow Sparrow. They only live in
certain grassland habitats and we're trying to determine how how that cycle works because we do
agricultural leasing here where farmers actually do mow and hay the fields and and they keep their crops.
So we have to time it right because obviously we can't go in there in mow when the the species or
when the grassland birds are are mating and all so we just study that whole process and to see how
it fits in ecologically. If the congressional budget cutbacks become law Johnson says national
parks across the nation will be affected including the one at Saratoga a place so deeply American.
We already are on a bare bones budget and we if it were not for volunteers we actually the summer
if it were not for volunteers we would not be able to partake in some of the studies that we're
doing because they're helping us in our grassland bird species studies. They're also helping us keep
our buildings the Skylar House open in the Nielsen House open longer than it is so we're already
tight to begin with the proposed cutbacks will greatly affect us we will most likely have to close
the Skylar House in the Nielsen House we will probably have to close a visitor center and we will not
be able to provide Rangers out in the field giving both natural and historical programs and walks
as far as the scientific studies that are ongoing it's very difficult to say most of the studies
that we're doing now are already in cooperation with other agencies both private and federal
and I don't know I just really can't say how the money will be cut back and what we'll do I think
if it does come down to cutting us back our primary concerns would be visitor and employee safety
and resource protection and when I say resource protection not so much that we've be able to
do the monitoring the survey the surveying as we are now but just to make sure that people don't
come on and hunt and don't abuse the land it would be more of I would almost say an enforcing just
to make sure that we can protect the land. For Yellowstone, Yosemite the Grand Canyon the Shenandoahs
of Virginia or Saratoga the issue is the same behind the externals of scenic beauty suitable for
picture-taking behind the rich and hallowed history of our nation our national parks serve as vast
refuges for wildlife. I think that's one of the things that makes Saratoga so very special although
it was established to commemorate of course the the very famous battles that turned the history
of this country around it has 34 a hundred acres of just the most beautiful diverse landscape
and people don't realize the things that are going on behind the scenes in terms of studying
even the deer we did do a deer study recently just to determine if the deer were indeed
destroying the habitat because they are so happy there are so many deer that live here
but again people when they come to a historical park don't understand that a lot of what park
management does is to monitor and make sure that the wildlife and the actual parks natural resources
are maintained and are in good shape. Gina Johnson program director at Saratoga Battlefield
National Park in Saratoga Springs, New York one of two hundred such parks that could face severe
cutbacks in operating funds if congressional proposals are upheld she says the effect on human
visitors would be one of disappointment but for the wild things it would be devastating this is
Bruce Robertson. That's our report on the Environment Show for this week make a no tune in again
next week for more news on the environment the environment show a program about the environment the
air, water, soil, wildlife and people of our common habitat. For a cassette copy of this program call
1-800-747-7444 the Environment Show program number 287 are thanks this week to Wendy Loot's
production assistant. The environment show is a presentation of national production solely
responsible for its content Dr. Alan Shartock executive producer this is Bruce Robertson the
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