Crimes Against Nature

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061740961
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politische Korruption & Fehlverhalten

Crimes against Nature reveals the hidden history behind three of the nation's first parklands: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Focusing on conservation's impact on local inhabitants, Karl Jacoby traces the effect of criminalizing such traditional practices as hunting, fishing, foraging, and timber cutting in the newly created parks. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes" and provides a rich portrait of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

1

The Mess in Texas

As you fly over the Houston Ship Channel at twilight, thousands of flares seem to ignite in the approaching darkness. Smokestacks from more than a hundred massive chemical factories, oil refineries, and power plants have suddenly become steel towers of light and fire. From the air, it’s not hard to understand why some call this area the “golden triangle.” This concentration of industry, which includes a 3,000-acre ExxonMobil facility—the planet’s largest oil refinery—generates enough wealth for its owners to make the Texas economy bigger than the gross domestic product of most nations.¹

It is a different scene on the ground. There the twilight flares rumble, the ground shakes, the air hisses. Plumes of black smoke belch upward and acrid odors permeate the atmosphere. The smell of money, some call it. But from this earthly vantage point—especially for low-income residents living downwind in eastern Harris County—it is less a golden triangle than a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.

The ubiquitous highway signs warning “Don’t Mess With Texas,” haven’t deterred the state’s polluters one bit. Here are some basic facts about the Lone Star State: According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, fully one-quarter of Texas’s streams and rivers are so polluted that they do not meet standards set for recreational use.² Half of the state’s 20 million people reside in areas where the smog pollution surpasses federal limits.³ In 1999, Houston overtook Los Angeles as America’s smoggiest city. Texas also ranked first in toxic releases to the environment, first in total toxic air emissions from industrial facilities, first in toxic chemical accidents, and first in cancer-causing pollution.⁴ Also in 1999, 15 of the nation’s 30 highest smog readings were all taken in Texas.⁵ Every major urban area—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, and Longview—either failed to meet the EPA’s minimum air quality standards, or was on the verge of failing.⁶

“The level of damage to human health is extraordinary,” says Tom Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. He cites a recent mayoral study estimating annual pollution-related health care costs of between $2.9 and $3.1 billion in the Houston metropolitan area alone.⁷ Air pollution kills an estimated 435 people a year in the city.⁸ “We lead the nation in childhood asthma,” says Lanell Anderson, a resident of Clear Lake, a town south of Houston that’s surrounded by chemical plants. “We lead the nation in childhood cancer…. Our cup runneth over.”⁹

Texas has long been one of the most polluted states in the country, but rather than remedy the situation, George W. Bush set out to destroy virtually all attempts to clean up the state’s tainted air, water, and land. During his six-year reign as governor, from 1994 to 2000, Texas dropped to number 49 in spending on the environment.¹⁰ Under his watch, Texas had the worst pollution record in the United States. It sent the most toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the air. It had the highest emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), accounting for at least 10 percent of the national total. It had the most chemical spills and Clean Water Act violations, and produced the largest volume of hazardous waste.¹¹ As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it shortly before Bush received the Republican nomination in 2000, “Mr. Bush’s relationship to the environment is roughly that of a doctor to a patient—when the doctor’s name is Kevorkian.”¹²

The anti-environment agenda of today’s White House was honed and perfected during Bush’s gubernatorial years. It was in Texas that he developed the tactics and policies that guide his autocratic leadership today: closed-door meetings with industry insiders who are among his biggest campaign contributors; reliance on pseudo-scientific “studies” by right-wing think tanks; emasculation of regulations that cut into industry profits; citizens muzzled in debates that affect their communities.

Soon after becoming governor, Bush declared tort reform an “emergency issue” and appointed judges who made it all but impossible for Texans to bring class action lawsuits against polluters. In 1995 he pushed through the Private Real Property Rights Preservation Act, a radical “takings” bill that would make taxpayers pay polluters’ cost of complying with pollution laws. According to this view, corporations should be able to do what they want with their private property; if the state cuts into their profits by forcing them to adopt pollution-control measures, the state (i.e., the public) should pay. This perverse doctrine reverses a millennium of western property law that holds that owners can use their property as they please, but never in a way that diminishes their neighbors’ property or the public trust properties like air and water. Leading the charge for this radical new approach was right-wing private-property advocate Marshall Kuykendall, who complained at a public forum that the last time the federal government took our property without compensation is “when Lincoln freed the slaves.”¹³

In another foreshadowing of his presidency, Bush installed a pro-industry troika to run the state’s environmental agency, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission. Bush selected Barry McBee, a lawyer with a host of oil-industry clients, to chair the TNRCC. At his previous position at the Texas Department of Agriculture, farm labor and environmental groups accused McBee of helping to dismantle a program that kept farmworkers out of fields that were still “hot” after pesticide applications. The second appointee was Ralph Marquez, a former Monsanto executive and lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council. Marquez quashed a plan to issue health warnings to Houston residents on high-smog days and later testified before a congressional committee that ozone “is a relatively benign pollutant.”¹⁴ Bush’s third appointment was a cattleman named John Baker, former official of the Texas Farm Bureau, a sworn enemy of pesticide regulations.¹⁵

The new TNRCC came to be known by the moniker “Train Wreck.” Until this new regime was in place, all Texas citizens had the right to challenge pollution permits required by companies for their waste disposal. This right is one of the few recourses that regular folks have to protect their health, homes, and communities from the ravages of pollution. The new TNRCC soon eliminated this policy, as well as the long-standing practice of making surprise inspections of industrial plants. It discovered loopholes in all kinds of federal and state environmental regulations. On Halloween 1995, for example, the TNRCC announced Texas’s plan to revise the Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards, an EPA directive that requires states to monitor for unsafe levels of ozone. The TNRCC decided it would mathematically average ozone pollution across large areas, in hopes that, in the words of Neil Carman, a former agency staffer, it could make “exceedances disappear by massaging the high numbers.” Carman is now Clean Air Director for the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club.¹⁶

Slashing the TNRCC’s budget by 20 percent, Bush ensured that the commission couldn’t possibly fulfill its duty as the state’s environmental watchdog. Texas virtually ceased monitoring water quality after Bush’s election, for example, despite the fact that Texas had far more facilities discharging into waterways than any other state.¹⁷ The Environmental Working Group, a national nonprofit research organization, reported that Texas also had the worst record in the country for inspecting companies that violated the Clean Water Act.¹⁸ Indeed, so little money was spent on protecting waterways that “almost nothing is known about the quality of 25,000 out of 40,000 miles of the state’s permanent rivers and streams,” according to the Texas Environmental Almanac in 1995. Even when the TNRCC did know of toxic water, it often failed to disclose its findings to the public. When the commission learned of high mercury levels in the Rio Grande River near Laredo, for example, it refused to inform residents.¹⁹ In 1999, the Natural Resources Defense Council named Texas as one of six “beach bum” states for a second consecutive year—because the state had no monitoring system designed to alert swimmers to potential pollution-related health risks.²⁰

But it is Governor Bush’s record on air pollution that is most appalling. When the Texas Clean Air Act of 1971 became law, more than 1,000 industrial facilities were “grandfathered,” or exempted from the new pollution regulations. The idea was that these grandfathered plants would eventually either modernize or become obsolete and close down. This was wishful thinking at best: In reality, companies that didn’t have to spend money on pollution control had a competitive edge over their regulated competitors.²¹ And with little incentive to modernize, they didn’t. While their competitors had to apply for a permit to pollute, running the gauntlet of public comment and government scrutiny, grandfathered companies just kept their outdated plants up and running.

These grandfathered polluters now create havoc for communities all over Texas. For example, some 30 miles from Dallas is the town of Midlothian, known as the “Cement Capital of America.” The largest operator is the TXI Corporation, whose emission control systems date back to 1972. The plant is powered by a generator that burns hazardous waste trucked in by other companies, a double-your-money idea that eliminates the need for natural gas to fire TXI’s kilns. The company’s own testing has revealed smokestacks belching out carcinogens at levels far in excess of EPA standards.²² According to a 1997 report in the Dallas Observer, “scientists don’t even have names for some of the substances coming out of TXI’s stacks.”²³ Midlothian residents have long complained of a variety of health problems, and a 1996 report by the Texas Department of Health noted that Down’s syndrome is unusually prevalent in babies born in the area.²⁴

Fully one-third of the state’s air pollution—903,800 tons a year by the end of the 1990s—was issuing from these grandfathered smokestacks.²⁵ These plants emit as much nitrogen oxide as 18 million cars.²⁶ One company, Alcoa, Inc., North America’s largest aluminum smelter, was responsible for more than 100,000 tons of toxic emissions at one of its plants in 1997. Neighboring Milam County residents maintain that the air around Alcoa’s smelter is so acidic that it eats the galvanized coating off barbed-wire fences. Neil Carman of the Sierra Club compares the situation to getting caught driving without a license, but happily finding that speed limits don’t apply to you: “You just say, ‘Well, I’m grandfathered, officer,’ and the reply is, ‘Have a good day, just don’t kill too many people.’ ”²⁷

By the 1990s, the Clinton administration’s EPA had these Texas polluters in its crosshairs. This put Bush in a tight spot. In order to get the EPA off his back, he needed to put some kind of state regulations in place. Trouble was, many of the top polluters were his prime financial backers. Between 1993 and 1998 Alcoa, Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Enron, Dow Chemical, and others poured $1.5 million into the Bush campaign coffers.²⁸

After privately conferring with these corporate backers, Bush pushed through two landmark laws, the 1995 Texas Audit Privilege an...