As I type, the Trump administration is currying favor with Koch donors by continuing to subsidize coal in counties who cannot afford the long-term costs of environmental degradation.
The funny thing about rape culture is the extent to which rapists deny it.
When injustice is codified into law and normalized by media, citizens become entangled in an evil as ordinary as tail-gating.
Justin Nobel's "Louisiana Environmental Apocalypse Road Trip" is much more ordinary than it sounds: an example of the banality of evil as it plays out in local development policy. I know this from personal experience--from conversations with the Alabama Department of Environmental Management in which employees denied the existence of leaking deep disposal wells along the Black Warrior River, from interactions with local officials who whisper when they mention "keeping Mercedes happy," from the extent to which we subsidize Mercedes' new class of "perma-temp" employees, and from the indisputable maps that reveal how every toxic project is planned and apportioned to working-class neighborhoods and residential areas.
In Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the local NAACP has been fighting to relocate Central Elementary School only to discover that black bodies have little impact on a School Board dominated by dark money, the overwhelming majority of which issues from rich white billionaires.
Robert Taylor. (Image source: Longreads)
Taylor was born in Reserve and remembers when DuPont began neoprene production in 1969, and the unexplainable wave of sickness and death that followed. Production of neoprene—dive wetsuits, insulated lunch boxes, beer koozies—emits toxic chloroprene, and this is the only plant in America that produces it.
Taylor, in jeans and black T-shirt is well-spoken and furious. One of his main concerns is the Fifth Ward Elementary School, which borders the plant, and where just this past January chloroprene concentrations in the air were recorded at 332 times the federal guidelines. “If we can commit an act of war against another country for chemically poisoning their children,” says Taylor, “how can we stand by and do nothing when chemicals are poisoning our own children?”
There are the problems of industrial production and the problems of disposal. Every toxic byproduct, after all, cannot be mailed to Mars with a "please do not return" sticker.
Image source: Alabama Public Radio
The price of cheap goods over the short term is very expensive over the long term. Coal ash disposal is a case in point.
For the past seven years, the citizens of Uniontown, Alabama have been trying to protect their health and homes from local government's decision to render some bodies less valuable than others. Millions of tons of coal ash has been stored at Arrowhead landfill:
“It was dumped right in a black community, right in front of their homes. That was terrifying. Esther Calhoun ‘Cause my neighbor, she lived right there and she was an older lady, she was like 72, and she would sit on that porch and she was terrified just looking at it. You know, I can’t go anywhere because this is mostly a poor residence. I can’t move, where am I gonna go?” And the Kingston spill isn’t the only possible source of coal ash that has environmentalists worried. What you’re hearing are the generators at the Gorgas Steam Plant, just north of Birmingham. It’s one of nine power plants at work across the length and breadth of the state. Nationwide, plants like these produce a reported one hundred and fifty million tons of coal ash each year.
Avner Vengosh “So what we have in the U.S. is a situation that we are protecting the sky because of preventing emission of metals and contaminants to the atmosphere. But at the same time, the level of contaminants in coal ash is being further concentrated.”
There are at least nine coal ash storage ponds located along major rivers in the state of Alabama. Alabama Public Radio was greeted with polite silence when it asked Alabama Power for commentary. But the truth wiggles out:
Off tape, Alabama Power says other forms of pollution like storm water runoff do more harm. The utility also insists that they monitor their coal ash along with state and federal inspectors. Vengosh says there’s a hole in those policies. “Each of the coal ash ponds has what we call outfall, which is regulated by the state with respect to the volume of effluent that is allowed to be discharged from the coal ash pond into the rivers or lakes that are associated with those coal ash pond. However, the levels of contaminants in those effluents in the outfalls are not regulated.”
When we talk about Arendt's "banality of evil," we assume concentration camps and foreign languages. But the banality of evil was not limited to Nazi Germany--the banality of evil appears whenever persons are slowly dehumanized and killed through ordinary institutional means. By the Powers That Be. When the same institutions that sponsor our school playgrounds also poison our water supply with calculated impunity.
I am certain most Alabama Power employees attend a local church. I am certain they are grateful for Southern Company's reasonable health care policies. Their view of pollution and poison as a natural byproduct of doing business has been drummed into their heads for decades. And their jobs depend upon an ability to serve as a mouthpiece for these norms.