
A small town, a chemical plant and the residents' desperate fight for clear air - 1_player
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2019/may/06/cancertown-louisana-reserve-special-report
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zubairlk
I find it really hard to digest such stories coming from the the first world
with so many regulations/laws/a functioning system/educated people etc.

Imagine the state of the 3rd world developing countries..

~~~
King-Aaron
I find it interesting that there's a disproportionately large amount of these
kinds of stories that come out of the US (compared to other western
countries). As you said, there should be enough educated/financially
able/motivated people in these areas that would mobilize and do something
about it.

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mac01021
Not many countries are anywhere near as big as the US, and those that are
mostly have similar issues.

I think a part of the problem is that, for someone in a little town like the
one in the article, regulatory authorities and the federal legislature are
peopled largely with individuals who reside a thousand miles away.

That just can't happen in basically any European country.

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moorhosj
This seems like a bit of a cop-out. States and municipalities have regulatory
power and are much closer to citizens. Many states are roughly the size of
European countries.

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mac01021
Perhaps the state of LA has the power to stop this pollution, but the
residents lobbying for help from regulators， as depicted in the article, seem
to be focusing their attention on the federal EPA. Unless I accidentally
skipped a paragraph that talked about lobbying at a regional level.

If the state doesn't lack the teeth to fix this, why would they choose to
compete for federal attention with an order of magnitude more people?

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moorhosj
==If the state doesn't lack the teeth to fix this, why would they choose to
compete for federal attention with an order of magnitude more people?==

I'm not sure, Louisiana does have a Department of Environmental Quality [1].
In Illinois we had a similar issue play out this year. The Governor is the one
who ended up banning the plant's use of ethylene oxide [2]. It looks an
obscure state law allowed for that action:

"Invoking rarely used authority in state law, Illinois EPA Director John Kim
prohibited Sterigenics from pumping ethylene oxide gas into massive chambers
used to sterilize medical equipment, pharmaceutical drugs, spices and food."

[1] [https://deq.louisiana.gov/](https://deq.louisiana.gov/)

[2] [https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-
pr...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-met-pritzker-
sterigenics-shutdown-willowbrook-20190215-story.html)

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ajxs
The re-framing of this story within the narrative of American racial conflict
feels remarkably cheap. Don't misinterpret this as a lack of sympathy for
those residents, I feel quite the opposite. I feel strongly about this in
particular, that air and water quality is a major issue. One where those
impacted are particularly powerless to protect themselves. However I feel that
pushing the racial component of the story cheapened an otherwise good article.
Whether the people impacted are predominantly African-American is likely
incidental. This is likely the effect, and not the cause. Economically
marginalised individuals of all backgrounds are most likely to be impacted by
this kind of pollution. If you make any environment unpleasant, people with
the means to leave will do so, selecting for the most marginalised
populations. Regardless, this is ridiculous... How is this acceptable within
the first world?

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rayiner
Ignoring the racial dimension would be inaccurate, for two reasons. First, the
fact is that the median income for black household is on the border of the
bottom third for white households. So all the things that happen to poor
households generally, like pollution, happen more intensively to black
households.

Second, black neighborhoods are discounted in the public eye even in
comparison to their income levels. I grew up in “progressive” northern
Virginia, hearing about how PG County (a suburb of DC) was “ghetto.” Two
decades later, when I moved next door, I was quite surprised to learn that PG
County is just a middle class predominantly black county. One of the richest
predominate black counties in the country, and richer than most counties in
Virginia that nobody considers “the ghetto.” Those attitudes almost certainly
impact peoples’ views about what places are desirable/undesirable/need
renewal/etc.

Those two phenomena also intersect. Places are worth less _because black
people live there._ Take the DC suburbs, for example. To the west and
southwest of DC, you have the Virginia suburbs of Fairfax County, Alexandria,
and Arlington. To the north, east, and southeast, you have the Maryland
suburbs of Montgomery County and PG County. PG County is better served by
Metro, both in number of lines and number of stations, than any other suburban
county (and that's been true for 30+ years). In DC, property near a Metro
station has appreciated incredibly over the past 25 years. Where has most of
that growth happened? On the Virginia side, where there are white people and
predominantly white schools. Even today, people are fighting through northern
Virginia traffic from places like Reston to get to a Metro station that then
takes 30 minutes to get to the city center. Meanwhile, they could get a house
in a solidly middle class PG County neighborhood with a shorter trip downtown,
for half the price. But they don't, because they do not want to send their
kids to predominately black schools.

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ajxs
> ...all the things that happen to poor households generally happen more
> intensively to black households.

That was kinda my point, but black communities being over-represented among
the population at risk does not mean necessarily imply that this action was a
targeted predatory action against the black community. If you sample the
population of these areas, you're obviously going to find samples
representative of larger marginalised communities.

~~~
reallytho9
It’s not that it’s necessarily targeted maliciously (they probably didn’t sit
around and decide “hey, let’s poison a town!”), but things like this happen
because black communities are marginalized and have no power (_especially_ in
the south). You want to build a chemical plant. Well, the white people have
money and power and all kinds of means to fight it: they have lawyers to sue,
they have the freedom to show up to Council meetings, they have
representatives who share their race and socioeconomic status. Poorer black
communities have little to none of that. So it’s easier to build your plant in
the poor, black town because nobody there can fight back effectively. Sure,
it’s not lynching, you’re right. But it’s still systemic racism, just a
softer, gentler version than perhaps your grandfather’s racism.

It’s not as simple as deciding whether or not you want to poison a town.

~~~
jbay808
I'm not sure racism is the right term to use here. This seems more like the
inevitable consequence of the cold, heartless, uncaring logic of politics,
game theory, and capitalism. To paint it as racism sort of implies that
somewhere along the line, someone who doesn't like black people decided to put
the pollution there on purpose because of their personal prejudices. But it
seems (to me) that this same thing would happen in a parallel universe to any
less-powerful community, regardless of whether their marginalized status were
due to race, language, legal immigration status, religion, inherited debt,
etc.

Racism is probably an indirect cause in this particular case because it
contributed to the community's lack of power. But I also think that labelling
this as racism does more to confuse rather than clarify the issue, and points
to solutions along the wrong axis. If the best solution is reduction of
racism, then it makes sense to call this problem caused by racism. If it's
actually best solved by economic policy or legal changes, then it's probably
more helpful to phrase it as an economic problem or so on. Otherwise we'll be
looking in the dark for a racist bad guy to punish and solve the problem, but
we won't find one.

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ScottBurson
That's what _systemic_ racism is: not necessarily a specific animus held by
individuals, but an aspect of the structure of society that has effectively
racist consequences.

~~~
jbay808
Does the concept pay rent though? There are a lot of ways to end up powerless
and marginalized; a legacy of racism is one but I named a few others.
Generally the concept that encompasses the result of a group of people being
marginalized, irrespective of how it happened, is class.

Does it sufficiently capture reality to say that this discrimination happens
to the lower class? In that case, "systemic racism" is mostly acting as
shorthand for statistics that black people have less wealth on average, and
points to an explanation of why. Or does this happen to black communities over
and above that of other communities of comparable wealth? In that case, it
makes sense to say that racism is a separate factor, beyond just economics.

I guess what I'm saying is, these are two different concepts with two
different implied solutions:

A) A history of racism is why black communities are poor, and all poor
communities equally suffer these burdens.

B) Black communities suffer these burdens over and above equally poor
communities.

In case A, measures to increase wealth equality might solve the problem. In
case B, that might not be sufficient, and deeper causes of lingering racist
discrimination might need to be sought.

Just labeling the issue "systemic racism" does more to confuse rather than
clarify how to solve it, I think.

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velacity
This is the same Conglomerate that was responsible for the Bhopal gas leak
that killed at least 3000 people in India in the 1980s.

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jstewartmobile
This is a common story throughout the southeast.

Europeans, Japanese--and other countries smart enough not to further pollute
their own countries--export it to the southeastern US, where everyone is
either so focused on JOBS! MONEY! that they'll roll the dice with cancer, or
just so beat-down that they can't put up an adequate defense.

Here's a similar case from 2016 in Mississippi:
[https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-
an...](https://theintercept.com/2016/11/25/did-the-epa-prosecute-and-jail-a-
mississippi-lab-owner-because-of-her-activism/)

~~~
moorhosj
I’m interested in when American politicians (and citizens) became so obsessed
with NEW JOBS. Are you familiar with any studies on the topic? It seems to
dominate all of our political talk and part of me feels it wasn’t always the
case.

~~~
jstewartmobile
No idea. Locally speaking, the academics seem to be pouring gasoline on that
fire rather than water. I wouldn't even know where to look.

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juskrey
In fact, due to sheer randomness there will be small towns with extraordinary
(hight or low) cancer rates. Of course there will be great temptation to
explain this with nearest plant (or healing springs) etc, where the truth may
or may not be there at all.

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Dylan16807
The more standard deviations from average, the fewer towns you expect. By the
time you hit a 50x rate for a reasonably large population, the expected number
of towns this bad is zero.

And look at the map, the whole area around it is spiked to a lesser extent.
It's not random.

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juskrey
Standard deviation does not "work" here. What I mean is that for rare 1:10000
diseases 1 patient per population of 100 people is x100 higher rate comparing
to 1 patient per city of 10000 people.

Obviously sometimes you have sick people in small villages. The obvious
mistake is to calculate the rate per village inhabitant, which is made exactly
on the poster.

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Dylan16807
That's what I was getting at with "reasonably large population". You're right
that for a rare disease 10000 is not enough to make standard deviation work.
But when you're talking about "cancer", all of it, it's much more than you
need for very strong statistical significance.

