Refining Expertise

How Responsible Engineers Subvert Environmental Justice Challenges

Gwen Ottinger

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814762615
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología

Winner of the 2015 Rachel Carson Prize presented by the Society for Social Studies of Science

Residentsof a small Louisiana town were sure that the oil refinery next door wasmaking them sick. As part of a campaign demanding relocation away from therefinery, they collected scientific data to prove it. Their campaign ended witha settlement agreement that addressed many of their grievances—but not concernsabout their health. Yet, instead of continuing to collect data, residents beganto let refinery scientists' assertions that their operations did notharm them stand without challenge. What makes a community moveso suddenly from actively challenging to apparently accepting experts'authority?

RefiningExpertise arguesthat the answer lies in the way that refinery scientists and engineers definedthemselves as experts. Rather than claiming to be infallible, they beganto portray themselves as responsible —committed to operating safelyand to contributing to the well-being of the community. The volume showsthat by grounding their claims to responsibility in influential ideas fromthe larger culture about what makes good citizens, nice communities, and moralcompanies, refinery scientists made it much harder for residents to challengetheir expertise and thus re-established their authority over scientificquestions related to the refinery's health and environmental effects.

GwenOttinger here shows how industrial facilities' current approaches todealing with concerned communities—approaches which leave much room fornegotiation while shielding industry's environmental and health claims fromcritique—effectively undermine not only individual grassroots campaigns butalso environmental justice activism and far-reaching effortsto democratize science. This work drives home the need for both activistsand politically engaged scholars to reconfigure their own activities inresponse, in order to advance community health and robust scientific knowledgeabout it.

1
The Battlefront

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

—T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men,” 1925

The campaign of Concerned Citizens of New Sarpy against Orion Refining ended with a show of hands in a crowded, windowless, cinder-block room on December 18, 2002.

The campaign had been one of those environmental David-and-Goliath stories about which movies are made. New Sarpy, Louisiana, a working-class town of seventeen hundred people, borders the Orion refinery. The back yards of the modest homes on one side of St. Charles Street end at the refinery’s fence; massive storage tanks squat just a few hundred feet away. With the refinery so close, residents were convinced that the toxic chemicals it released into the air were making them sick. So—as in Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action—the community took on the company, demanding that Orion buy their homes to make it possible for them to relocate to neighborhoods away from industrial pollution. In addition to the usual rallies, press releases, and lawsuits, New Sarpy residents had in their arsenal a novel weapon: the bucket. An inexpensive, homemade air-sampling device, the bucket produced measurements that proved that residents were breathing toxic chemicals released by the refinery. The scientific data supplied by the buckets bolstered both residents’ determination to move to a healthier environment and their confidence in their campaign. When in July 2002 Orion offered them money—their choice of home improvement grants or cash payments—to drop an important Clean Air Act lawsuit and continue to live next door, members of Concerned Citizens of New Sarpy (CCNS) angrily denounced the company for trying to buy them off. They vowed to continue their fight for clean air and relocation.

But there will be no movie made about New Sarpy. The bucket will not star as the stone that felled the giant Orion. On that December night in 2002, one week before Christmas, the loosely organized Concerned Citizens group voted to drop their lawsuit and accept a settlement that featured basically the same package of cash payments and home improvement money that Orion had offered—and CCNS had rejected—five months before. In simplest terms, Orion had won. Their money had trumped residents’ evidence that they were breathing polluted air.¹

Or had it? Looking at the campaign in New Sarpy as a familiar story of David versus Goliath, of truth versus power, downplays an important plot twist. On the night of the settlement, leaders of CCNS declared that they had gotten what they wanted all along: clean air. They and Orion officials expressed their mutual appreciation for the respectful conversations through which the settlement had been reached. The corporate Goliath had seemingly become a trusted friend.

The night of December 18, then, marked not only an end to residents’ attempts to discredit Orion experts and prove that refinery pollution was harming their health. That night marked the start of a new era of community-industry relations in New Sarpy. It was to be an era of respect, of dialogue, of corporate responsibility.

In the dawning of this new era, there is a movie-worthy story to be told after all—a story of struggle, of resourcefulness, of resilience. It is the story of the experts. It is the story of how petrochemical industry scientists and engineers, and the claims that they made about pollution and health, came under attack from all sides. From residents who disbelieved their reassurances that their plants did no harm. From environmental activists who charged that the industry was harmful on a grand scale. From academics who argued that the experts’ truths are not the only, or the best, available. It is the story of how those scientists and engineers resisted those attacks. Of how they drew on important ideas and popular policies to forge a new relationship with residents who mistrusted them. Of how they themselves emerged from the battle changed.

Importantly, it was the newly respectful, cooperative form of community-industry relations—not shows of force—through which petrochemical industry experts regained their status as authorities over technical matters. Far from being a story of the fragility of truth in the face of power, New Sarpy’s story is one of the robustness of experts’ claims to speak for the truth through clever, fluid alliances with power.

Winning Respect

When the December meeting ended, Jason Carter,*² a senior refinery official who had spoken about the settlement plan at the beginning of the meeting, looked pleased to hear of the vote’s outcome, which he had awaited in the hallway. A white man³ in his midforties trained as an engineer, Carter had been frustrated throughout CCNS’s campaign by residents’ assertions that Orion’s unchecked emissions were making them ill.⁴ For him, it was indisputable that New Sarpy residents’ health complaints were not Orion’s fault. Having come to the refinery less than a year after Orion assumed ownership in 1999, Carter conceded that the facility had had a reputation for poor environmental performance and lax safety procedures under its prior owner. He even admitted that, in the start-up process under Orion, the refinery had had a series of flaring incidents that had made it a nuisance to the community. But by the height of residents’ campaign in mid-2002, Carter insisted, his refinery had no problems with its emissions. They had been unable to corroborate the results of residents’ bucket monitoring, and, moreover, they were working out a settlement with regulators at the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality to redress the earlier flaring problems and other issues that CCNS had raised in their lawsuit.

Given that the refinery’s performance at the time offered no basis for CCNS’s continued opposition, Carter attributed the campaign to factors that had nothing to do with science. In particular, he felt that the campaign continued because Orion somehow had not convinced residents that it was “committed to running the place right.” He blamed the Louisiana Bucket Brigade (LABB) for this: the involvement of the New Orleans–based environmental health and justice nonprofit, in his view, had turned an early, company-sponsored community meeting into an ambush by irate residents and had subsequently prevented Orion from establishing a relationship with its neighbors. The December 2002 settlement with CCNS indicated that the company had finally been successful in establishing the dialogue with community members that he had sought since arriving at the refinery.

In Carter’s account, the turning point in relations between Orion and its neighbors came when he was approached by two CCNS leaders, including Don Winston (also white and of a similar age), who asked if Carter would sit down and talk with CCNS’s core leadership. Carter recalled that he quickly agreed, telling the residents that that was just what he had wanted all along. He met with residents without their lawyers or LABB staff, with the stipulation that relocation would not be a subject for discussion. Residents arrived with a list of other demands, which Carter agreed to. Many of these, such as the demand that Orion clean up the industrial trash strewn on a stretch of land just the other side of the fence from New Sarpy, involved issues about which residents felt strongly but of which Orion officials had been unaware—confirming Carter’s belief that open lines of communication, not lower emissions, were what was necessary to break the standoff with angry residents.

For Carter, the settlement was a victory—but not a victory of Orion over CCNS, of Goliath over David. Rather, Carter would have called it a victory for both parties. With the campaign behind them, the former antagonists could enjoy a new relationship, characterized by communication and cooperation rather than conflict. The money that residents would receive from the settlement was but one way in which the two groups would work together to improve the community. And, with lines of communication opened, Carter and other refinery officials could better understand and respond to community needs. The new relationship also put an end to spurious (according to Carter) accusations about environmental problems at the refinery and put technical matters back in the hands of experts. Instead of taking bucket samples, residents were asked to report promptly to Orion any noxious odors in the community—the sort that would have triggered bucket monitoring during the campaign—so that refinery staff, committed to safe and environmentally sound operations, could locate and fix the problem.

In contrast to Carter, Anne Rolfes looked grim and deflated as she left the December 18 meeting. A white Louisiana native, the gregarious, indefatigable founder of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade had been CCNS’s steadiest source of advice, encouragement, and material resources throughout the two years of their campaign. She thought it undeniable that petrochemical pollution in New Sarpy—and in other so-called fenceline communities adjacent to chemical facilities—caused respiratory ailments and other health problems for residents; that this was not an established scientific fact was, in her view, a result of biased studies and, more importantly, the failure of scientists to collect appropriate data in fenceline communities themselves. The campaign in New Sarpy was an effort to move residents out of harm’s way. LABB gave community members the means to collect data to show they were being harmed, providing New Sarpy residents with buckets and helping them conduct a community health study. But Rolfes also encouraged and assisted residents in using traditional organizing strategies, including demonstrations and press conferences, to try to pressure Orion into meeting their demand for relocation.

From Rolfes’s perspective, the settlement was a defeat in that it left residents next door to Orion, breathing dangerous chemicals. Moreover, Orion had won the struggle by using blatantly underhanded tactics that ultimately overcame CCNS leaders’ resolve to continue their campaign. By offering residents money to drop their lawsuit and remain in New Sarpy, Orion manufactured a split within the community. They then deepened the divisions between CCNS members and previously uninvolved residents who wanted to “take the money” by helping the latter to organize into a rival community group. CCNS leaders were angered by Orion’s maneuvering. But, in Rolfes’s telling, the refinery’s methods eventually made the personal costs of continued resistance too high for CCNS’s core group of decision makers, who found themselves plagued by angry recriminations from neighbors and in need of Orion’s money to repair hurricane damage to their own homes.

CCNS leaders’ decision to settle thus represented to Rolfes a triumph of the oil refinery’s sneaky and divisive tactics, of Orion’s money and power over residents’ evidence and, ultimately, their health. She worried that, by dissolving residents’ campaign and taking away the motivations for their air monitoring, the settlement eroded the little power that the residents had gained with respect to the refinery through their organizing and left Orion able, once again, to insist with impunity that health and environmental problems in the neighboring community were not their fault.

Rolfes was not the only one disappointed in the outcome of that December meeting. When the meeting ended, Guy Landry, a white CCNS member in his seventies who had quietly refused to vote for the settlement, went to her and expressed his disgust at his fellow residents’ decision to sell out. In doing so, he echoed a complaint that he had made at a press conference months before, when he chastised fellow residents for losing sight of the problem of health in their angry denouncements of Orion.

But the core leaders of CCNS, those who had originally been most critical of Orion and most determined to resist their underhanded efforts to derail the campaign, expressed satisfaction with the meeting’s outcome. Don Winston, who had for weeks been bragging that they had finally gotten Orion to sit down and talk “like reasonable businesspeople,” explained triumphantly the many ways Orion would be obligated to the community under the settlement. And Ida Mitchell (also white and in her early seventies), although she remained as convinced as anyone that refinery emissions harmed people’s health, told me with a defiant look that the community had gotten the clean air that they had wanted all along.⁵

For Mitchell, Winston, and other CCNS leaders, the decision to begin negotiating with Orion was a pragmatic matter. The Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ) had announced in September 2002 that it had reached a settlement with Orion. The LDEQ settlement required the refinery to rectify, and pay penalties for, the violations of the Clean Air Act alleged in CCNS’s lawsuit. The enforcement action by the LDEQ made it unlikely that CCNS’s suit, filed under a citizen enforcement provision of the act, could go forward. Even if it did, any additional penalties would go to the state treasury and not to the community, whereas community members would benefit directly by dropping the suit and taking Orion’s offer of money. Mitchell and others reasoned that, because the LDEQ settlement would guarantee clean air for the community, there was nothing to lose—and much to gain—by settling with Orion. Further, Winston especially emphasized that, if Orion failed to meet its obligations or resumed polluting excessively, there was nothing to stop the community from once again taking action against the refinery.

But while the LDEQ’s action marked a victory for clean air, CCNS leaders’ sense of triumph on the night of the settlement had as much to do with the way the tone of their interactions with Orion had shifted. Jason Carter and other Orion officials had, throughout the campaign, refused to credit residents’ assertions that the refinery was making them sick. Residents regarded this position as blatant dishonesty. They were incredulous when, for example, Orion officials insisted that community members had not been exposed to any hazardous chemicals released during a fourteen-hour fire in a multi-million-gallon gasoline storage tank. Moreover, these and other untruths, in the minds of residents, showed Orion’s lack of respect for the community. When a refinery representative suggested that the black sediment that coated their properties was just dirt, residents complained bitterly that Orion treated them as though they could not tell the difference between garden-variety dirt and petrochemical sludge.

Orion’s dishonesty and disrespect angered residents and fueled their campaign activities almost as much as their concerns about health effects did. While CCNS’s campaign aimed to move community members away from the hazards of the refinery, the air sampling they conducted—during the tank fire, for example—was seen by CCNS members not only to demonstrate that they were being exposed to hazardous chemicals but also, more importantly, to prove that the refinery was lying to them.

Settlement negotiations changed the pattern of disrespect and dishonesty—at least in the minds of the CCNS leaders who participated. Beginning with their first meeting with Carter, CCNS leaders felt that Orion officials had been willing to sit down with residents and talk to them, in Winston’s words, “like equals.” They began addressing their complaints directly to Carter and other refinery officials instead of organizing meetings and press events around them, and Orion officials, for their part, consistently responded to the issues raised by community leaders.

In their new relationship with refinery managers, CCNS leaders could claim an important victory. They had not won relocation or seen their health concerns acknowledged. But residents’ Goliath had nonetheless been brought down to size. With the LDEQ settlement, Orion took responsibility for its environmental effects and ended its disrespectful denials. Key officials had made themselves accessible and accountable directly to the community, as well, through settlement negotiations that would set a precedent for dialogues to follow. In the context of this new relationship, residents accepted Orion’s assurances that they could address complaints about flares or smells directly to the company and have refinery scientists and engineers respond seriously to the issues. And even though residents like Guy Landry and Ida Mitchell did not cease to believe that petrochemical emissions affected their health, residents stopped taking bucket samples and publicly challenging now-approachable refinery scientists and engineers about the plant’s effects on their health and environment.

* * *

On December 18, 2002, the dominant narrative of community-refinery relations in New Sarpy shifted. During CCNS’s campaign, both the community group and its environmentalist supporters, namely Rolfes and LABB, saw residents’ interactions with Orion as a battle, a struggle between a powerful, wealthy company and a powerless but determined community. Residents had to fight for acknowledgment of their legitimate health concerns—which they did, with LABB’s help, by collecting data on chemical concentrations and illness rates. After the settlement, however, community and refinery saw themselves as partners in dialogue. In their egalitarian communications, residents could raise concerns, including concerns about facility emissions and accidents. Refinery officials took it as their responsibility to inform residents about plant operations and, where residents’ concerns pointed to real problems, to identify and address them promptly.

In the shift to the cooperative, communicative model of community-industry relations, refinery scientists and engineers regained their control over scientific claims. As part of the new civility, residents neither collected their own data nor challenged that of experts. But experts, too, altered their approach. Prior to the settlement, experts made pronouncements whose content residents thought implausible and dishonest and whose tone they found disrespectful. After the settlement, experts did not pronounce. Instead, they informed residents of events at the refinery, they listened to concerns, and they took responsibility for flaring and accidents.

If industry scientists’ and engineers’ technical authority was a central target of CCNS’s campaign, the new model of community-industry relations was instrumental to experts’ authority in the campaign’s wake. The model rested on powerful ideas about what it meant to be a responsible citizen and community member, as well as on public policies that shift responsibility for health, the environment, and social services from central governments to individuals, communities, and corporati...