[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 128 (Tuesday, September 23, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1822]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                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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