This episode continues to follow the first year of the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill opposition and the making of the environmental justice movement that is taking place in 1979. The local narrative is very much a national EPA narrative. PCBs in North Carolina, and EPA regulations in Washington, D.C. are the battle grounds.
EPA is turning hazardous waste regulations into a license to pollute, and the battle is for uncorrupted science. Warren County citizens who have the metaphorical gun to their heads in 1979 can clearly see that how things are playing out in Warren County are affecting what North Carolina and the nation will be doing with toxic, hazardous, and other dangerous waste.
The untangling of the local, state, and federal EPA web is exposing how the EPA is using “Stone Age science” (to echo a phrase from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to legally unleash tens of thousands of untested, unregulated chemicals on the market.
More than six decades ago Rachael Carson wrote at the end of Silent Spring:
“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life — a fabric on the one hand, delicate and destructible, on the other hand miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control.”
Episode 27 continues to focus on this “Stone Age science” as it is being legalized in hazardous waste disposal regulations and technology. A November 1, 1979, interview by Journalist Jim Klosty with Jeff Diver, of Waste Management, Inc., reveals just how our “stone age vogue for poisons” is being scientifically justified and instituted as a way that protects polluting industries, discriminates against and destroys ground-zero communities first, and then spreads pervasively and harms us all.
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