Chester is choking

by Veronica Gomes and Kimberley Thomas

Waste trucks rumbling through the residential neighborhood have become a commonplace scene in Chester City, Pennsylvania. These trucks make their way to the Covanta incinerator carrying tons of garbage from Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and places as far as 115 miles away, like New York. It is the nation’s largest trash incinerator, has very few pollution controls, and has become infamous for burning an astonishing 3,510 tons of trash a day. Trucks disrupting the otherwise peaceful neighborhood have become an extension of the myriad ways in which Chester has been reduced to a burning furnace. The city’s 4.8 square miles are overburdened with trash incinerators, a medical trash burner, a sewage sludge incinerator, paper mills, and a multitude of chemical plants (Map 1). This hub of toxic facilities has disproportionately subjected the predominantly minority population, 70 percent of which is African American, to the perils of environmental pollution. Such environmental harm has been an unwelcome addition to the social ills and disinvestment that Chester residents continue to struggle with in their daily lives. The close proximity between the toxic facilities and neighborhoods with a high density of African Americans is unambiguous (Map1). Meanwhile, such facilities are notably absent from the areas that flank the core African American neighborhoods to the east and west.

Map 1. The demographic concentration of the African American population in and around Chester, Pennsylvania with the locations of polluting industries. E = Ethanol Refinery, G = Gas, I = Trash Incinerator, O = Oil Refinery and Red/Green markings = Others. Borrowed from Energy Justice Network. 

Map 2. A Google Maps image of the Chester city boundary.

Media coverage of the Chester case has uncovered the detrimental health consequences associated with residents’ prolonged exposure to pollution. While the sources of air pollution are varied and difficult to isolate, their attendant health problems have been very certain. Cases of asthma, lung cancer, stroke, and heart disease are rampant and exist alongside lead poisoning from deteriorated housing and air pollution. The pollution has reached the extent that even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is aware that the facilities violate national air quality standards. While current news articles uncover ‘pollution’, harmful air’, and dirty air’ as the major concerns of Chester, most of the systemic racism ingrained in the continued pattern of toxic facility siting largely goes missing. Only by placing Chester in a historical context does the environmental racism of the toxic dump come into view. 

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The Covanta Delaware Valley LP, located at Chester, Pennsylvania, USA. Credit: Veronica Gomes
A factory with smoke coming out of it

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The Monroe Energy LLP, located at Chester, Pennsylvania, USA. Credit: Veronica Gomes

Nations’ worst case of environmental racism

So, when did environmental racism start? What events positioned Chester as the nations’ worst case of environmental racism?’

Chester was once a flourishing ‘boom town’, according to Dr. Marilyn Howarth of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology. During the 1960s, it was host to multiple manufacturing centers, namely Sun Ship, Scott paper, and Ford Motor Company. The site of the town along the Delaware River was attractive for industries that heralded the surge of the middle-class population. Chester boasted a good educational system, department stores and was a major music venue that hosted jazz concerts and live theatre. But the city’s heyday was short-lived.

A sign that has greeted people entering the city since the 1920s, ‘What Chester makes, makes Chester’ now serves as an apt parody for the flared pollution that characterizes the city today

A sign that has greeted people entering the city since the 1920s, ‘What Chester makes, makes Chester’ now serves as an apt parody for the flared pollution that characterizes the city today. Chester experienced economic and demographic restructuring after World War II due to technological advancements and competition from abroad that led to massive deindustrialization. The shift of the city’s core industries offshore follows the common trend of industries relocating for factors such as cheap labor and land values. Also typical of other cities in the American Rust Belt, the subsequent collapse of the economy and the deficit in manufacturing jobs led affluent residents to move to the suburbs, leaving behind the poor minorities. 

The evacuation of manufacturing jobs led to the transformation of the demographic make-up and ‘white flight’ out of Chester. Coupling the concept of ‘white privilege’ to ‘white flight’ as geographer Laura Pulido has demonstrated expands conventional understandings of racism. Namely, white residents secure relatively cleaner neighborhoods, through processes of suburbanization and decentralization. White privilege, which is embedded in our social, economic, and political system, thus reinforces discrimination between ‘whites’ and ‘nonwhites’ in creating forms of racism that are geographically distinct. The resulting segregation between whites in suburbs and nonwhites in the city core contributes to environmental racism through the uneven distribution of and exposure to toxic air, polluted water, and other environmental hazards. This phenomenon, termed the spatiality of racism’ applies to Chester’s process of deindustrialization, urban disinvestment, and demographic change that characterize its landscape of environmental racism. 

Racism and its consequences occur across multiple scales – individual, institution, society, and global. The concept of ‘spatiality of racism’ challenges us to look beyond Chester’s polluting activities of a single facility and instead address the larger industrial zone in its relation to the suburbs and the inner city. Meanwhile, a historical perspective helps us recognize the racialized process of suburbanization that created these regions in the first place. The clarification of the relationship between industrial zones, suburbs, inner-city, and race then becomes primary to understanding contemporary patterns of environmental racism. 

Attention to Chester’s broader history of class inequality and racial segregation implicates instead a suite of intersecting drivers of environmental racism

Most studies on Chester’s environmental racism till date have been conducted using inadequate scales of analysis – mainly by focusing on the polluting facilities and its immediate harm on the air quality. Accordingly, we encourage moving beyond those limited conceptions of scale and a narrow understanding of racism to identify linkages within the spatial units of Chester’s industrial zone, the suburbs, and the inner city that produce a toxic urban landscape. Where standard narratives blame the siting of toxic facilities as discreet acts of individual racism, this approach draws attention to Chester’s broader history of class inequality and racial segregation which implicates instead a suite of intersecting drivers of environmental racism.

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The contrastive skyline of Chester marking the power plants to the left and the resident’s neighborhood to the right. Credit: Veronica Gomes

Beyond environmental racism

Two dominant narratives have constrained the environmental racism discourse. As geographer Malini Ranganathan argues, environmental racism is often reduced to matters of individual intentional acts, in which a few ill-minded people misbehave in an otherwise race-neutral society, while race itself is assumed to be randomly correlated with the siting of toxic facilities. Both narratives constrain our thinking and treat racism as an unfortunate outcome of personal disposition. Accepting race as a random correlate of hazardous facility siting makes it difficult to raise questions about the broader structures that direct the siting process. Even when there is no intent to discriminate in the siting process, the market forces that trap ethnic minorities in such locations, for instance, should not be seen as ‘race-neutral’.

In the case of Chester, past policies of housing segregation remain intertwined with contemporary decisions about siting hazardous facilities. Zoning decisions made in the past to racially segregate residents and concentrate industries in African American communities have present-day effects. Even though the present decisions to place facilities in industrial zones may appear race-neutral, the outcomes discriminate against minority populations. This is so because polluting facilities end up in low-income African American communities due to the past discriminatory decisions to situate industrial zones around minority communities. The low-income, predominantly African American community in Chester is thus disproportionately subjected to industrial pollution and its attendant health impacts. This is an example of what Joe R. Feagin and Clairece Boojer Feagin term side-effect discrimination’, where discrimination in one area reinforces discriminatory outcomes in another even while the siting decision itself has no discriminatory intent. Identifying the factors that create disparities in the distribution of polluting facilities is critical towards understanding who is responsible for environmental harms and what can be done to reduce them. Towards this end, more attention needs to be given to understand how housing market policies confines people of color to hazardous areas and if those actions qualify as racist or discriminatory.

The toxic pollution of Chester and its myriad bodily effects on poor and minority residents serve as a vivid example of Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence’. This idea captures the gradual environmental harm that affects marginalized residents, which, unlike spectacular disasters like Chernobyl or Hurricane Katrina, is usually difficult to witness and measure. Slow violence has both spatial and temporal components. While it welcomes attention to immediate destruction within a particular space, it also instigates us to delve into the past to uncover the structural processes that allow hazards to accumulate and defer their damage over time. 

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A quaint neighborhood, just 320 meters away from the Covanta Delaware Valley Facility. Location: Chester, Pennsylvania, USA. Credit: Veronica Gomes

The Department of Environmental Protection continues to make siting decisions based on the demography of Chester, which it perceives to be politically incapable of mounting strong opposition

So, why do toxic facilities continue to flourish in Chester? The Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) distributes permits based on a ‘decision analysis’ that largely denies the cumulative impacts of past emissions in Chester and the active permits that enable pollution today. Deindustrialization decimated land values, which made it attractive for toxic plants to assume permanency on cheap land. The DEP continues to make siting decisions based on the demography of Chester, which it perceives to be politically incapable of mounting strong opposition. Recent environmental justice campaigns move beyond race to engage with people affected by such encroachment due to lack of economic presence and political power. This encourages us to move past previous debates about whether race or class is a better predictor of where toxic facilities are designated. The case of Chester shows how historical, political, social, and economic specificities intersect to produce a toxic landscape. Future research on these components would not only enable us to understand how such factors influence facility siting but also their implications for collective struggle and resistance.

Making the gradual harm visible

What might make the gradual harm of residents more visible and thus more amenable to change? 

The evident forms of ‘slow violence’ in Chester serve as a layered burden of poverty, environmental pollution, political repression, and inadequate education, which makes community activism and resistance challenging. While media narratives sensationalize Chester’s pollution and toxic air, it fails to initiate conversations about the structural discrimination inherent in the historical developments that Chester has witnessed. To grapple with a proper understanding of environmental racism we suggest moving past purely descriptive narratives and those that narrow the understanding of racism to individual acts. The recognition of the scale at which racism is prevalent and its interlinkages with the inner city, industrial zone, and suburbs then become instrumental for a broader conceptualization of racism. 

While we attach importance to the historical developments that shaped much of Chester’s toxic urban landscape, we also recognize the influence of past discriminatory housing policies on present-day facility siting in Chester. Documenting and narrating communities’ toxic experiences also provides a defined shape to the otherwise formless and invisible threats to residents and thereby helps confront slow violence. 

Towards this, Zulene Mayfield, a longtime resident of Chester, has been steadfast in her battle against the facility siting around minority neighborhoods. Active since 1992, her grass-roots organization, Chester Residents Concerned for Quality Living (CRCQL) has made strides to fight against the issuance of new chemical permits to facilities with occasional successes. Additionally, Dr. Howarth and her colleagues are conducting a health study to investigate health outcomes among Chester residents. Besides the health study, they support community members in approaching the DEP to investigate the industries’ flawed practices. They also collaborate with the Chester Environmental Partnership to sustain community’s voice among regulatory agencies. According to Dr. Howarth, a monumental success for Chester would mean a fair regulatory process that decreases emissions and allows companies to operate in a manner that is not detrimental for its residents. Towards this, spreading awareness through public education, distribution of community resources, and monitoring indoor and outdoor air quality has been their other notable success to date.

“Don’t believe in myths” says the Covanta Incinerator. Credit: Veronica Gomes

A bigger question, however, remains – how can we interrupt the pattern of toxic harm done to African Americans in Chester? Thinking along the concepts of white privilege and slow violence – however, it makes sense for us to stop questioning why an incinerator was placed in an African American community but instead question why and how were the whites able to distance itself from the pollution in Chester? Moving forward, is it possible to correct the ‘flawed regulatory practices’ of the DEP in Pennsylvania which according to Dr. Howarth is an ‘extremely industry-friendly’ state? While temporary protective fixes of air filters and cautions about venturing outdoors are in place, when can we finally begin to think about institutional fixes that bring justice to residents who have aged breathing toxic air in the long-neglected city of Chester?

Veronica Gomes is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies, Temple University, Philadelphia. Her research focuses on the study of residential segregation and health outcomes of minority populations with a focus on understanding neighborhood-level exposures, community specific perceptions of health and the spatiality of deprivation.

Kimberley Thomas is an environmental social scientist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. She takes a political ecology approach to questions about environmental justice, human vulnerability to hazards, and the multi-scalar politics of resource governance.

April readings

Source: Grist / Amelia Bates

Once a month, we put together a list of stories we’ve been reading: news you might’ve missed or crucial conversations going on around the web. We focus on environmental justice, radical municipalism, new politics, political theory, and resources for action and education.

We try to include articles that have been published recently but will last, that are relatively light and inspiring, and are from corners of the web that don’t always get the light of day. This will also be a space to keep you up to date with news about what’s happening at Uneven Earth.

This month’s list is a little shorter than usual, but maybe that’s not a bad thing! In April, we read stories about India’s Covid catastrophe, the dangers of the concept of net zero, toxic USA, an Aboriginal family beating back a fossil fuel conglomerate, the death and post-Covid comeback of “third spaces”, as well as a fact-check of the new Netflix documentary Seaspiracy and a general critique of nature documentaries, to name a few. There’s also been quite a bit of discussion around Malmology — a very serious term we coined to describe Andreas Malm’s work. And, as you probably know by now, degrowth, global environmental justice struggles, radical municipalism, and new politics are recurring themes in our readings.

A small note that the articles linked in this newsletter do not represent the views of Uneven Earth. When reading, please keep in mind that we don’t have capacity to do further research on the authors or publishers!


Uneven Earth updates

We hit 5k followers on Twitter this month — join the party!

Is green growth happening? | The answer is no. Decoupling will not be enough to ensure ecological sustainability without a downscaling of production and consumption.

The commons | The commons opposes and transcends the logic of capitalism by building relations based on cooperation, solidarity, mutualism and direct democracy

Review of Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador by Thea Riofrancos | Resource Radicals marks an important contribution to burgeoning literature on resource politics and democratic practice

Well diggers tackling water woes in a megacity: The case of Bangalore, India | The ever-fast growing metropolis Bangalore is running out of groundwater. Yet traditional water practices might be key to a sustainable use of the blue gold below us.


Top 5 articles to read

Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story.

Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

How an Aboriginal family beat back a fossil fuel conglomerate

How value weaponises the machine. In Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Mueller reminds us that the new antagonism between consumer and platform over data capture is not unlike the struggle between worker and capitalist over wages and the working day.

Arundhati Roy on India’s Covid catastrophe: ‘We are witnessing a crime against humanity’ 



News you might’ve missed

Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine research ‘was 97% publicly funded’

Rich countries are refusing to waive the rights on Covid vaccines as global cases hit record levels

Environment protest being criminalised around world, say experts 

A top U.S. seller of carbon offsets starts investigating its own projects

French lawmakers approve a ban on short domestic flights 



Toxic USA

‘No community should suffer this’: Florida’s toxic breach was decades in the making

The toxic legacy of the US military in the Pacific

Nuclear colonialism and the Marshall Islands



Global environmental justice struggles

Georgia: guardians of the Rioni Valley face off the dams

Land grabs and other destructive environmental practices in Cambodia test the International Criminal Court

Attacks on forest-dependent communities in Indonesia and resistance stories

Canada: hummingbirds succeed in halting controversial pipeline construction 



Where we’re at: analysis

SILENCE = DEATH, ACTION = LIFE: New relevance of HIV/AIDS organizing in COVID pandemic times

The rise and fall of multilateralism

Revenge of the plans. Why do we keep reviving technocratic climate politics when it has consistently failed?

Digital colonialism: the evolution of American empire 

Joe Biden’s new Climate Pledge isn’t fair or ambitious 



Just think about it…

Deepfake satellite imagery poses a not-so-distant threat, warn geographers

Why bitcoin is bad for the environment 

Learning a new language can help us escape climate catastrophe. Many Indigenous languages have been forcefully wiped out by white people. Turns out, they’re some of our main hopes for beating the climate crisis.

The problem with nature documentaries

What Netflix’s Seaspiracy gets wrong about fishing, explained by a marine biologist

The 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change

To save the Earth, dismantle individuality



Malmology

The kaleidoscope of catastrophe – On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm

Can sabotage stop climate change?

How to blow up a movement: Andreas Malm’s new book dreams of sabotage but ignores consequences

Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency



Degrowth

Why Malthus’s gospel of growth was, and still is, wrong

Beyond the growth imperative 

Degrowth in demand. Lexie Smith and Jamie Tyberg on degrowth, decolonization, and agriculture.

On sacrifice



New politics

From fossil capitalism to green democracy

Book review: Enlightenment and ecology: The legacy of Murray Bookchin in the 21st century

A youth revolt is under way in South Korea

Farmers are using their stimmys to grow free food for their communities



Sci-fi

Born to rewild: Jeff VanderMeer on what it means to restore your own little part of the world



Cities and radical municipalism

The death and post-Covid rebirth of ‘third places’. “Third spaces” like coffeeshops, gyms and libraries are critical for building community ties and boosting social cohesion. What happens when they almost disappear for more than a year?



Resources

Gender bias in Academe: An annotated bibliography of important recent studies



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Encyclopedia of the mad gardener

by Marcus Yee

“Encyclopedia of the Mad Gardener” takes place in a fictional future where the equatorial line has thickened to become a zone, forcing mass migrations to the ends of the planet. This equatorial zone is the dampscape, where things are irremediably hybrid and contaminated (human/nonhuman, virtual/real, organic/inorganic) and the boundary-edges of solids are fuzzy, mushy, and moist. The zone undecipherable of the equator stands in contrast to the Garden, which is an inhabitable heterotopia, a site of purification, albeit precarious. Desperate for resources in this hollowed-out planet, the Department’s priority is to create a new classification system to determine ‘pure rubbish’, elements from which no further value can be extracted. The narrative focus is on “this Clarice”, who is tasked to draft this taxonomy, but reaches a point of saturation where she herself melts into the humid dampscape.

This piece was developed in a writing workshop, Post Super Future Asia, organized by Jason Wee, founder of Grey Projects in Singapore, and Esther Lu, director of Taiwan Contemporary Art Centre.

.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT2
Things that provide humans with energy
Things that provide humans with energy that are not edible
Construction materials with a five-year life-span
Construction materials with a ten-year life-span
Organic matter
Inert matter
Plastics with origins in inorganic compounds
Plastics with origins in organometallic compounds
Plastics with origins in organic compounds
Solids that look like solids
Solids that look like solids but are actually
Gases
Bio-aggregates
Things with bio-traces
Ambivalent things that could be considered human with further research
Sluices and foams
Databytes
Incomprehensible databytes
Things that appear to be useful (but are not)
Things that appear to be useless (but are not)
Things that are very useful
Things that are very useless
Etcetera.

They need to hear its airless breathing, ozone skin and metal spines heaving in and out.

Words weigh on this Clarice with their inclusions and exclusions, non-sequiturs and false dichotomies, mistakes lodge themselves into their windpipe, air thinning out. Walking out into the labyrinth has turned into a nightly habit. They need to hear its airless breathing, ozone skin and metal spines heaving in and out. Under the genteel face of the pink moon, the orchids appear to droop slightly, providing no compensation. They are no longer the verdant and beautiful, immortal stalks standing erect and sitting out of time. Only the sweet smell of smouldering plastic and aircon refrigerant, perhaps, already leaking through the pores of the triple-layered glass.

They feel the smells seep into their nasal channels, dioxins boiled under the pink moon, flooding neural pathways, gases slowly encrusting, lining the PVC walls of veins and arteries.[1] This Clarice would then become rock, an eternal orchid.

Other projects were lighter, more definite, like the implementation of picture-windows onto every edge of the garden, the first of many ingenious contributions by this Clarice for the Department. The message of the picture-windows were simple: look at what’s outside and look at yourself. The outside would be burnished into the day-to-day lives of the garden’s inhabitants, instilling gratitude, and more importantly, keeping the outside within a frame, as an image, an undesirable horizon, to be viewed from a comfortable distance.[2]

.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT1
Construction materials
Plastics/Non-Plastics
Solid/Liquid/Gas
Metals
Organic compounds/Inorganic compounds
Biomatter
Vibrant/Inert matter
Databytes
Pure Rubbish
Et cetera

This project was like slime, neither fluid nor solid, categories sliding past one another, sticking and mixing like weekday adulterers under warm neon. These were words for contaminated things and the boundaries drawn drew no blood. From past experiences, the Department’s campaigns with compounding, hyphenation and other terminological transplants were unviable options. Surgical as they were, these words quickly dissolved into obsolescence.

The Department, tired from the Babel-like confusion in the administration of the tropics, placed the renovation of existing classification systems as its top priority.

Et cetera was the other problem. The problem was equatorial, a line thickened from a hairline to a stroke to a wet stain: zone undecipherable. Three planets and a fraction already exhausted, causing in a mass migration from the maladies and mercurial weather of the yawning tropics. The Department, tired from the Babel-like confusion in the administration of the tropics, placed the renovation of existing classification systems as its top priority. The most urgent was to delimit pure rubbish, waste for which no value could be extracted. But this Clarice began from nowhere, the agglutinating mush offering neither entry nor exit, fleeing from definition, by definition, this Clarice could not dissect and examine its pieces.[3] It was an admission of defeat.

.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT3
Things that belong to the Department
Things with tentacles

This evening that Clarice, letting their feet navigate the sinews of the labyrinth, find themselves in another pavilion. One could tell that not many have visited the Pavilion of Benevolent Knowledge, with its carbonfibre seats splintered and frayed, the onceluminescent orange of its pillars now off-colour, browned by the moon.[4] Cloaks of dust settled on the miniaturized Banyan. The eyes direct themselves, contouring along the tangents and angles of the pavilion, all lines leading towards the picture window. Towards the outside, an anachronistic dampscape, wetland and swamp. Perhaps from the affliction of the wandering mind, in this sweltering evening, the glass surface of the window saturates itself, as though looking back at this Clarice were the lace of hairline cracks, the undulating light that breaks apart, dappled and dappling layers of dust, rainwater stains, and their reflection onto the uneven glass coming together and torn asunder, one of thousand other countenances sunken into the mush, tangled with gossamer plastic and sewer-lalang floating in deadwater, rafflesian rot blooming with silicon-sand particles of circuitboard, eroded, haunted by the great drift of spectral vibrations from databytes, undeletable. What remains of wet banana leaves, crushed, a halo of flies starving for polyethylene.[5]

.UNTITLED_ORDER_DRAFT3
Things that belong to the Department
Tentacled Ones
Slimes and other aggregates
Pdf. documents
Those that look more human with your eyes squinted
Unnamed names
Et cetera

 

[1] “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober sense his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)

[2] “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).” Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia, 1967

[3] “The unfinished Chthulucene must collect up the trash of the Anthropocene, the exterminism of the Capitolocene, and chipping and shredding and layering like a mad gardener, make a much hotter compost pile for still possible pasts, presents, and futures.” Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016

[4] “I leave to the various futures (not at all) my garden of forking paths.” Ts’ui Pen quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths, 1941

[5] “What matters is through this daily gesture I confirm the need to separate myself from a part of what was once mine, the slough of chrysalis or squeezed lemon of living, so that its substance might remain, so that tomorrow I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have. Only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future.” Italo Calvino, La Poubelle Agréée, 1977

Marcus Yee is an artist and writer working at the intersections of waste cultures, infrastructure, and new materialism. He recently presented his first solo exhibition, Altars for Four Silly Planets in soft/WALL/studs, Singapore.

This piece is part of Not afraid of the ruins, our series of science fiction and utopian imaginings.

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