In its Aug. 9 editorial, The Star uses a narrow definition of environmental racism to defend the Army's chemical weapons incinerator while attacking Rev. N.Q. Reynolds, the president of the Calhoun Chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. This year at the SCLC's national conference in Montgomery, the Calhoun Chapter was named "Chapter of the Year" for its work on environmental racism. Shame on you for choosing to criticize these civil rights and environmental justice leaders rather than explore further the issues of environmental racism in Anniston.The 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice was enacted as an attempt to break the patterns of environmental racism in this country by protecting communities of color and low income communities from disproportionate impact from government and industrial activities. Under the Executive Order, the Department of Defense, along with other government agencies, is required to consider such disproportionate impacts, and ways in which those impacts can be lessened.
The Star's editorial chose to frame the chemical weapons disposal issue as a problem with only two options: incineration or continued storage of the lethal weapons. Continued storage poses little immediate threat but is not a solution. The Army's own risk assessment data show that the chemical weapons incinerator in Anniston will release PCBs, mercury, lead, dioxins, and live chemical agents into the environment. Anniston residents are already overburdened from exposure to some of these same compounds. This is clearly a disproportionate impact.
The truth is, a third option exists which will lessen the disproportionate impact to all residents in the Anniston area, and at the same time fulfill the tenets of environmental justice: use of a non-incineration technology which, unlike incineration, can largely contain the toxic by-products of chemical weapons disposal.
Despite the availability of these technologies and a decade of advocacy for non-incineration technologies by hundreds of Anniston area residents, the Army's Program Manager for Chemical Demilitarization and Alabama Department of Environmental Management have failed to consider them for use in Alabama.
Withholding the benefits of safer cleanup technologies from disproportionately affected communities like Anniston, while offering safer options to other communities, certainly does constitute environmental racism and injustice. The Army and ADEM have safer disposal technologies well within their grasp, and can take steps NOW to implement these technologies ... yet they choose not to pursue this option.
It's past time for the Army and ADEM to take environmental racism and environmental justice issues seriously, and implement more protective, non-incineration weapons disposal technologies in Alabama. And it's past time that The Anniston Star stop making excuses for these agencies' patterns of injustice.
Elizabeth Crowe
Chemical Weapons Working Group, Berea, Ky.
