Raul Alvarez, PODER and Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter

Raul Alvarez is transportation coordinator for People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources (PODER), an environmental justice group based in East Austin, Texas. He is also environmental justice director for the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter in Texas.

The earthquake in Turkey has been a sobering reminder of the awesome and unpredictable power of nature. The totality of the disaster is difficult to grasp: large-scale structural damage and loss of human life; the threat of death and disease from lack of food, water, and sanitation; the additional threat of disease from flies and mosquitoes brought on by torrential rain; the pollution of the air, water, and land from a refinery blaze; etc. A BBC News article reported that a toxic waste dump has been exposed by the quake and that there is possible damage to a PVC factory, a waste treatment plant, and an incinerator.

Nature unleashed another threat this past week in the form of Hurricane Bret right here in Texas's gulf coast area. Although a hurricane does provide some advanced warning, I could not help but be concerned for the safety of my family, friends, and everyone else living in south Texas. I was also concerned about the potential environmental impacts that could occur if facilities in Corpus Christi's northeast industrial district were damaged. The district contains seven refineries, a sour-gas processing plant, two smelting/refining plants, approximately 550 fuel storage tanks, several chemical/gas/crude oil pipelines, ship barge loading/unloading terminals, petroleum coke and coal piles, and more. Luckily, Bret struck in a relatively unpopulated area, missing Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and my hometown.

The Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club has worked extensively since 1992 with several refinery communities in the state, including those in Corpus Christi. In 1994, the Lone Star Chapter spent considerable time over several months researching and drafting a lengthy administrative Title VI (civil rights) complaint on behalf of several Corpus Christi community groups. The complaint was filed in 1994 with the EPA against the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC) for not adequately enforcing environmental laws and against the City of Corpus Christi for creating an industrial district adjacent to neighborhoods extensively populated by people of color. The complaint remains pending at EPA.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has emerged as a potentially powerful tool for community organizations that are engaged in the struggle for environmental justice. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in programs or activities receiving federal financial assistance.

The first Title VI complaints concerning environmental justice were filed with EPA in 1993. As of June 1999, some 79 complaints had been filed with EPA. Out of these, 35 have already been rejected or dismissed and 44 are still active in one form or another. In Texas, 12 complaints have been filed, of which five have been accepted for investigation, three have been rejected, and four are under consideration for investigation.

Two of the pending Title VI complaints in Texas were filed by PODER and pertain to facilities located in East Austin, a predominantly African-American and Latino community. The first complaint was filed in 1995 against both the City of Austin and the TNRCC for allowing a high-technology company to bypass normal processes in order to get approval for construction of their facility in the Montopolis community. The second was filed on March 29, 1999 against the City of Austin for failing to meet the commitment it made in 1995 to begin phasing out the use of a power plant that is located in a residential area. The complaints also allege systematic discrimination by the city because of land-use policies that have directed a disproportionate amount of industrial growth to East Austin.

Due to the growing number of civil rights complaints, EPA was under a lot of pressure to begin the process of resolving them. As a result, in February 1998, EPA issued an interim guidance policy intended to provide a framework for such processing. If EPA finds discrimination in a recipient's permitting program, and the recipient is not able to come into compliance voluntarily, EPA must initiate procedures to terminate funding to the recipient.

EPA's interim guidance policy has come under attack from industry and state governments. States, through organizations such as the Environmental Council of States and the National Governors Association, have claimed that the policy will impede companies from redeveloping abandoned, contaminated industrial sites in urban areas, also known as "brownfields." A recent EPA report found that this is not the case. An analysis by the Transnational Resource Action Center found that corporations are furthering their claims by using front groups such as the Business Network for Environmental Justice, which is a corporate coalition run by the National Association of Manufacturers.

EPA is expected to release a draft final guidance policy sometime in the fall. The fate of all pending complaints and the usefulness of Title VI to communities disproportionately affected by environmental hazards will depend on the strength of this policy.

"A disenchanted world is, at the same time, a world liable to control and manipulation. Any science that conceives the world as being governed according to a universal theoretical plan that reduces its riches to the drab applications of general laws thereby becomes an instrument of domination. And man, a stranger to the world, sets himself up as its master."
-- Ilya Prigogine, physicist and Isabelle Stengers, chemist as quoted in Wisdom of the Elders