For the final edition
of this blog in 2014, I looked back through my files for a report to recommend
as environmental story of the year. One that has stuck with me since November is
a report in The Nation by Sharon
Lerner. It is superb not only for the quality and thoroughness of the research
but also because the story relates everything that is wrong with countries that
have chosen to put energy security and national security above the protection
of life.
In this story about the
cancer cluster in Acreage, Florida, the tragic irony in the pursuit of security
is starkly revealed in the experience of a father who worked as a customs agent.
Because his job required him to keep his nation safe from the bad guys who
would smuggle in nuclear materials and perhaps dump them in water supplies, he wore
a Geiger counter on his belt, and it was this device that detected the high
radiation levels in the water around his residence in Acreage. His teenage
daughter had survived brain cancer surgery recently, and was still struggling
with the after-effects. Several other children living nearby had been similarly
afflicted, some of them with fatal outcomes. Their families had been getting
some support from local, state and federal government, but still the cause of
the mysterious cancer cluster was difficult to pin down. Was it a random
coincidence? Chemicals? A unique lifestyle shared by the victims? Radiation? The
staccato sound of that Geiger counter in the middle of the night was the sign pointing
to the most likely cause—a defense contractor that will always be able to evade
responsibility because of the important work it does in protecting the nation
from evildoers.
Sharon
Lerner, “Brain
Cancer Cases Shot Up in This Florida Town—Is a Defense Contractor to Blame?”
The Nation, November 3, 2014. http://www.thenation.com/article/182099/brain-cancer-rate-girls-town-shot-550-defense-contractor-blame
For years,
radioactive waste has seeped into swampland, canals—even drinking water in
Acreage, Florida. Now a few families are fighting to hold the polluters
accountable.
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Just because I chose
an American story doesn’t mean that this is only an American story. My point is
that this is a textbook case of what occurs in contaminated communities everywhere
in the world. If anything, this American story might be the most hopeful simply
because it is known and reported, and government agencies and the justice
system sometimes did at least function to some degree to assist the victims,
even though there is likely to be no satisfying outcome.
It would be more
compelling perhaps if each story of contaminated communities could be as unique
as a new work of avant-garde narrative, but, unfortunately, they are as
formulaic as the standard three-act Hollywood romantic comedy. So this is how I’ve
summarized the report on Acreage. You can get the general outline here, but it
would be better to take the time to read the long version at the link above.
Act
1: First Reactions
The story began with
the individual families dealing in isolation with the rare diseases that
afflicted their children. At first they accepted what had happened as blameless,
rare tragedies, but then they started to hear about other cases nearby and they
became suspicious of an environmental cause. There were four children with brain tumors who lived within two miles of
each other, and several pets had died as well. Because the town was
unincorporated and had no responsibility to supply treated water, the well water
which everyone drank was a likely place to look for pollutants.
Act
2: The Conflict
The affected townspeople
turned their suspicions into a concerted fight to find out what had sickened
their children. In the past, government agencies had obviously failed to act on
knowledge that the area had problems that should have closed it off to
residential development, but in the present case there were people in
government agencies who did what they are supposed to do when citizens come
with concerns. The state undertook a cancer cluster investigation, which, like
99% of all such investigations, everyone expected to conclude with a finding
that the cancers were random occurrences. This is because random events are
never evenly distributed. If you throw confetti in a room, you won’t find that
each square meter of the floor has an equal number of confetti. Some will have
very few, and others will have a lot. Thus it was a shock to the community when
the Center for Disease Control found that the situation in Acreage was indeed statistically
significant.
All levels of
government got involved and helped the victims find out what pollutants had caused
the problem, but they turned out to be less interested in finding entities to
blame. They found several contaminants in local wells that were above legal limits
and the townspeople got the message. Don’t drink the water. However, after
these results were found, a new phase of the struggle was becoming apparent.
The government agencies were prepared to close the investigation by publishing understated
generalities like “water is safe for families to enjoy outdoor activities in
their yards.”
At this point the
families realized that the government agencies had little interest in pursuing
justice for past suffering, or doing anything that would deter future crimes.
The more they spoke up and demanded that polluters be identified and punished,
the more the unaffected residents fought back. Most people were not affected by
health problems, and they were more concerned about maintaining property
values, business investment and jobs.
The families that
continued to seek answers were accused of gold digging—cynically using their
children’s tragic deaths to get money from big corporations. They were subjected
to verbal abuse, physical threats, vandalism, and online bullying.
Act
3: Small victories, big defeats
Some of the affected
families persisted in going forward in civil trials, while others declined. There
are 13 personal injury suits and two class action lawsuits over damages to
property values—declines which co-occurred, unfortunately for the plaintiffs, with
the nation-wide crash in property values in 2007-08.
There have been famous
precedents in environmental justice cases which involved private lawsuits and
legal actions by government agencies. The cases in Woburn, Mass. and Toms
River, NJ are two mentioned in the article because they serve as examples where
much was spent for little gain. They actually serve as deterrents now for lawyers
working on contingency and government agencies that might consider going after environmental
crimes. Furthermore, some corporations, just like some individuals, are easier
to target than others. In the late 1990s, several American states were ready to
make the tobacco industry pay hundreds of billions for health care costs, but
when the defendants are defense contractors working on secret projects for the
government itself, government agencies aren’t likely to be interesting in prosecution.
Meanwhile, much was
done to deflect attention to other possible causes: old dump sites, pesticides
and herbicides, or even the smoke from sugar cane fires. Yet the brain cancer cluster
in children was a unique kind of cancer cluster that deserved to have special
attention, and one question worth pursuing arose from the fact that radiation
is a known cause of brain cancer. That was where the custom officer’s Geiger
counter entered the story.
One suspect was a
limestone mine that was known to have released a lot of radon out of the soil,
but the more likely culprit that emerged was Pratt and Whitney, a defense
contractor that had been in the area for decades. The company was able to
conceal information under the cloak of national security, and the courts had no
power to make them hand it over. However, records were found of radionuclide
use in Pratt and Whitney facilities—in particular, radionuclides that don’t
occur naturally. But Pratt and Whitney said these were Chernobyl fallout.* The
company had also released various chemicals into the environment: jet fuel, trichloroethylene,
PCBs… And there was a study that showed the death rate by cancer of company
workers went from 13 to 122 per 100,000 between 1967 and 1980.
There was a point in
the early 1980s when the EPA wanted to declare the Acreage area a Superfund
site, but Pratt and Whitney won that battle and government agencies began to
forget about the issue. Today, the company sponsors cancer charities and
engages in other greenwashing activities, and there has been a revolving door
for high-level officials to move between regulatory agencies and corporations. It
seems like none of the government agencies ever made the effort to at least
have the state zone the worst areas as “nature preserves”—an increasingly
common euphemistic label employed in recent years to let polluters save face
(and $$) while the public is kept from living on land they don’t know is
contaminated. Like the wildlife that has to live there, the humans don’t need
to know, apparently.
The legal battles
continue, but many opted to take their losses on loved ones, property and careers and just
move far away. Many who stayed feel just like residents of Fukushima. They may
not claim to have suffered any physical harm from the pollution, but the
revelations about their contaminated environment have left them traumatized and
fearful about what the future holds in store.
What
does this say about us?
The story of Acreage
wouldn’t be so worrisome if it were just a one-time tragedy, but it is really
just a typical entry in a long list of such cases. Almost very element of this story can be found in any story of contaminated communities. In my short lifetime I’ve
been chilled to see the growing indifference to the phrase “national sacrifice
zone.” It’s like we just shrug it off and add one more to the list, as if there
were an infinite supply of new places to inhabit.
When Hernan Cortes
conquered Mexico in 1521, one of the rationalizations for the takeover was that
the Aztecs were barbarians who sacrificed innocent children to their heathen gods.
At least they had an excuse. They hadn’t developed a rational scientific method
to teach them that the sacrifices were unnecessary. Ironically, we have had our
scientific method for 500 years, but it has been warped into a faith called
scientism which serves the ends of military and corporate expansion. An
entrenched priesthood of scientists and economists tells us that children with glioblastoma
brain tumors are just a part of our way of life that we must accept. A
sacrifice for all the great benefits bestowed upon us.
*
A question for those online activists who have found radiation hot spots in
Florida that they claim to be Fukushima fallout: Have you ruled out all possible
local sources?
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