An Intro to Environmental Justice: How many people has your carpet poisioned?
On May 23, 2017, State Toxicologist Dr. John Guarisco warned the 3,587 people of Centre, Alabama that pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and formula-fed infants needed to find new sources of drinking water.
The warning came about 6 months after the Gadsden Water Works and Sewer Board in Gadsden, Alabama filed a lawsuit against 32 carpet makers alleging the companies released cancer-causing chemicals into the Conasauga and Coosa rivers, the primary water supply for both Gadsden and Centre.
Since 1990, Dalton, Georgia – a town just northeast of Gadsden and Centre – has supplied 90% of the world’s demand for carpeting and downstream communities have borne the consequences of the global obsession with shag. Seven years after the problem was discovered and lawsuits were filed, just one party to the lawsuit has settled for a grand total of $35,000, one thousand dollars less than the annual median household income in Centre.
Ecological catastrophes in the United States are as ubiquitous as they are disastrous. Train derailments, oil spills, and cancer clusters are part of our shared vocabulary– it’d be far more surprising to find that “the carpet capital of the world” operated as an ecologically sustainable B-Corp.
What is remarkable about the story of Gadsden and Centre is just how unremarkable it is– two news articles were published by the Chattanooga Times Free Press, another piece came from the regional ABC News affiliate. 25% of the breaking coverage of two rivers being poisoned came courtesy of FloorDaily.net, a blog self-described as “the leading resource for accurate, unbiased and up to the minute flooring news”.
The bottle-fed infants advised to find new sources of water are now entering the third grade without any restitution, and our economic system of production is the direct culprit. Throughout the United States, the same logic of maximal exploitation colocates polluting activity and people economically desperate enough to welcome it. The United States formalized this natural arrangement of capitalism through racialized zoning practices and redlining practices with consequences that continue to structure our reality.
In the same way the United States and other members of the Global Racial Empire export their dirtiest and most environmentally exhaustive activities to emerging economies– mining coltan in the DRC, fishery collapse in the mediterranean sea, consumer electronic production in China– they also put the most polluting activity in the communities that can’t afford to fight it. Whether it is oil refineries in the Los Angeles neighborhoods, Uranium processing on the Navajo Nation, or stain-resistant carpeting in Dalton, a political system that privileges the interests of the wealthy over all else will inevitably concentrate environmental harms among the people who can’t pay to avoid them.
The environmental justice movement seeks to challenge the inequitable distribution of the ecological benefits and burdens of our system of production, hand power and control of the governmental procedures that influence environmental decisions to the frontline communities most affected by them, and make direct reparations for the health consequences inflicted by profit driven corporations on residents.
While retribution for carpet-tainted water winds its way through byzantine legal processes, it’s difficult to see where you can fit in to the fight for environmental justice. The best time to stop extreme pollution is before it occurs; the second best time is now. You can support frontline community organizers by donating to Communities for a Better Environment, a group who helped lead the effort to end neighborhood drilling in Los Angeles and pass a statewide ban on new drilling within 2,500 feet of homes– a bill in immediate danger of being overturned as oil industry groups have collected enough signatures to place a ballot measure overturning the law on November ballots.
