Kraut pounded the gavel, calling for order.“I’d like to devote my three minutes to her,” someone in the gallery called out, to swelling cheers.“We are going to hire an attorney!” Geller shouted, her back turned from Kraut, the City Council and Sawser. She addressed her fellow citizens: “We are going to get this stopped! Calabasas is not going to sit back and wait to be another 9/11!”The environmental-justice movement emerged from landfills. In 1978, the governor of North Carolina announced plans to dump tens of thousands of tons of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — compounds also prevalent in wildfire ash — in a majority-Black county, one of the state’s poorest. For the next four years, there were protests, lawsuits and more than 500 arrests. In the end, the state dumped a smaller share of the waste, 7,000 tons, but a movement was born.Its intellectual leader was Robert Bullard, a sociology professor who, as he later put it, got “dragged into this” when his wife, a lawyer, asked for his help with a lawsuit fighting a proposed landfill in Houston. Bullard noticed that all the publicly owned landfills in the area were in Black neighborhoods. He also observed, more generally, that the national environmental movement that emerged during the 1970s was supported by middle- and upper-middle-class white people with an above-average education, even though “toxic dumping and the location of locally unwanted land uses” disproportionately burdened Black and poor communities.“How are the benefits and burdens of environmental reform distributed?” he asked in his foundational 1990 book, “Dumping in Dixie.” “Who gets what, where, and why?” Historically, white people got their way, he wrote, while Black people and the poor got dumped on. As white environmentalists made NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) cases against hazardous waste, government and industry responded with what Bullard called the “PIBBY” principle: “place in Blacks’ backyard.”
First seen: 2025-08-28 13:29
Last seen: 2025-08-28 13:29