The Earth's Best Defense

The answer to “Why now?” is obvious to an increasing number of people, partly thanks to American media. Apocalyptic documentaries aside, it was the tireless, if not overzealous reporters and camera operators who brought us around-the-clock footage of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, one of the worst natural disasters the United States has seen. Somewhat surprisingly, it was the same media that openly berated the United States government for their blatant failure to aide those in need, stirring up old questions of racism in America. While the issue of race and relief has since quieted, compassion for the environment turned to eco-action once a connection between pollution and increasingly turbulent weather was made.

Though the world is now abuzz with talk of how to avert another ecological disaster of that caliber, post hurricane cleanup by federal and local governments has somehow been less swift and dedicated than initial relief efforts. But there are people, many not directly affected by Katrina, who have yet to put the plight of those hurt or displaced by the storm behind them. I sat down with one such person, Al Huang of the Natural Resources Defense Council, to learn about NRDC’s efforts to make New Orleans and other affected areas of post Katrina safe from toxic pollution and, working on a much larger scale, to stop the progression of global warming.

As the self-proclaimed “Earth’s Best Defense,” the Natural Resources Defense Council has grown into a 350-person organization of lawyers, scientists and advocates since it’s inception in 1970. NRDC works to solve a wide variety of crises, including wildland depletion, oil dependence and toxic pollution. What makes NRDC unlike many other groups is their understanding of how race and class play into many ecological problems. It is the Environmental Justice Project, for which  Huang works, that stands up for those who are often hit hardest by environmental calamities.

“I think that global warming has been one of those issues that has solidified people’s psyche,” Huang told me as we sat in his office at NRDC’s New York headquarters. “In some ways they say global warming is the über environmental issue because it almost ties into everything.”

One key to NRDC’s success is that they understand when it comes to affecting environmental change on a global level, there is greater power, and often times greater knowledge, in numbers.

“Building a movement means you’re trying to go for systemic change. And part of that is the community needs to be better off than they were before.” Though this may sound like a standard goal for humanitarian organizations, other agencies’ aims are often much more short sighted. “Let’s say I’m a lawyer. I can come in and represent a community. We might kick ass and fight a power plant and beat it, or we might lose. And then I move on to my next case. Now where is that community? Are they better off than they were before? And do they still need someone from the outside to fight for them? Part of lawyering for Environmental Justice is that the community drives decisions. They tell you when they want to litigate.” Huang added, “I can’t always speak for a community, nor can anyone. And often times they’re the best experts. You go to the community, they’re the ones who know who’s sick. They’re the ones who know where all the pollution is. And they know more about their immediate area.”

Wherever they are working, it is imperative for Huang and NRDC to convince individuals that it is in their best interest to care about their surroundings.

“I think the challenge for the survival of the environmental movement is, ‘How do you tie all these issues that are so far away from people to something that is right around you?’ Some environmentalism has to appeal to the ego. The other thing that environmentalism has at its core is your progeny and your future; what you leave to your kids. They say that once you have kids it changes your whole perspective. ‘How is that going to affect my kids?’”

If Environmental Justice is concerned with ensuring the safety of future generations in New Orleans, they have their work cut out for them.

Shifting focus to the South, Huang rattled off some quick statistics about the amount of pollution that was created or stirred up during Hurricane Katrina. “The coastguard and EPA reported over 575 toxic and hazardous spills caused by the hurricane. Over 8 million gallons of crude oil were spilled. One spill, at Murphy Oil in Chalmette, was over a million gallons. There were thousands of cars that were abandoned and flooded. Just assume that each one of them had a half of a tank of gas. You add that up with the amount of oil spills there were, it probably exceeded Exxon Valdez. And the Exxon Valdez spill was like 10 million gallons, but that was in a large bay. This is in an urban area; a highly concentrated population of people living there.

“There was enough debris generated, 100 million cubic yards of debris, which is enough to fill the Superdome 55 times from floor to ceiling. Or another way, if you like sports analogies, enough to fill 1,000 football fields, three stories high. That’s a lot of trash. And that’s just buildings, trees, garbage. That’s a big challenge.”

This challenge was exacerbated by the enormous amount of pollution that existed in New Orleans prior to Katrina. Huang explained that there is a long history behind why high levels of pollution and severe flooding occurred in mostly low-income, minority communities.

“After the hurricane hit, we knew, because of the history of New Orleans, because of the long history of pollution there, that with that much flooding there was going to be toxic pollution everywhere. And we were not wrong. 

“There’s an 85 mile stretch from New Orleans all the way to Baton Rouge, up the Mississippi river, called Cancer Alley, where 140 oil refineries and petrochemical plants are located. Within a three-mile radius of these plants more than 50% of the people are African American and a significant percentage live below the federal poverty line. So you ask yourself, ‘How did that happen? There’s a large white population in the state, too. What’s the history behind that?’”

Huang explained that the correlation between unhealthy living conditions and race has its roots in the history of slavery in the United States.

“What’s really interesting is if you look at the history of Cancer Alley, that area used to be where many of the slave plantations were located. When slavery was abolished, many freed slaves received plots of land that they settled in, and many of these plots ended up directly adjacent to where the plantation they used to work at was located. When these oil and petrochemical companies came in, many actually ended up buying the entire plantation instead of negotiating with each individual landowner. So you’d have these fenceline communities where the plantation was replaced with
a refinery.”

Though the world’s attention was on New Orleans in the months following the hurricane, even with severe criticism coming down on the government, residents are still finding it difficult to get the support they need to clean up their communities. After flood waters receded, NRDC, in partnership with local residents, had to pressure the Environmental Protection Agency just to sample for pollutants fully and release the results to the public.

“The EPA, to their credit, did a fair amount of sampling. So we analyzed EPA’s results, and then went out at the request of the local residents and community groups to do independent sampling. It turned out that our sampling and EPA’s sampling essentially showed the same results. All over the city we both found high levels of lead, arsenic, and other toxic pollutants in the soil.” Just because the EPA found unsafe amounts of hazardous pollutants did not mean they felt obligated to do anything about them.

“The position of the federal government and the local environmental agency is that, ‘You’re right. These numbers are really high, and they exceed our thresholds that would trigger cleanups. But, under our disaster laws, we don’t have to clean up unless you can prove the hurricane caused the contamination,’ which is a very strange nuance. But what they’re saying is, ‘Yeah, the stuff’s bad, that’s always been there. Every city has this stuff there,’ and because the hurricane didn’t cause it, they didn’t think they had the legal obligation to clean it up. So, the result is that the burden’s on the people to prove that the hurricane triggered it and, ‘If you can prove that then we’ll take a closer look.’ What we hear from people down there is, ‘That’s not OK.’”

Pushing for aid from local and federal governments, even organizations that are in place to help, has been an uphill battle. Some agencies even worked against cleanup efforts, at times to a comical degree.

NRDC has been working in collaboration with Dr. Beverly Wright and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice to remove and replace the hazardous topsoil that has settled around their homes, parks and schools. It was at one of these instructional meetings where they received a visit from the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. “The head of the DEQ showed up at one of [Wright’s] soil events and took the contaminated dirt, ate it, and said, ‘Look! Look! I’m still standing. It’s fine! It’s safe!’ That’s a common industry thing. The thing is, none of this stuff is going to kill you in one exposure. It’s the prolonged exposure over time. So she invited him to come back and eat it every day for the next twenty years. Of course, he declined. She was genius. The press line she came back with was, Head of Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality says ‘Let Them Eat Dirt.’”

Whether or not a satisfactory cleanup is eventually achieved, Huang and NRDC will be deeply involved in New Orleans for a long time to come.

“There’s two ways to look at rebuilding New Orleans: ‘Let’s just get it up and running again,’ or, ‘Let’s build a city that fits our knowledge of what we know now. Let’s make it the most sustainable and green city.’ Because we know now about energy efficiency, we know about toxics. In many cities we don’t have the opportunity to go and rebuild it in a way that’s sustainable and safe. What we saw post Katrina, at least from the state and the federal government was, ‘We’re not too concerned about environmental stuff.’ What the community made clear to us was that everyone has a right to return. They have a right to return somewhere that’s safe and healthy. That’s really been the mantra.”

For more information on the Natural Resources Defense Council, visit www.nrdc.org