Since 2004, Warren County officials have considered building on top of its PCB Landfill, a Superfund site that was supposedly detoxified in the early 2000s through a process not overseen by independent scientists and in the wake of which there seem to be very few public records.
Most recently, in January of 2023, the county commissioners held a meeting, during which they announced the results of testing done at the landfill, testing done after 40 years of no longitudinal studies on the health of area residents and for reasons unknown.
The tests show the presence of PCBs in the sampling (levels below “legal limits,” but we must ask ourselves, how was the testing performed? And, can we trust these few samples as representative of levels present within the whole 100+ acre site?).
These questions all lead to a larger one that has loomed over the minds of many area residents: why would a county ever want to attract life to a site that will be toxic in perpetuity, particularly when there is plenty of land in its rural surroundings much better suited for such development?
There are likely many answers to this question, but rather than focus on the motives of those who would consider doing such a thing, I would like us to think about some of the root causes that may contribute to the problematic decisions those in power make as well as the general silence among those who will be affected.
As Albert Einstein asserts, “the world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
In my Our Road to Walk podcast segment entitled, “Pollution Is Not Somewhere Over There,” I discuss my observation that many people seem to feel that environmental activism is not their responsibility because they believe they are not directly affected by hazards that more underprivileged, fence-line communities look straight in the eye—in other words, that financial privilege and status can buy a protective barrier.
However, the issue is larger than that. Many educated and privileged people believe that to be environmentally conscious is to turn something bad and unsightly into something useful and beautiful, to change a toxic landfill into a park, an industrial brown site into upscale condos or restaurants with snazzy revealed brick walls to boot. On the surface, this sort of thinking is necessary, as our country—our world—has a growing problem with waste and where to put it. And, to be fair, many of these people happily make use of, live in or near, or are patrons at such sites.
Gorgeous homes in the most sought-after neighborhoods, homes of professors, medical doctors, deans, scientists, and lawyers, and university buildings where bright minds work and learn are within a mile or even feet from coal and steam plants or radiation testing and instructional facilities. Chapel Hill’s police force is stationed on top of a coal ash disposal site and next to a creek where area residents sometimes take their children to enjoy nature and wade in the water, and officials have proposed that the site be further developed into office spaces and apartments (apartments that must start on the second floor due to coal ash levels and at least some of which would be “set aside” for low-income housing . . . how thoughtful). A short drive over, in Morrisville, North Carolina, a sinkhole outside of a car dealership exposed a coal ash burial site—and, another disposal site of 40,000 tons was discovered adjacent to an area high school. Reports show that at least 8,858,668 tons of coal ash have been used as structural fill in North Carolina alone.
Some UNC student organizations and concerned residents have been outspoken about their concerns for health and safety, but the public outcry in North Carolina and nationally has not been loud enough. I cannot help but wonder why? As Einstein’s words would imply, silence in response to a wrong is as destructive as the wrong itself.
As a literature major, English instructor, and mother, I was struck by how the texts we teach and read to our children and the stories that are so often used to celebrate innovation and the work that it will take to make our earth a better place are often teaching children that toxic waste can be covered up and forgotten about.
Beloved children’s author Richard Scarry shows happy illustrations of the process of creating a landfill and the subsequent work that can be done to make it into a lovely park, and the classic Boxcar Children tales celebrate ingenuity when the four siblings rummage through a nearby landfill to collect castaway items (e.g. cups, utensils) to make cozy their temporary home. Andrea Beaty follows in Warner’s and Scarry’s tradition with Sofia Valdez, Future Prez, a book that celebrates its protagonist for turning a “slimy mess into a park” and, as Amazon reviews promise, will teach kids that like Sofia, “they can make a difference, help their community, or one day become president of the United States.”
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, officials did exactly what folks like Beaty would celebrate. They turned a massive solid waste landfill into a park and are proud of it:
Notable for its flat geography, the highest point in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, isn’t a towering skyscraper. It’s an overlook atop years of solid waste — a landmark we designed to turn a landfill into a community asset. The beloved Mount Trashmore Trails and Overlook stands nearly 950 feet above sea level, adding character to the flat Midwestern landscape (emphasis added).
The site has biking and hiking trails and an overlook for picnickers and nature lovers.
Cedar Rapids’ Mount Trashmore isn’t the only one. In fact, it’s one of many. Virginia Beach boasts its own landfill turned recreational park, the first in the nation, by the same name. Standing at 60 feet high and 800 feet long, Mount Trashmore is the result of the city’s conversion of a “640,000-ton pile of garbage into the nation’s first landfill park. An environmental wonder, Mount Trashmore Park also features many other eco-friendly amenities.” Celebrated as the “most popular area park,” a whopping 67% of area residents make a visit each year to fish and partake in other events. “Amenities” include a skate park, playgrounds, charcoal grills, and more…
Closer to home, Chapel Hill’s Paperhand Puppet Intervention, a giant puppet show whose vision is “inspired by our love for the earth and its creatures (including humans)” and its participants self-proclaimed “activists,” puts on a show annually with a message of hope in a politically polarized and environmentally troubled world. Beautiful as the experience is for me in many ways (it has become a family tradition for nearly a decade), the Deus Ex Machina of turning often hazardous trash into nature and creating parks on disposal sites remains troubling.
What happens when, as in Chapel Hill and Morrisville, sites are built and people come to reside, unaware of any dangers present, on highly contaminated land that appears safe?
Many times, people are not aware that their homes or businesses have been built on or near burial sites or heavily contaminated areas. Let us not forget about Love Canal, the site of one of the worst environmental travesties in U.S. history where a neighborhood was built directly next to a covered canal in which some of the most toxic chemicals made were dumped, or Spring Valley, located just one block away from American University and where million dollar homes were placed atop a toxic burial site for weapons of war.
In 1980, two years before the forced burial of toxic PCBs just above groundwater at the Afton, North Carolina site, Emilie Travel Livezey wrote “Poison Alert,” which addressed the chemical and waste containment problem our country faced even then and looks ahead to the chemical issue we all face: “Besides the millions of tons of waste being piped or plopped into these leaky depositories from on-going industrial operations, untold volumes of waste are moldering in abandoned dumps, the locations of which are unknown in many cases.”
In some instances, it may be impossible to know where chemicals have been buried or released because those responsible either did not disclose the facts or were legally exempted from doing so. That is why the Sierra Club long ago came up with a “Hunt the Dump” program, which encourages citizens to get out into nature for the purpose of both enjoying the outdoors and discovering environmental threats and illegal practices.
As in the case of Warren County and native Montana’s Blackfoot Mountain residents, however, we do know the history. We have records, either in the case of oral histories and testimonies or through archives. The scars have been deeply seared into the community members’ hearts and minds. But, what happens when, as is so often the case, those who were there and who cared or were the children or grandchildren of those who were move away or pass on? What happens if we stop telling the stories? We must continue to share these difficult histories, to tell and retell them, in order to avoid a cultural amnesia—a collective forgetting that allows for compromised lands to be bought and sold without regard for public health.
Environments know no borders, and while the idea of nice and tidy containment is great, the reality is that chemicals migrate through liners and through air, soil, and water, creating devastating and lasting effects far beyond their landing or burial site.
Chemicals pay no heed to status or wealth. As was the case of Greensboro’s waste water treatment plant releasing chemicals into the Haw River, a water source for many including Pittsboro residents, shows, contaminants come from all over and are constantly entering areas they were not welcomed in. Such contaminants may be mitigated with water and air filters, and people can try to limit their exposure levels by eating mostly organically and purposely sourcing their products, but not everyone can afford to take such precautions. And, even with them in place, everyone will be affected in various ways and to varying degrees.
A study by the CDC found that 80% of US children and adults tested had levels of glyphosate, a weedkilling chemical found in Roundup and linked to cancer, in their urine.
Whether exposed at school, by neighboring farmlands, via foods or water, while playing in a park and digging in soil, on athletic fields and artificial turf, on golf courses, or in an upscale neighborhood that prides itself on its landscaping that remains perfect and free of weeds with the use of harmful herbicides, chemicals are omnipresent and inescapable.
And, while we may find ourselves frustrated by constantly having to tell our children, “don’t touch that!” and “don’t sit there!” and may feel that those doing the dumping or treatments are the “bad guys,” things are much more complicated than what might appear and, in fact, those workers spraying the pesticides and working with and dumping the coal ash are exposed at high levels and often face terrible health impacts as a result.
No life is spared from toxic waste and chemical exposure, and while some profit much, much more than others from it, we are all living organisms made up of cells—cells that can and will mutate and turn to illness with small exposures.
Our fates are inter-related, and as cheesy as it may sound, we are all neighbors on Earth.
Life can be really hard, and just getting through the day—with work and family demands and the stress of wars, an economic crisis, violence against so many bodies, and a pandemic—can seem more than enough of a challenge.
But, we all must do what we can for ourselves and all that we love, including our fellow humans and more-than-human animals and natural world.
This often means acting locally and in one neighborhood or on one project at a time.
I am not proposing protecting our own properties with a disregard for others, nor am I a NIMBY, at least not in its more recent pejorative meaning (folks who happily ship off their problems to become someone else’s, usually to poor and minority communities, as was the case with predominately white and privileged residents in Harriman, Tennessee, who sent millions of cubic yards of coal ash across state lines to Uniontown, AL, one of Alabama’s lowest income areas with a population comprised of 68% African Americans).
Important also to note is that the term NIMBY, used prior but often linked to Emilie Travel Livezey, staff writer for the Christian Science Monitor, in an article that states, “People are now thoroughly alert to the dangers of hazardous chemical wastes. The very thought of having even a secure landfill anywhere near them is anathema to most Americans today. It’s an attitude referred to in the trade as NIMBY—’not in my backyard,’” is one that was not always so derisive. It has also been used to refer to people who resisted threats and stood up for their lives and properties against large corporations. In more recent years, however, to be called a NIMBY, as an environmentalist, is a grave insult.
It would seem that invested regulators and polluting industries benefit from the dissemination of this term in its more recent usage, which serves to neutralize people. It creates a false dichotomy that best serves those who benefit from the thinking that there is no other way to meet the needs of society but to create waste and toxic by-products that all has to be placed somewhere. With this thinking, the burden, then, is put on community members to sacrifice their homes and health if they wish to avoid being pathologized.
No doubt, the communities (commonly working-class and minority in make-up) targeted are most affected in every way. Yet, we must see the problems of those most apparently vulnerable as everyone’s—not only because it is the only right thing to do as fellow humans but because the problems will be felt in a ripple effect. That means working, in what ways possible, to protect others outside of our own envisioned “zones.”
If we all acted locally but in as wide of a radius as possible and began to see how our fates are intertwined, changes could be seen globally.
Practically, what might this look like? I certainly don’t have answers and could do a lot more than I have, but it seems there are many ways to make a difference. One might start small by attending community forums or writing letters to the editor or state and national officials and policy makers. A good start is resolving to get informed and perhaps joining or creating a group for a cause and speaking out—even when it isn’t convenient or easy to do so.
Some might argue and even celebrate that the “wheels of production” have to turn regardless of the environmental impacts and that we are in a technological and global age that requires that our phones be the newest, connectivity speeds be the fastest, and where everything old is bad (except for the best wines and cheeses).
With such logic, one might say that because of the production of “thneeds,” the things people need or feel they need, we have no choice but to keep “biggering,” as Dr. Seuss’s Onceler says, our factories, roads, stores, plants, and landfills.
I disagree.
Certainly, much can be said about technological and medical advancements that have made living easier (and have allowed human kind to live, on average, considerably longer than in the past). I have certainly benefited from these advancements in countless ways: access to vaccines and excellent medical care, phones, cars, flush-able toilets, refrigerators, radios, and every other modern convenience that those fortunate enough to enjoy them have come to take for granted.
But, we must decrease our consumption and be more conscious consumers because we cannot continue to produce, and throw away, in the ways and at the speeds we are. At the rate we are going, science shows we would need multiple more earths to sustain our lifestyles.
As those like Albert Einstein and Jane Goodall have long urged, and as James Felice hauntingly chants, we’ve “gotta do something…”
And, Dr. Seuss’s Once-ler would tell us that the change has to start with you and me: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
