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It is a luxury to move further away from Superfund sites, and there are immense racial differences in who have that luxury. The pool of Massachusetts residents with the economic means to move further away from toxic waste sites will, of course, generally choose to do so, and those who have that luxury of choice are generally white. This is a contextual phenomenon useful to bear in mind when considering how a state with more than three registered Democrats for every one registered Republican¹²³so frequently elects Republican governors. 

When capital is the determinant of an individual’s ability to physically distance their homes from environmental waste sites, any sociodemographic inequalities latent within their communities are ostensibly manifested through the housing segregation which has defined by those inequalities. Racial segregation in Greater Boston is certainly not attributable to this fact alone, but the presence of such waste sites limits reformative measures not involving systemic change.

Without examining the catalysts which create distinct demo-geographic groupings, these causes are merely moved out of one’s line of sight. By rendering nameless and faceless those who are not within one’s same economic class, it is made easier for the wealthy to recede into individualism.

By understanding these differences in opportunity, the consequences of elected leaders’ policies can better be appreciated and legitimized in the ballot box. Critically however, modern conservatism has regressed in its platform’s environmental position to such an extent that legislative compromise on the part of the Democratic party—to the extent that it was ever a prudent strategy—produces built-to-fail bureaucracy.

It is undeniable that Wheeler’s EPA and the Trump administration’s environmental regulation rollbacks are putting the environmental health of countless communities—particularly people of color and those with low-incomes—in tremendous peril. Much of the ecological damage from their regulatory rollbacks will likely be irreversible. But neither of Trump’s two appointees to lead the EPA, nor the Agency’s actions throughout his presidency were particularly anomalous among Republican presidencies since Reagan. And given the past careers of the Party’s EPA administrator appointments, the policies should not have taken any casual observer by surprise. Indeed, many would argue the more damaging dangers to progressive advocacy for environmental justice and ecological protection are found across the aisle.

The post-Reagan era Democratic Party’s presidential platforms have represented Americans’ ostensibly more progressive option, despite never outright rejecting the framing of many Republican positions.  

Reagan’s economic policy emphasis on federal deregulation, trickle down taxation, and austerity measures shifted tax burden, regulatory oversight, and financial risk away from high income individuals and corporations onto individuals. The Democratic platform was to undo what the Republicans did. In practice though, the Democrats’ party leaders sought largely to undo the regulatory rollbacks, while embracing the Neoliberal framing of one’s civil liberties as being contingent upon their economic value.

In the years since the enactment of the Superfund, federal environmental regulatory measures have been kneecapped by bureaucratic procedure, the outcome of Congressional compromise between Republican representatives who sought to dismantle oversight altogether and Democrats who sought to maximize their constituents’ economic potential—irrespective of existing systemic inequalities.

Neoliberalism is a constructivist project; it endeavors to create the world it claims already exists. It not only aims to govern society in the name of the economy, but also actively creates institutions that work to naturalize the extension of market rationality to all registers of political and social life. Market rationality—competition, entrepreneurialism, calculation—is thus not presumed by neoliberalism as an innate human quality, but is rather asserted as normative, and as something that must be actively cultivated. The practice of governance in the neoliberalizing regime is precisely to cultivate such market rationality in every realm.

Lisa Brawley¹²⁴

This indifference to existing, systemic inequalities impedes progress in racial justice. Dr. Dana-ain Davis, professor of urban studies at Queens College and the Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society, describes the damaging impact of this ‘color-blindness’—

Within this potential erasure neoliberalism plays a perverted race card, in that by rejecting race, formerly racialized ‘‘others’’ can be fully incorporated as consumptive citizens with no racial barriers to their participation in the economy. Neoliberalism, then, willfully misconstrues and dismisses the reality of racism as a powerful explanatory factor in analyzing persistent racial inequities.

This is a rather uncomfortable deflection in the welfare and post-welfare reform era as racism and racial disparities are not easily indicted as racist, the implication being that people suffer no particular harm. Under neoliberal racism the relevance of the raced subject, racial identity and racism is subsumed under the auspices of meritocracy. For in a neoliberal society, individuals are supposedly freed from identity and operate under the limiting assumption that hard work will be rewarded if the game is played according to the rules. Consequently, any impediments to success are attributed to personal flaws. This attribution affirms notions of neutrality and silences claims of racializing and racism.¹²⁵

These surface-deep policy positions have come to define the Democratic party-approved resistance to Republican policy. As political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. points out—

Why does this tailing behind an increasingly right-of-center Democratic Party persist in the absence of any apparent payoff? There has nearly always been a qualifying excuse: Republicans control the White House; they control Congress; they’re strong enough to block progressive initiatives even if they don’t control either the executive or the legislative branch. Thus have the faithful been able to take comfort in the circular self-evidence of their conviction. Each undesirable act by a Republican administration is eo ipso evidence that if the Democratic candidate had won, things would have been much better. When Democrats have been in office, the imagined omnipresent threat from the Republican bugbear remains a fatal constraint on action and a pretext for suppressing criticism from the left.¹²⁶

The Clinton presidency encapsulated today’s Democratic policy positions as they exist on the spectrum defined by corporate conservatives. The 42nd president had a penchant for supporting the sort of policies which would be useful if all Americans looked the same and began with the same quality of life in all respects. Reed, again—

Bill Clinton’s record demonstrates, if anything, the extent of Reaganism’s victory in defining the terms of political debate and the limits of political practice. A recap of some of his administration’s greatest hits should suffice to break through the social amnesia. Clinton ran partly on a pledge of “ending welfare as we know it”; in office he both presided over the termination of the federal government’s sixty-year commitment to provide income support for the poor and effectively ended direct federal provision of low-income housing. In both cases his approach was to transfer federal subsidies — when not simply eliminating them — from impoverished people to employers of low-wage labor, real estate developers, and landlords. He signed into law repressive crime bills that increased the number of federal capital offenses, flooded the prisons, and upheld unjustified and racially discriminatory sentencing disparities for crack and powder cocaine. He pushed NAFTA through over strenuous objections from labor and many congressional Democrats. He temporized on his campaign pledge to pursue labor-law reform that would tilt the playing field back toward workers, until the Republican takeover of Congress in 1995 gave him an excuse not to pursue it at all. He undertook the privatization of Sallie Mae, the Student Loan Marketing Association, thereby fueling the student-debt crisis.

Notwithstanding his administration’s Orwellian folderol about “reinventing government,” his commitment to deficit reduction led to, among other things, extending privatization of the federal meat-inspection program, which shifted responsibility to the meat industry — a reinvention that must have pleased his former Arkansas patron, Tyson Foods, and arguably has left its legacy in the sporadic outbreaks and recalls that suggest deeper, endemic problems of food safety in the United States. His approach to health-care reform, like Barack Obama’s, was built around placating the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and its failure only intensified the blitzkrieg of for-profit medicine…

It is difficult to imagine that a Republican administration could have been much more successful in advancing Reaganism’s agenda…

But if the left is tied to a Democratic strategy that, at least since the Clinton Administration, tries to win elections by absorbing much of the right’s social vision and agenda, before long the notion of a political left will have no meaning. For all intents and purposes, that is what has occurred. If the right sets the terms of debate for the Democrats, and the Democrats set the terms of debate for the left, then what can it mean to be on the political left? The terms “left” and “progressive”—and in practical usage the latter is only a milquetoast version of the former—now signify a cultural sensibility rather than a reasoned critique of the existing social order. Because only the right proceeds from a clear, practical utopian vision, “left” has come to mean little more than “not right.” ¹²⁶

Hillary Clinton and then-CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein in 2014 ¹²⁷

The US is to an unusual extent a business-run society, where short-term concerns of profit and market share displace rational planning.

Noam Chomsky

Collective Action for Intercommunality

The intersectionality of the issues of a person’s class, race, wealth, and healthcare access are highlighted by the varying hospitalization and mortality rates of different demographics. Relatedly, the influence of capital on so many aspects of American governance is increasingly a competing interest to human life.

Nearly all aspects of American life are defined and circumscribed by the Neoliberal dogma of the accumulation and utilization of wealth within the bounds of market-focused regulation. Critically though, some aspects that American law exists to protect are simply more resilient than others, because their damages cannot be remediated.

The collapse, or subsidence, of land areas resulting from groundwater pumping, is virtually irreversible.¹²⁸ Carelessness or malfunction when mining lead can result in toxic acid mine drainage into groundwater, a virtually impossible to reverse process.¹²⁹

Low levels of neonatal, prenatal, or pediatric exposure to lead can quickly cause untreatable, irreversible damage to the brain.¹³⁰ One’s death attributed to their unwillingness to go to the hospital without health insurance is of course irreversible. Loss of species through damage to habitats, climate change, and poaching is irreversible.

Moreover, the trichloroethylene in Woburn did not care what the human consuming it looked like. Nor did the benzene in the Love Canal, arsenic in the Aberjona, or petroleum in Chelsea Creek. What is the measure of incremental ecological progress on a continuum with an initial baseline of a career coal lobbyist in Andrew Wheeler as the head environmental enforcement? Will climate change bend to, or allow for, incremental regulatory reform?

When the establishment political parties and cable news media work in lock step to manufacture consent into the narrow bounds of discourse that exist between a presidential cabinet of lobbyists who spent their careers advocating for the deregulation of the agencies they are appointed to oversee, and an opposition whose cabinets are made up of careerists who only took those lobbyists’ campaign funds, the rate of deterioration of the United States’ air and water quality clearly outpaces policy enactment.

Communities are not affected by environmental destruction homogenously, nor at the same pace. When one side of the argument has so much more to lose which cannot be regained, those on that side of the argument have no reason to ask for mere compromise, nor for incremental change. Many of the existing environmental protections which have originated at the federal level are often only in response to the most conspicuous environmental disasters throughout American history.¹¹⁵

Meanwhile, the influence of corporate contributors and the theme of revolving door regulatory appointments has only increased in the past two decades, with the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opening the flood gates for unlimited corporate expenditures towards voter influence, and the Court’s McCutcheon v FEC decision, removing the cap individuals could contribute overall to federal candidates, parties and PACs during a two-year period.¹³¹ Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have been the only two major presidential candidates to buck that trend in recent years.

Source: Stephanie Herman, GEKE.US¹³²

This highlights the critical role played by community organizing, such as that by GreenRoots and the Chelsea Collaborative in Chelsea, by For A Cleaner Environment in Woburn, and the Love Canal Homeowners Association in Niagara Falls, New York. Local action has strongly influenced federal activities, and has the capacity to help define the federal environmental regulatory agenda.

More broadly, Dr. Denis Salles of France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment (INRAE) presents a further diagnose in his brilliant publication Responsibility-based Environmental Governance—

The progressive withdrawal of the state over the last three decades goes hand in hand with a transfer of responsibility and arbitrage from the state to individuals (user-citizen-consumer) in the name of the governance principles called upon by globalization and the liberalization of commercial exchanges. Following that logic, public authorities would assume the role of prescribing norms, guide individual choices and increasingly control private as well as public choices and their consequence on the collectivity.

Thus, the principle of responsibility and the mechanisms of responsibility transfer observed in the field of the environment, which has become “everybody’s business”, converge with an ideology of autonomy of individuals with respect to socializing institutions and with a discourse on the valorization of self-regulation of individual behavior and the liberating power of the individual’s ability to determine their life-choices.¹²¹

Salles offers valuable insights regarding recalibrating governmental institutions to elecit behaviors of equality rather than individualism, and in doing so, better protect the planet from damaging practices—

If the progress of individualism is seen as a historical step in the modernization of societies, and not reduced to a product of neoliberal ideology, but seen as a democratic asset which elevates the social individual equipped with a capacity for reflection, criticism and autonomy, then this leads to an increased political status of individual responsibility. This concept of an active responsibility, rather granted to than burdened upon the individual, brings him to constantly question the meaning of his practices with regards to their intended consequences and to the perverse side effects of their behavior. Responsibility then acts as the ‘moral correction mechanism of individualism. It is the limit beyond which one cannot afford to be purely individualistic… Individualism and society are not contradictory, the contrary is true.’¹³³

The concept of a ‘shared responsibility’ displaces the paradigm of pure domination, which considers responsibility as a consequence of an egoistic or imposed individualism and as a vehicle of neoliberal ideology. Most scientific investigations underline the importance of economic and cultural determinants crucial for the adoption of new social practices less harmful to the environment. The hesitancy to move on to action stems from the difficulty of putting alternative practices into place, such as different transport modes, waste recycling or energy and water savings in an environment ruled by the constraints of the organization of labor, lifestyle and consumption modes. Environmental practices are economically and socially dependent on more immediate needs, for example commuting to the workplace, school or shopping centers. In order to better understand the question of responsibility in the environmental field, it seems preferable to see the different interpretations as complementary, rather than as mutually exclusive, in an open and pluralistic attitude towards the process of responsibility transfer.¹³⁴

In a hypothetical ecosystem with laws of physics bound by the tenets of a market-based economy, the Mystic River’s water would not flow from Woburn to Winchester to Medford to Everett to Chelsea, as it would respect municipal boundaries. In such an ecosystem, the water that rained on the IndustriPlex would not drain into the Aberjona River’s drainage basin and then into the Mystic River, as it would respect property lines.

If in such an ecosystem there existed an egalitarian society, wherein no person experienced homelessness, faced inordinate social or physical obstacles attributable to the prejudices held by others; where no family drank from a water supply contaminated with carcinogens, endured a barrage of corporate marketing campaigns conveying the subjective as objective, or were governed under regulatory institutions architected to sustain the aforementioned inequalities, then perhaps a society built as ours has been built would suffice.

But amid the economic inequality, accumulated environmental destruction, and racial opportunity disparities found today within the Mystic River Watershed, there is finite time afforded to advocate for something more.

 —-

Referenced Works

Contents

When Donald Trump took office in January 2017, he worked promptly to dismantle the Clean Water Rule and many other environmental protections.

His first pick for EPA administrator was Scott Pruitt, former attorney general of Oklahoma. In his former role, Pruitt frequently had sued the EPA to attempt to block all new environmental protections. The Guardian published an expose detailing his more than 7,500 emails with fossil fuel interests, including the Koch brothers and one of the Koch’s lobbying arms, the American Legislative Exchange Council.¹⁰¹ According to The New York Times, he led 14 different challenges of EPA rules. In 13 of those 14 challenges, campaign contributors of Pruitt’s joined as co-parties.¹⁰² One such challenge was to the Clean Water Rule, submitted by Murray Energy Corporation against the EPA, with Pruitt as a state petitioner.¹⁰³

Amidst a litany of corruption investigations, Pruitt resigned from the post in July 2018.^104,105 In his place, Trump appointed Andrew Wheeler. Wheeler accepted the position, leaving his job as a lobbyist for law firm Faegre Baker Daniels, where his best-paying client was that aforementioned Murray Energy Corporation.¹⁰⁶

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. Francis Chung/E&E News¹⁰⁷

In September 2019, Wheeler’s EPA announced that it was repealing the Clean Water Rule.¹⁰⁸ The repeal was temporarily delayed by a multitude of lawsuits from environmental advocacy organizations, but it was made official on January 23, 2020.¹⁰⁹ The repeal was of course just one example of Trump’s EPA’s onslaught against environmental protections.

More recently, Wheeler has leveraged the COVID-19 crisis with impunity. In a March 2020 announcement, the EPA announced the first of its unsolicited economic relief measures for businesses to sidestep environmental regulation—

E.P.A. is committed to protecting human health and the environment, but recognizes challenges resulting from efforts to protect workers and the public from COVID -19 may directly impact the ability of regulated facilities to meet all federal regulatory requirements. This temporary policy is designed to provide enforcement discretion under the current, extraordinary conditions, while ensuring facility operations continue to protect human health and the environment.¹¹⁰

Many of Wheeler’s water regulation rollbacks have been largely justified under the guise of shifting the authority to regulate environmental resources from the federal to the state level, joining the ranks of many historical figures on the right side of history with that reasoning.[a]

In contrast to the conclusions enumerated in the Clean Water Rule, the EPA under Trump has cited the connectedness of water bodies as the justification to deregulate environmental protections at the federal level. For example, in a November 2019 rule, the EPA determined that—

The known boundaries of contamination can be expected to change over time. Thus, in most cases, it may be impossible to describe the boundaries of a release with absolute certainty. Further, as noted previously, [the Superfund National Priority List] does not assign liability to any party or to the owner of any specific property.¹¹¹

This 'Who could be sure?' perspective, that EPA’s function is to enforce only congressionally enacted protections—as weak as they are—conflicts with what has historically been the “liability at any cost” standard of CERCLA. Labor attorney Martha Clarke explained the shift in a 2017 report for the Northwestern Law Review—

By imposing a much higher standard of intent, courts are actively subverting the original intention of CERCLA to avoid liability loopholes based on difficult-to-prove, subjective criteria. One of the animating factors behind the major environmental statutes was the need to develop causes of action that would serve as effective stand-ins for the common law causes of action that courts had previously relied upon in the environmental context… One of the main challenges of using common law causes of action was establishing causation between the harm and the defendant’s conduct…Given the complicated nature of environmental contamination, direct causation is difficult to prove and often depends on the amorphous notions of ‘fault’ and ‘state of mind’ that were difficult to quantify and could be easily manipulated by the parties.¹¹²

As covered in part 2, it took many years to identify and quantify the extent of the public health crisis that resulted from the Love Canal disaster—many years beyond the initial litigation that resulted from the disaster. For example, it was not until July of 1982 that the state of New York and the EPA determined that dioxin was found in the canal at concentrations 100,000 times the level known to kill laboratory animals.₂₃ Only a year after that, Occidental Chemical settled with the majority of Love Canal’s residents impacted by the pollution for an average payment of $14,250 per resident. How quantifiable could the injuries to the residents have been at the time of the settlement?

There were legislative protections promptly enacted by Congress after this spate of environmental disasters—just not the legislative protections for individuals.

Non-Confrontational Voluntary Compliance

CERCLA was signed into law by Jimmy Carter on December 11, 1980. But the dissenting arguments for the environmental protections were rhetorically impactful, as they hinged upon mischaracterized—but politically artful—portrayals of how the legislation should be enforced. For example, in 1980, the indelible Texas representative Ron Paul rebuked the polluted communities’ residents for even seeking damages—not the polluters themselves for polluting.

His reasoning was sound if given cursory critical thought: free markets are self-regulating, those who are injured by the presence of toxic chemicals should have left at the first hint of their presence, and it was a burden to society for ‘taxpayer’ dollars to go towards the state investing any resources into holding polluters accountable. Paul rationalized—

Yes, there is always danger in a free society. There is always danger everywhere, but the egalitarians insist that we have perfect safety, perfect remuneration, and perfect redistribution or wealth. This is the ultimate goal of the egalitarians. Yes, it is an accepted fact that for the past 50 years we have assumed that it is a proper function of Government to spread the fruits of labor by acts of the Government and at the discretion of the politicians. But must we go to the next step and assume that we will share the penalties as well? I believe sincerely that we should hold individuals responsible for all their acts…

The real issue we are dealing with in this legislation is whether or not we as individuals are responsible for our acts. Passage of this bill would clearly indicate that we as a legislative body do not accept the notion of self-responsibility, and that innocent people should pay a penalty for the negligence of others…

No one can deny that danger exists with toxic waste just as it exists with thousands of other things we deal with daily in modern America. It is obvious that life and life's activities are never without danger. The goal, no matter how well intended, of perfect protection from all potential danger is an illusion. It is doomed to frustrate the egalitarians even more than the utopian goal of equitable distribution of wealth by force of the state-they also eagerly seek…

The absence of a clear understanding of individual responsibility is apparent in our judicial system as well today. Our sociological judges are ‘soft’ on criminals, giving minimal sentence to vicious criminals because they have been ‘victims of an unfair society’ and are not responsible for their acts. Since society hurt them, society must pay…

Were our courts allowed to function under the common, tort law, any suits that might arise could be settled equitably and quickly. It is not the judicial system, but the regulatory system that has been imposed by both State and Federal governments, that is slow and complex. Were this system abolished, the judicial system could function properly. Bypassing our judicial system and leaving the regulatory system intact is the precise opposite of what should be done.

The Love Canal episode demonstrates so well how government-the City of Niagara Falls and the Niagara Falls Board of Education-creates a problem and then how that problem is compounded by the hysteria of an EPA pseudo-scientist. Government is the problem, not the solution, and the sooner we learn this the better off the country will be. The same ethical standards which insist that the fruits of one's labor be shared forcefully and arbitrarily at the command of the State accept, quite consistently, the notion of ‘spreading the pain’ of paying for personal injury or property damage to everyone ‘equally.' ¹¹³

This inspirational portrayal of rugged individualism against all else jived well with recurring American villains Charles and David Koch[b], who deemed Ron Paul the first president of their lobbying arm, Citizens for a Sound Economy (today Americans for Prosperity) within three years of that speech.¹¹⁴

Paul would linger as a monger of dumbfounding takes on environmental regulation for decades to come.

CERCLA was signed into law by Jimmy Carter in December of 1980. The responsibility of its implementation, though, was in the hands of his successor, Ronald Reagan, who took office the very next month. Inaugurated in January of 1981, Reagan abolished the Water Resources Council, eliminated funding for federal participation in river basin commissions, and cut back appropriations to the water-resources research institutes—all in his first year.¹¹⁵ For good measure, Reagan would also remove the solar panels that had been installed on the White House roof during the Carter presidency.

Reagan’s presidency standardized what is now routine practice in republican presidential politics—appointing career advocates for industry deregulation to helm the respective agencies which serve to enforce the regulations of those same regulations. Regarding Reagan’s implementation of the Superfund legislation, economist Harold Barnett writes in Toxic Wastes—

Top positions at the EPA remained unfilled during the first three months of the Reagan term. Those eventually selected to administer EPA and to implement the Superfund program were chosen for their ideological conformity with Reagan administration views of deregulation. Ann Gorsuch [mother of supreme court justice Neil Gorsuch], chosen as EPA administrator, was a lawyer from Colorado with no Washington experience and little substantive experience with environmental issues. As a former Colorado state legislator, she fiercely opposed regulating hazardous waste disposal.₆₀

EPA Administrator Ann Gorsuch’s changes to the Superfund cleanup process heavily favored polluters, as documented in a 1982 report by the House of Representatives’ subcommittee tasked with oversight of federal hazardous waste enforcement—

The Subcommittee observes that this dramatic decline in enforcement litigation is basically attributable to two factors:

1.     EPA’s continual reorganization of its enforcement program since mid-1981, which has resulted in uncertainty and confusion and has adversely impacted employee morale and efficiency

2.     An Enforcement philosophy that emphasizes ‘non-confrontational voluntary compliance’ with environmental statutes and regulations.₆₀

The report concluded that—

Without a strong enforcement policy, backed up by an aggressive program, no one can reasonably believe that EPA’s rhetoric urging “voluntary compliance” will cause many generators, haulers, and disposers of hazardous waste to adhere to the letter of the law. Instead, the improper land filling and indiscriminate disposal of toxic substances will continue to threaten our neighborhoods and contaminate our water supplies.¹¹⁶

Gorsuch’s dismantlement of environmental protections before they had even been fully implemented was not limited to Superfund protections.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) was signed into law in 1976, prior to Reagan’s presidency. The intent, according to the initial law, was to — 

Provide technical and financial assistance for the development of management plans and facilities for the recovery of energy and other resources from discarded materials and for the safe disposal of discarded materials, and to regulate the management of hazardous waste.¹¹⁷

This law, however, needed to be expanded in the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments of 1984. The amendment was passed under the guise of a need to expand the government’s ability to minimize the future dumping of environmental wastes. Its true intent, however, was to hamper the active, willful botching of the original law’s implementation under Gorsuch’s leadership. Kent Portney, Director of the Institute for Science, Technology and Public Policy at Texas A&M, writes in his 1992 book, Controversial Issues in Environmental Policy: Science vs. Economics vs. Politics, that Gorsuch’s efforts in her post were to effectively serve as an impediment to the regulation —

In terms of actual implementation of RCRA, it was not long before the EPA under Ann Gorsuch began to retreat from what little regulatory effort had already been accomplished. For example, in mid-1981, Gorsuch notified [US Office of Management and Budget] that the EPA would essentially suspend the rules already issued governing existing incinerators and surface hazardous waste storage impoundment areas.

In late 1981, the EPA announced that it would defer or eliminate already-issued financial responsibility regulations. In early 1982, the EPA postponed record-keeping and reporting requirements, eliminated the required assessment of groundwater around areas found to be contaminated by hazardous wastes, and removed the ban on landfill disposal of containerized liquid hazardous wastes… Enforcement of existing regulations was minimal, and the EPA often did nothing to try to ensure that hazardous waste facilities were operated according to permits.¹¹⁸

Individuals’ rights remain today a potent weapon in the modern Republican platform’s nuanced argument against environmental regulations. Specifically, the government’s authority to regulate private land has been readjudicated time and again.

Environmental sociologist Denis Salles’ analysis disects this rhetorical device—

The principle of ‘individual responsibility’, which consists in ‘accounting for your actions before others’ can be adapted in many ways, be it as a legal responsibility exerting normative constraint, as an economic mechanism, as a moral imperative,¹¹⁹ or as a governance mechanism.¹²⁰ Specifically within the framework of public environmental action, the individual, in its multiple roles of user, citizen, and consumer is placed in a situation where he can expect his choices, decisions and actions to contribute in a tangible way to the resolution of a collective problem.

As a result, however, the individual becomes responsible and accountable before society of the norms to the establishment of which he has explicitly been associated. This tendency to substitute self-regulation to authority and bureaucratic regulation, while granting individuals larger autonomy of action and decision, leads to placing responsibility for their actions on the social actors. The idea is to have individuals assume the consequences of their choices, even though those choices may be limited by structural constraints.¹²¹

Reagan-era individualistic discourse framed environmentalism as an infringement of individuals' rights to property, and a threat to one’s income via regulatory pressures imposed upon their employer. Today’s G.O.P. cuts to the chase and simply denies the existence of ecological threats. But irrespective of ideology, individual liberties are made shared by flowing water and groundwater, which connect individual properties to other municipal land parcels, communal drinking water, and neighboring watersheds.[c]

Surely this incompatibility of conservative values with scientific consensus would present a clear opportunity for a strong counter from the Democratic opposition. This would, however, require a rejection of the individualist, market-centric premise of said values, and an acknowledgement that ecosystems' being on the brink of irreversible damage is a variable that simply does not afford the time needed for incremental reform. But while Republicans have done away with the rhetorical nuances on the environmental issue, Democrats’ modern Neoliberal platform has leaned into them.

[a] For deeper exploration of this issue, see Other Rights Revolution (Decker), Unlikely Environmentalist (Milazzo), Republican Reversal (Turner and Isenberg)

[b] Two recommended works on the Koch’s far-reaching influence on popular American discourse are Jane Mayer’s The Koch Brothers’ Covert Ops (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations) and Christopher Leanord’s Kochland.

 [c] In other areas of the country where Native American reservations are located, it is commonplace to find the presence of toxic levels of wastes in water that flows through tribal lands. If the residents in the communities within these lands leave the land to seek cleaner environments, they risk losing reservation land permanently. Dorceta Taylor covers this problem in depth in Toxic Communties.

Part 8: Facta, non verba

Contents

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. - W.E.B. Du Bois⁷¹

The Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy And Environmental Affairs (EEOEA) produces mapped data sets that correlate US Census Demographic data with Massachusetts communities. The EEOEA established a criterion by which to group ‘Environmental Justice Populations’ if any of the following are true:

• Annual median household income is equal to or less than 65 percent of the statewide median ($62,072 in 2010); or
• 25% or more of the residents identify as a race other than white; or
• 25% or more of households have no one over the age of 14 who speaks English only or very well  (“English Isolation”)

As shown in the map below, these classifications are quite widespread within the region surrounding Encore Boston Harbor.

Adapted by the author from Google Earth, 2019. Data on populations from Census 2010 Environmental Justice Populations, superimposed on map using data from the Bureau of Geographic Information (MassGIS), Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Office of Technology and Security Services, 2019

The Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey documented that:

• 26.5% of children in Chelsea, MA lived in households with incomes beneath the poverty line, versus just 3.8% in Arlington
• 24% of Everett residents are black, versus less than 1% in Winchester
• More than half of Malden residents speak a language other than English at home, while nearly 80% of Woburn residents speak solely English at home

Drilling specifically into how the communities of Everett and Chelsea relate to other municipalities in the state provides further context. 13.9% of Everett residents live below the poverty line (just $25,465 for a family of two parents and two kids, according to data published by the US Census Bureau), more than 20% higher than the state average. Next door, 19.5% of Chelsea residents live below the poverty line, 75% higher than the state average.⁷² The correlation between the disproportionately high levels of poverty in these two cities and their racial makeup is the subject of the rest of Part 6.

Everett

The Encore Resort at 1 Broadway in Everett, MA— however disruptive to the surrounding neighborhoods it may be when operational—is likely among the least disruptive occupants of the land parcel in centuries. As with the Woburn IndustriPlex in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, factories and biochemical plants rapidly expanded in the lower end of the Mystic River.

Large parts of Everett and Chelsea—originally saltmarsh— were transformed by industry and railroads. In contrast to Woburn, these cities had the additional ecological burden brought from being New England’s preeminent shipping and rail terminals. The Massachusetts Historical Commission detailed in a 1982 report—

As the distribution center for much of New England, Boston's waterfront had long been cluttered with wharves and warehouses. During the last half of the nineteenth-century these were joined by vast coal yards which held the reserves required to fuel the railroads, steamships and power generating plants. New technologies required new fuels and by the early twentieth-century, another series of storage facilities, this time for oil, kerosene and other petrochemicals was established. This kind of terminal fringe developed in East and South Boston, Charlestown and Everett.⁴

Adapted by the author from 1830 map of Boston and adjacent towns, present site of Encore Boston Harbor annotated with star⁷³

The 1912 Historical Register published by the neighboring city of Medford chronologued the evolution of the 1 Broadway plot of land, though Everett had only been incorporated as a city in 1892. The land originated as a part-time island, depending upon the tides. The earliest recorded owner of the parcel was Sam Swan, who had purchased it directly from the town of Charlestown. During low tide, he would pick the vegetation growing on the sandbar and sell it to ‘a man in Reading, for $30 a year.’¹⁰

When Swan died in 1825, he bequeathed the land to his son Caleb, who promptly sold the land to the Atwood family the proprietors of the still operational Union Oyster House.⁷⁴ The Atwoods harvested oysters from the clam beds to supply the restaurant for decades to follow, until railroads and industrial buildings built along the coast polluted the land irrecoverably, eliminating its habitability to oysters. The Historical Register observed—

The island was gradually enlarged until similar filling from the Malden (Everett) shore reached it and the place was an island no longer. At the present time it is thickly covered with factories of various kinds, chemical works, and the accessories of railroad work, all in marked contrast to the days of Dr. Swan.¹⁰

The first chemical company along the Mystic was the New England Chemical company. Though it was only operational from 1868 to 1872, many others operationalized shortly thereafter. In 1872, New England Chemical was taken over by the Cochrane Chemical Company.⁷⁵ Cochrane Chemical grew rapidly in the years that followed, while paving the way for other industrial sectors to move manufacturing operations to Everett, including paint, varnish, dye, iron, steel, oil, gas, and coke refineries. Merrimac Chemical Co. acquired Cochrane in 1917, which itself was acquired by Monsanto in 1929.⁷⁵

Like the chemical manufacturers, the oil and gas conglomerates were consolidating rapidly, monopolizing the state’s energy production. In a unique 1916 publication, The Boston Social Survey: An Enquiry Into the Relation Between Financial and Political Affairs in Boston, author Grover Shoholm’s commentary traces the familiar public-private parternship approach to providing public services, and its consequences that have yet to be addressed over a century later. For fear it may otherwise be lost to history, I share this passage in full —

The story of Gas has been long since told. There raged a fierce fight, years ago, but a settlement was effected [sic], and, as usual, the public forgets. The turmoil subsides; headlines flash forth a new murder trial or a divorce or the World's Series or other such more important matters; so the public soon forgets.

Mr. A. C. Burrage, a lawyer once upon a time by no means widely known, discovered in the charter of the Brookline Gas Light Company a provision under which that corporation was empowered to extend its service into Boston.

He called the attention of Henry H. Rogers and the Standard Oil interests to this charter and managed to negotiate a sale of the Brookline company to them. The charter was used as a lever by which these interests forced their way into the control of the gas situation in this city.

Burrage received only a fee of $250,000 for the services he rendered; but coming into the good graces of powerful friends prepared the way for acquiring the fortune which he has gained through mining enterprises. Burrage is now known as a powerful copper magnate.

Of interest today, however, is not the story of the shameless means through which the gas interests gained their ends, but rather the relation of the gas industry to the people of Boston at the present time.

The gas companies in and around Boston are gathered into a group, a holding company, — technically a “voluntary association,'' — which calls itself the Massachusetts Gas Companies.

In 1908 six companies composed the system: Boston Consolidated Gas Co., New England Gas and Coke Co., East Boston Gas Co., Chelsea Gas Light Co., Citizens' Gas Co. of Quincy., New England Coal and Coke Co.

The East Boston and Chelsea companies have since consolidated. In the year 1910 there was included: Newton and Watertown Gas Co.

and the next year the combine included: Federal Coal and Coke Co., Boston Towboat Co.

Now the process is going on of acquiring the stock of: J. B. B. Coal Co.

In addition, the system comprises subsidiary manufacturing companies which utilize the valuable by-products of gas production for making such things as dyes and explosives. In 1910 gas made up two thirds of the net earnings, and coal one third. In 1914 the coal profits had increased to 43.6 per cent, of the net earnings.

This is one of the ways in which the profits of the predominant element, the Boston Consolidated Gas Company, have been hidden through the various subtle devices of higher accounting. The Gas Company buys coal from itself, or rather from one of its brothers. The money is all kept in the family, as it were. In this way the modest little profit fixed by the famous “sliding scale” is held at its proper level.

Only a part of the story is told by the published figures, which show that from 1908 to 1915 the profits of the Boston Consolidated have mounted from year to year until they are now higher by about $300,000. The electric department of its business, which averaged $145,000 a year, was sold to the Edison Electric Illuminating Company on Sept. 1, 1909.

Surrounded by a dozen devices for disposing of its surplus profits, there is but little hope that in accordance with the “sliding scale” agreement a reduction in the price of gas will follow increased earnings. The result of the many ingenious arrangements of these related companies may be seen in the dividend statements which appear from time to time in the financial columns of the daily newspapers:

The Boston Consolidated Gas Company has declared a dividend of 2.5 percent., making 8.5 percent, for the year, as compared with 8 percent, last year. The New England Coal and Coke Company has declared a dividend of 10 percent, and an extra dividend of 10 percent. The Boston Towboat Company has declared a dividend of 12 per cent., as compared with 10 percent, last year. The Federal Coal and Coke Company has declared a dividend of 15 percent, as compared with 10 percent, last year. The East Boston Gas Company has declared a dividend of 2.5 per cent, and an extra of 1 percent., making 11 percent, for the year.

On page 232A of the 1913 report of the Massachusetts Gas Commissioners will be found a schedule showing how much gas the Massachusetts Gas Companies sold to each other and how much they charged each other for it:

According to this table it appears that the New England Gas and Coke Company sold almost 3,000,000 thousand [sic] feet of gas to the Boston Consolidated at 28 cents a thousand; the Boston Consolidated sold 184,000 thousand feet to the East Boston Co. at 45 cents; the East Boston Co. sold 20,000 thousand feet to the Suburban Gas Co. of Revere at 50 cents.

The Massachusetts Gas Companies owns all the above gas companies with the exception of the Suburban Gas Company of Revere. The Massachusetts Gas Companies, therefore, sells its gas three times and makes three profits before it sells to the Revere Company. Then the Suburban sells to the people of Revere at 90 cents.

The gas which is produced at the Everett works of the New England Gas and Coke Company at a cost of about 20 cents finally does reach the consumer, but not until prosperity has been “passed around.”

The timeliness of a little consideration as regards gas is emphasized by the fact that the matter of continuing and extending the “sliding scale” system of gas prices and dividends as at present applied to the Boston Consolidated Gas Company is now before the Legislature.

If this matter played a part in the last election, it was, like other matters of a similar nature, considered only by a small group in the vicinity of State Street; it was not an open campaign issue. Our modern civilization has evolved a wondrous system whereby a business situation, a position of advantage over others, is clinched by means of words printed upon paper. The business strategist has his position given the force of law.

It is around these vantage points of protective law that political battles are waged. With reference to the controlling elements of the political situation, we do not err greatly if we assume that important political struggles are not fought for the sake of the pure spiritual satisfaction of overcoming the wrong and vindicating the right.

There is no important private purpose that cannot be translated into terms of public policy.

It is true, the political parties annually conduct an elaborate form of debate and bring into play all their machinery for producing stage effects of idealism. But in politics words, ideas, disinterested sentiments, have little force.

That the real governing power is the “will of the people,” that government is today maintained and promoted by the general conscience and the general conviction — is a popular myth that would evoke a grin from any experienced campaign manager.⁷⁶

Drawing of the New England Gas and Coke Company facility, date unknown⁷⁷

Monsanto had purchased the Everett plant from Merrimac Chemical along with the Woburn plants. Unlike the Woburn facilities which Monsanto sold shortly thereafter, the Everett facility was kept operational from 1929 to 1983. In this period, the industrial sector in Boston saw a marked scale back, as manufacturers relocated their operations to more tax and regulatorily advantageous towns and states, if they did not leave the country altogether in response to union victories for labor protections. The state’s highway system which had been built up in this time allowed for many residents to sprawl outwards from the urban centers. A Boston Historical Commission report explains—

The combination of industrial stagnation, loss of residential population and increased fringe activity brought severe problems to Boston's central core. Among these were abandonment and decay. Most evident around obsolete railroad and water front facilities during the period, these problems were harbingers of more serious difficulties yet to come.⁴

In 1983, Monsanto sold the plant to Boston Edison. Monsanto specified restrictions on the deed that the land was not suitable for any purpose other than industrial use. Boston Edison sold the property in 1995, and the parcel changed hands several more times after that, with the deed’s use restriction clause being lost along the way.⁷⁸

Notably, it was also in 1983 that the state enacted the Massachusetts Oil and Hazardous Material Release Prevention and Response Act, which disallowed such omissions.

On May 2, 1985, firefighters in Everett, MA responded to reports of a fire in overgrown shrubbery at the site. As a result of the fire, started by a child playing with fireworks, the dense brush throughout the land was partly razed, unearthing fifty to sixty barrels containing a variety of unknown substances.

As outlined in a memorandum by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP), the drums contained one or more of three types of industrial waste — a clear liquid, a white liquid, and a black solid.

The Boston Globe, May 3, 1985

MassDEP’s memo gave an initial conclusion that the clear and white liquids were “most likely a waste byproduct of melamine formaldehyde resin.” Melamine formaldehyde resin, a substance widely used in automotive coatings, epoxy coatings and polyester appliance coatings, emits toxic fumes when exposed to fire, which it would have been from the grass fire.⁷⁹

The black material, meanwhile, was originally described by Monsanto as ‘roofing tar,’ but it appeared to be quite similar to a substance found buried in a riverbank area adjacent to the plant in June 1984. In that incident, Monsanto removed and disposed of approximately twelve hundred tons of this same black, tarry material, after it was revealed to actually be a mix of toxic chemicals, not simply roofing tar.⁸⁰

Attempts to identify the chemicals, as well as when they had been deposited into the ground would carry on for years. In their response to an information request in 1992, Monsanto provided an account for the disposal of the wastes,⁸¹ which left a bit to be desired—

While Monsanto took the position of not being able to confirm or deny toxic pollution on the site, residents could. One 2014 Boston Globe article recounted an acid leak at the Monsanto plant in 1956, and the hardship it caused residents.⁸² The Globe reported on other major incidents at the plant in 1951, ’55, ’56, and ’58.

In 1987, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection detected high concentrations of metals and semi-volatile compounds in the soil at the neighboring Massachusetts Public Transit Authority (MBTA) repair facility, which has since been sold to Wynn and been subsumed into the neighboring Encore Boston Harbor property. The MBTA contracted a construction engineering consulting agency to assess the site.⁸³

The investigation, published in 1996, detailed the contaminants and the history of the site. Contamination extended horizontally through the soil beyond the MBTA property, and consisted primarily of metals including lead and mercury.

Chelsea, MA within the Mystic River Watershed.⁸⁴

Chelsea shares much of the same industrious history as Everett, but as the southern end of the Mystic River, it has endured the brunt of accumulated manufacturing waste produced upstream.

Comprising a series of drumlins surrounded by low-lying areas, a sizeable share of the city’s land area was developed by filling salt marshes. Sitting at low elevations, these coastal areas are tidally influenced, with high groundwater tables and poorly draining soil.⁸⁵

Through the end of the 18^th century, Chelsea was primarily farmland; the Chelsea waterfront was a rich source of fish and shellfish, and Chelsea Creek served as a trading post for outgoing vessels.⁸⁵ By the end of the nineteenth century, Chelsea bore no resemblance to this description. The shipbuilding industry spurred rapid growth in Chelsea’s industrial and transportation infrastructure. Shipbuilding was replaced with the more lucrative leather tanning, manufacturing of rubber, dyes, and varnish, each industries further bolstered by the immense shipping port that the Chelsea waterfront became.

Chalk manufacturer Stickney, Tirrell and Co., picture taken in ~1880 at their plant along Chelsea Creek at the corner of Marginal and Charles streets⁸⁶

For residents and commuters through the city of Chelsea today, the physical consequences of this unfortunate geographic placement are quite visible to the naked eye.

Indeed, while Chelsea too has a notable history largely defined in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by chemical, leather, rubber, and other industrial manufacturing operations, that history is more familiar to Massachusetts residents. The more inconvenient yet drastically urgent topic of discussion is that of the implicit, stark racial and economic inequities of socioeconomic status and class mobility of Chelsea and Everett, versus that of other communities in the Mystic River Watershed.

Longtime residents of Chelsea have by now grown accustomed to playing the role of ecological waste martyr for the sake of surrounding communities, while themselves having lagging infrastructure for municipal services like sewage treatment.

Approximately 70% of Chelsea is serviced by ‘combined sewers,’ designed to collect both wastewater and stormwater runoff in the same pipe. Most of the time, Chelsea’s combined sewers transport all of the wastewater and stormwater to the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority’s (MWRA’s) Deer Island Treatment Plant, where it is treated and then discharged to the Atlantic Ocean. However, during large rainstorms, the combined sewer pipes can exceed capacity. To prevent sewage from backing up into buildings or out of manholes, combined sewer overflow (CSO) systems like Chelsea’s and about 770 other cities across the country have special overflow structures to release the excess wet-weather flow into nearby water bodies.⁸⁷

Under the federal Clean Water Act, the EPA regulates CSO discharges through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit program. The EPA allows Chelsea three different locations where, during heavy rainstorms, it may discharge untreated sewage and debris into the Chelsea River. Chelsea’s 2015 annual report of ‘Combined Sewer Overflow’ showed that one of these sites discharged a total of 551,935 gallons, and another released 1,181,189 gallons.⁸⁸

Chelsea Permitted CSO Locations as of March, 2020⁸⁷

Meanwhile, all of Boston’s Logan Airport’s jet fuel is distributed via Chelsea Creek.⁸⁹ Seventy to eighty percent of all of New England’s heating fuel is stored along the creek, and over 70 percent of its gasoline and diesel fuel. Road salt for 350 communities in the New England area is too stored along the Chelsea Creek.

The 2019 Chelsea Creek Municipal Harbor Plan documented that—

Chelsea’s industrial activity has resulted in oil and other hazardous material contamination. The Massachusetts General Law, Chapter 21E, also known as the Massachusetts Oil and Hazardous Material Release Prevention Act, is a statute which encompasses issues related to the identification and cleanup of property contaminated by releases of oil and/or hazardous material to the environment.

Under this law, a