Читать книгу Lessons in Environmental Justice - Группа авторов - Страница 13

The historical backdrop of the environmental justice movement has its roots in small, isolated struggles found across the United States. A decade after Dr. King’s death, black homeowners in 1978 took on a fight against a municipal landfill proposal in a mostly black suburban community in Houston, Texas. The city has seen a dramatic demographic shift over the past three decades (Bullard, 1987). In 1980, it was 52.3 percent white, 27.4 percent black, 17.6 percent Hispanic, and 2.7 percent Asian and other. By 2010, Houston became a majority people-of-color city—25.6 percent Anglo, 43.8 percent Hispanic, 23.7 percent African American, and 6.0 percent Asian.

The Houston case study examined solid waste disposal in Houston from the 1970s through 2013. Houston is the nation’s fourth largest city with a population of some 2.3 million persons spread over more than 600 square miles and more than 500 neighborhoods. It is the only major American city without zoning. This no-zoning policy allowed for an erratic land-use pattern. As a result, the NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard) practice was replaced with the “PIBBY” (Place in Blacks’ Back Yard) policy (Bullard, 1983). The all-white, all-male Houston city government and private industry targeted landfills, incinerators, garbage dumps, and garbage transfer stations for Houston’s black neighborhoods (Bullard, 1987). Five decades of this type of thinking and discriminatory land-use practices lowered black residents’ property values, accelerated physical deterioration, and increased disinvestment in Houston’s black neighborhoods. Houston’s black neighborhoods were in fact “unofficially zoned for garbage” (Bullard, 2005). Discriminatory siting of waste facilities stigmatized black neighborhoods as “dumping grounds” for a host of other unwanted services, including salvage yards and recycling (Rosen, 1994, pp. 223–229).

Ineffective land-use regulations created a nightmare for many of Houston’s neighborhoods—especially the ones that were ill equipped to fend off industrial encroachment. From the 1920s through the 1970s, the siting of nonresidential facilities heightened animosities between the black community and the local government. This is especially true in the case of solid waste disposal. It was not until 1978, with Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management Corp., that Black Houston mounted a legal assault on environmental racism in solid waste facility siting (Bullard, 1983).

The Bean case exposed racism and the discriminatory practices of Houston’s waste facilities as well as its flawed no-zoning legacy. For example, the Whispering Pines Landfill that triggered the lawsuit was sited less than 1,500 feet from a public school and within a two-mile radius of a half-dozen other schools in the predominately black and poor North Forest Independent School District. Although the landfill was built and plaintiffs lost their legal case in 1984, the lawsuit changed the city’s solid waste facility siting practices after 1979 (Bullard, 2005). From the time of the lawsuit until the present, not a single Type I municipal landfill has been sited in Houston, in contrast to the 1920s to the late 1970s, when Black Houston became the “unofficial dumping grounds” for the city’s garbage (Bullard, 1983).

For decades, the city used two basic methods to dispose of its solid waste—incineration and landfill. Eleven of 13 city-owned landfills and incinerators (84.6 percent) were built in black neighborhoods. This city siting pattern set the stage for private waste disposal firms to follow. From 1970 to 1978, the Texas Department of Health (TDH) issued four sanitary Type I solid waste landfill permits, for the disposal of Houston’s solid waste, and all four were located in city council districts that were majority people of color.

In 2018, the brunt of waste disposal was still borne disproportionately by low-income people of color. In 2018, two Type I landfills, McCarty Landfill and Whispering Pines Landfill, operated in Houston, and both were in council district B, which is 93 percent people of color (53 percent black and 40 percent Hispanic). As mentioned earlier, after 1979 and the Bean case, no other Type I landfills were built in the city. Houston instead began sending much household garbage to four landfills located outside the city limits. In 2018, three of these four landfills were located in census tracts where the majority of the population is people of color—Waste Management (76.6 percent), Atascocita (86.0 percent), and BFI Blue Ridge (85.7 percent).