For more than two decades, the historically black and poor township of Holly Springs in Wake County, N.C., has been targeted for landfills. The pattern continues with Wake County's proposed 471-acre landfill, scheduled to open in Holly Springs by 1998. Each facility was sited adjacent to existing black communities, whose residents never participated in the siting process. The first story of this thesis' three-article series examines the inequitable pattern for distributing these dumps countywide and how their placement fits a national pattern. The second article and Appendix A discuss the new "environmental justice" movement, whose grassroots and minority activists are protesting unwanted pollution and alleged environmental discrimination. The movement's members have coined the term "environmental racism" to describe the unfair apportionment of environmentally noxious facilities. Article three discusses whether municipal solid waste landfills can cause ground water contamination. Federally mandated landfill technology to be installed at the planned landfill may not provide pollution protection for ground water, used by Holly Springs for its municipal water source.

This thesis is dedicated to the people of the Holly Springs, N.C. Without their cooperation and kindness, I could not have completed this project.

I wish to thank Robie Cox, who first introduced me to the environmental justice issue. I especially wish to thank my advisor, Jane Brown, for her encouragement and feedback throughout my research.

Chapter

Introduction

Chapter II. The History and Future of Solid Waste Disposal in Holly Springs, N.C.

Chapter III. Environmental Racism: A National and Regional Perspective

Chapter VI: Landfill Technology: Flawed Solution or Adequate Protection?

Appendix

A. Chronology of the Environmental Justice Movement

Bibliography

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 

In 1998, multi-ton garbage trucks will begin unloading Wake County's household and business trash at the municipal solid waste dump in south Wake County. A decade later, the landfill will take 100 percent of the county's solid waste stream.

But the $8 million, 471-acre South Wake Solid Waste Management Facility will not be built near the areas that produce the most waste. Instead, it will be constructed in Holly Springs, a small community located 15 miles south of Raleigh. The dump will border Easton Acres, a low-and middle-income black neighborhood.

For long-time residents of Holly Springs' black neighborhoods, the latest dump is nothing new. In the 1960s, the Town of Cary opened a sanitary landfill on property adjacent to a community of black homeowners just outside Holly Springs. In 1971, Wake County opened a privately-run sanitary landfill next to another black community, also in the Holly Springs area. The two, small facilities have closed. Both were sited a stone's throw from black-owned homes. Nearby residents continue to use ground water from drinking wells near the dumps that operated with little or no regulatory control for incoming waste. Everything from dead animals to chemical waste was dumped in similar sites across Wake County during the 1970s.

In 1975, the county opened the larger, 300-acre Feltonville Solid Waste Landfill next to Feltonville, an established black neighborhood just north of Holly Springs off Route 55. In 1991, a 75-acre private construction and demolition debris landfill run by Browning-Ferris Industries opened less than one-half mile from a black neighborhood off New Hill Road, in Holly Springs. And now, property adjacent to the Feltonville dump inside Holly Springs is slated for the county's mega-solid waste facility. If permitted and constructed, the south Wake facility will contain 12 million tons of garbage by the projected closing date of 2023. When sealed, the pyramid-shaped mound will tower 240 feet above the neighboring Easton Acres community as a monument to solid waste.

Whether by coincidence or design, the result of landfill siting decisions affecting the Holly Springs region is clear. The historically black and impoverished area, with less than one percent of the county's size and population, has received one-fifth of the county's permitted municipal solid waste and debris landfills. Low-income communities predated each facility. The affected residents--all black--claim that they were never involved in the decision process, despite the proximity of the dumps to their homes.

The siting pattern that overlooked community participation was repeated with the proposed facility. It is still unclear whether public hearing provisions to the state's revised solid waste regulations effective October 1993 will allow for public comments that will change the county's current site location for the new dump.

Despite the trend of lumping a proportionally larger share of unwanted land uses in a powerless community of color, the local press has written nothing about that relationship. Without protest, as is happening against landfills in Orange, Anson, Cumberland and Wilson counties, it appears that the local media will continue to ignore the landfills in Holly Springs as news. Media thrive on controversy, not acquiescence.

But in hundreds of low-income and minority communities across the country that have been targeted for unwanted land uses from landfills to hazardous waste sites, protesters have transformed their battles against unwanted pollution into an issue of public concern. The activists have rallied under the banner of environmental justice to form what is becoming a potentially powerful multi-racial, multi-class political movement. The grassroots activists successfully have adopted the language, strategies and social justice themes of civil rights-era activism. As opposed to the earlier, white-led environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s, the new environmentalists have redefined the term "environment" to include the home, work place, school and community. Grassroots protesters' main battles are not for preserving faraway wilderness areas or endangered species. Their adversaries are polluters. Their concerns are for neighborhoods that have been contaminated with air pollutants, lead, solid waste dumps, hazardous chemicals, rats and other pollutants.

Environmental justice activists point to well-documented patterns of discrimination in the enforcement of environmental regulations and the siting of noxious environmental facilities in poor, powerless and minority communities. "Its definitely racial discrimination," said the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, "father" of the environmental justice movement and NAACP head. "I'm not saying that whites aren't exposed. I'm saying that the disproportionate exposure to minorities has been the result of systematic policymaking, not a factor of historical coincidence."

For years, studies--including EPA-commissioned research--have found clear biases in the distribution of the environmental and health hazards. Recent developments have exacerbated old problems. With the NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) phenomenon that has followed greater government regulation of waste disposal, private and public decision-makers have found that the cheapest, quickest and most politically expedient route for siting unwanted land uses is in neighborhoods least likely to resist.

In response, poor and minority communities in American Indian reservations, inner cities and rural areas have mobilized against unwanted land uses through local organizations and a national coalition. In 1991, minority activists held the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington and drafted a charter outlining the principles of environmental justice. More recently in February 1992, the U.S. Congress held its first ever hearings on environmental justice. In June 1992, then Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) introduced the first federal environmental justice legislation, called the Environmental Justice Act. The act would assure that the adverse health impacts of environmental pollution "are not distributed inequitably." National lawmakers have presented other remedies. One 1992 amendment to a RCRA reauthorization bill proposes that the permitting process for solid waste landfills include "community information statements" to assess the landfill's impact to a community and to study an affected community's demographic makeup.

And this April, Chavis testified in Congress on legislative proposals to require better regulatory enforcement of environmental laws in disadvantaged areas. It is clear that protests for equal environmental protection and an end to toxic pollution in everybody's backyard has gained momentum. What was once a marginal and unaddressed problem of poor, minority communities finally has coalesced into a national concern.

The following articles examine the history and future of garbage disposal in Holly Springs and how Wake County's planned countywide dump illustrates the larger issues of environmental racism and potentially faulty federal policy for municipal solid waste disposal. The first article relates the county's long-planned decision to open a solid waste landfill in Holly Springs with previous decisions that opened four other dumps. It will demonstrate a pattern of decision-making by officials that excluded participation of affected black residents in Holly Springs. The article also will discuss whether officials should have encouraged more public input during the site selection process and whether they should have considered a fairness principle in their siting decision.

The second article describes the environmental justice movement and the issue of environmental racism, statewide and nationally. It outlines the major evidence used by activists to document alleged discrimination and how officials, activists and lawmakers are responding to the issue in North Carolina.

The third article looks at the solid waste problem statewide and nationally and the new EPA rules, under Subtitle D of RCRA. The article examines whether the regulations assure adequate environmental protection or whether the regulations allow for continued pollution of an undervalued national resource--ground water.

These articles will spotlight issues of public concern. The non-sustainable practices of our throw-away society have created permanent environmental degradation and inequity in the distribution of pollution hazards. My goal is to document the relationship between pollution and social inequity in municipal solid waste disposal. By using a case study that illustrates a national phenomenon, I hope to alert the public and decision-makers to problems that need immediate redress.

Literature for my subject is divided into three categories: 1) Holly Springs; 2) environmental justice and environmental racism; 3) municipal solid waste disposal and Subtitle D regulations. The material includes scholarly studies, newspaper and magazine articles, scientific studies, government studies and state and federal regulations.

HOLLY SPRINGS

I found two reports on Holly Springs. Graduate students at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote both investigations. The two studies summarize the community's past and the results of socioeconomic surveys. Existing Conditions in Holly Springs quickly traces the history of the black township, founded in 1876. It then describes the present Holly Springs--a rural town that had not shared in the Triangle's economic prosperity of late 1970s and early 1980s. At the time of the 1984 study, the researchers discovered a community lacking basic services, such as modern housing, health care, grocery stores, employment and schools. Nearly 80 percent of the town's 774 residents was black, with 25 percent of the town's families below the poverty level. The town lacked sewer services and industry. The report noted the town's low land values in comparison with nearby Cary and Apex and it recommended that the town install sewer services "to shed its less than favorable image as an entirely poor, rural community with a stable or no-growth atmosphere about it." The 1992 study found improvements in housing, employment and sewers. Population had grown to more than 1,400 persons. At the time of the study, the town was experiencing boom in high-income, three-story home developments such as Sunset Ridge. However, the report highlighted the continued absence of a permanent medical facility, a grocery store and jobs for the town's unemployed. The researchers pointed out wide discrepancies between income levels for black and white town residents. They also described the differences in the town's high unemployment and low education rates in comparison with surrounding Wake County. The study recommended more affordable housing and employment opportunities for the town's low-income residents.

Several personal visits to Holly Springs confirmed many of the reports' conclusions concerning unemployment and affordable, low-income housing. Town Mayor Gerald Holleman also verified the two reports' findings.

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM

The second set of literature concerns environmental justice and environmental racism. Research in this field has focussed on three national studies that are often cited by activists to document environmental injustice.

District of Columbia congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy ordered the U.S. General Accounting Office to conduct what became a widely cited investigation on race and waste. The action followed protests in 1982 against a toxic PCB landfill in predominantly black Warren County, N.C. The 1983 study, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities, found that three of four commercial hazardous waste landfills in the Southeast--including Warren County--were located in majority black communities. All of the three black communities were disproportionately poor, with 26 percent to 42 percent of the populations living below the poverty level.

The GAO study prompted further research, this time a United Church of Christ (UCC)-commissioned investigation that tested the relation between the location of 415 commercial hazardous waste facilities and racial and economic data. The 1987 study, Toxic Waste and Race, found that race, even more than socioeconomic status, was the most significant factor related to the presence of a hazardous waste site. Areas with one such facility had twice as many people of color as areas with no facility. And three of the hazardous waste landfills in minority areas alone accounted for 59 percent of the Southeast's hazardous waste landfill capacity, or 40 percent of the national capacity.

Five years later, another national study found still more evidence of environmental inequity. The National Law Journal in a 1992 investigation of EPA records for 1,177 Superfund toxic waste sites found unequal federal enforcement in environmental laws meant to provide equal protection. The study found that penalties under hazardous waste laws at Superfund sites having greatest white populations were more than 500 percent greater than penalties at similar sites with the greatest minority population. Sites in white communities also received better and quicker cleanup--20 percent faster--than sites in minority communities under the massive Superfund program. Finally, the investigation discovered disparity in federal environmental laws protecting citizens from air, water and waste pollution, where penalties in white communities were 46 higher than in minority areas.

Outside these national studies, researchers have studied inequity in environmental hazards at the city, state and regional level. A synthesis of research on race and income as factors in environmental hazards can be found in the studies of Paul Mohai and Bunyan Bryant. The two University of Michigan researchers reviewed evidence from 16 studies on the distribution of environmental hazards and found evidence that income and racial biases exist. In six of nine studies that included findings from three national studies, they found that race more strong related to the distribution of these hazards than income information and that race had an additional bias effect that was independent of class. They concluded that knowing if race or class biases were greater was of less importance than understanding and correcting the conditions that have led to documented inequity in the exposure of certain groups to environmental hazards.

Robert Bullard's Dumping in Dixie is a good starting point for understanding the broad issue of environmental racism documented by the national studies and the grassroots response by minority activists. Bullard's research combines his previous studies and a comprehensive review of more than two decades of scientific studies that document racial and socioeconomic inequity in environmental decision-making and in the distribution of pollution health hazards. Bullard, an activist scholar who specializes in environmental sociology, chronicles the environmental justice movement through case studies of pollution-burdened minority communities. According to Bullard:

Growing empirical evidence shows that toxic-waste dumps, municipal landfills, garbage incinerators, and similar noxious facilities are not randomly scattered across the American landscape. The siting process has resulted in minority neighborhoods (regardless of class) carrying a greater burden of localized costs than either affluent or poor white neighborhoods. Differential access to power and decision making found among black and white communities also institutionalizes siting disparities.

Other academics have taken Bullard's lead and reached similar conclusions. Law journals have been fertile ground for legal scholars interested in different facets of the issue. The scholars have produced exhaustively researched articles. The articles' subnotes provide excellent resources for interested scholars.

Rachel Godsil published the first comprehensive law review on environmental racism in November 1991. After examining legal battles over alleged racial discrimination in the siting of noxious land uses, she concluded that legislative remedies under federal, state and local laws could more equitably distribute hazardous facilities. She found that judicial remedies under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of 1866 cannot redress the problem of inequitable distribution of environmentally hazardous sites.

But the following year, a law review by lawyer and legal scholar Luke Cole called for "environmental poverty law," in the legal battles for environmental and social justice. Cole's survey found evidence of racial and environmental inequity with the impacts from toxics production, garbage dumps, air pollution, lead poisoning, pesticides, occupational hazards, noise pollution and rat bites. He concluded that grassroots environmental activists wisely have avoided the costly litigation strategies of white-led environmentalists because of the U.S. judicial system's long history of racism and neglect of minorities. Cole concluded that the solutions to environmental injustice will come through the proven tools of poor and minority communities--people power that forces the economic and political system to reform.

Law professor Richard Lazarus also examined the environmental justice issue. But Lazarus' research concerned the distribution of environmentally hazardous facilities associated with the promulgation of environmental legislation and whether these laws over the past three decades have exacerbated the problems of inequitable burden sharing. Lazarus found that the negative distribution effects of unwanted land uses has favored those with power in the political and administrative arena: namely, the wealthy, whites and mainstream environmental groups. By contrast, those without resources--poor and minority groups--have received unequal participation in environmental lawmaking and a greater share of the burdens from that lawmaking, such as the location of hazardous waste sites in their communities.

Taking still another approach to the issue, law professor Vicki Been sought to define the words that activists have left purposefully vague--"environmental justice." Been explored through seven definitions of justice and fairness and how they applied to equitably distributing locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) such as dumps and homeless shelters in society. Her section concerning legislative remedies to inequity gave a thorough oversight how lawmakers have translated rhetorical calls for environmental justice into law at the local, state and national level. But her survey of the legal and social remedies found problems with each solution. She concluded that activists and lawmakers need to determine what specific theory of fairness they mean and how it will look in practice. She also called for researchers and activists to reexamine earlier findings on the distribution of environmental hazards and to reassess whether communities predated or followed the LULU siting decisions.

Outside the law field, the mainstream press since 1990 has started using the labels "environmental racism" and "environmental justice" when reporting on the issues of pollution inequity and grassroots environmentalism. Even The Washington Post and The New York Times have tackled the issues that until recently were addressed only by scholars, activists and the alternative press. The selection of the Rev. Benjamin Chavis to head the NAACP likely will keep the issue in the national media spotlight, given Chavis' charisma and his role as an environmental justice crusader since the Warren County protests.

Local media, such as The News and Observer and The Independent, also have covered the issue. But stories on other controversies statewide have not discussed the conflicts of unwanted land uses and minority community activism through the label of environmental racism or environmental justice. Still, it is likely that the controversy has moved to the main stage as a legitimate public issue in North Carolina rather than as isolated incidents in individual communities. Even leading state officials are referring to the LULU and NIMBY problems in terms defined by environmental justice activists. It is likely that the problems will gain more credibility as a public issue through even greater media coverage.

FEDERAL REGULATIONS UNDER "SUBTITLE D"

The third set of literature concerns federal Subtitle D regulations issued on October 9, 1991. Effective October 1993, all states must implement the requirements. The regulations were passed to improve landfill safety, reduce solid waste volume, promote recycling and instill public confidence in the controversial procedure of siting new facilities. They prescribe a national landfill design standard to "protect against ground water contamination" from landfills' toxic liquid runoff called leachate.

North Carolina's Solid Waste Management Rules outline the state's regulations governing solid waste disposal, which meet the Subtitle D rules. Under the federal rules, all new solid waste landfills must have a plastic lining sheet and a two-foot thick compacted soil liner, a cover, a leachate collection system and a ground water monitoring program. The regulations restrict landfills near airports, wetlands and flood areas. Landfill operators also must control water runoff, apply daily soil top covers to landfill waste, monitor methane gas and show financial ability to pay for landfill testing and cleanups during a 30-year post-closure period. The state's response to the solid waste disposal problem and the new EPA rules is available in numerous documents available at the state's solid waste section office.

The federal rules adopted by North Carolina have been condemned strongly by G. Fred Lee, a nationally-known ground water expert. Lee has written hundreds of ground water pollution and landfill technology studies. In his recent research, he and his associates have criticized sharply the federal response as dangerously inadequate protection for ground water. According to Lee:

...it is well-known that even if properly designed and constructed, landfills of the Subtitle D type at best only postpone groundwater pollution; they will not prevent it. ... The "dry tomb" landfill of the type prescribed in Subtitle D regulations is a flawed technology; in practice such landfills will not protect groundwater resources from pollution by landfill leachate where the landfills are sited in areas where the leachate that will pass through the liner system can pollute groundwater that is, or could be, used at any time in the future for domestic water supply sources.

Lee further argues that the ground water monitoring rules for pollution protection are inadequate and that the costs associated with pollution remediation and control are grossly underestimated and not accounted for by the 30-year post-closure provisions.

Press accounts in trade journals and newspapers also have covered the regulations and their economic, social and environmental impacts. Coverage, including in-depth reports, has shown that landfills have contaminated underground aquifers. In 1992, the Orlando Sentinel Tribune ran two investigative stories on the ground water pollution crisis in Florida. The stories documented the enormous environmental and economic costs of landfill pollution to ground water.

Through course work this spring at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I first learned of the proposed landfill for Holly Springs. During group project presentations in April for one graduate class, I heard a student field research report on Wake County's proposed solid waste management facility in Holly Springs. I learned that this historically black and impoverished rural community with a history of landfill sitings had been chosen again for a new dump, which would border a low-income, all-black neighborhood. The three graduate-level researchers concluded that: "The most glaring issue in this Field Practicum is that of equity for the residents of Holly Springs. It involves equity at all level [sic] --financial, social, political economic, etc.--in essence it revolves around the issue of the powerless (or at least the less powerful) being seen as pawns in the larger game of countywide development." The report also raised serious questions concerning the long-term environmental and health impacts of Holly Springs' previous landfills and the newly proposed dump.

At first glance, this report confirmed Bullard's findings. However, it did not include a survey of residents' attitudes toward the facility. Nor did it provide an in-depth analysis of the recent and previous landfill siting decisions. I began my research here.

From the start I focused on three key questions:

1. Whether the issue illustrates potential discrimination in the distribution of environmentally harmful facilities in Wake County--in this instance, landfills;

2. Whether the landfill demonstrates the issue of inequity due to race and income according to a national pattern as described by Bullard and other researchers;

3. Whether the federally prescribed technology for the scheduled landfill in Holly Springs is environmentally safe or inadequate protection for the underground aquifers used for drinking water by the town.

Each element alone provided the material for a long story. But the new landfill siting in Holly Springs touched on all three. To a reporter, this was a story that begged to be written.

I began my research in early May. I first interviewed Holly Springs officials. Luncie McNeil, the town's public works director and a black man, gave me a tour of the three landfills (he wasn't aware of still another) and the site for the planned facility. He described the black communities next to each site and how they predated the landfills. Town Mayor Gerald Holleman gladly talked with me about the recently concluded landfill decision. He described the landfill as non-threatening and un-solicited.

Next I interviewed nearly 30 Holly Springs residents door to door. All but one--an American Indian--was black. None of the low- and middle-income homeowners I talked to said they were consulted about any of the area's landfills. And all of the residents lived in homes that predated and adjoined the site areas. I visited all of the landfill sites again for closer inspection.

For my next round of interviews, I contacted county and state officials. I interviewed four Wake County commissioners by telephone. I personally interviewed the county's two main waste planners: Community Development Services Director Doug Longhini and Solid Waste Director Phil Carter. I also interviewed by telephone Wake County's first black and woman commissioner, Elizabeth Cofield, and public works officials in Cary and Apex. From these interviews I pieced together a chronology of how officials made the south Wake facility decisions and how county officials have perceived Holly Springs.

To prepare for these interviews, I researched government records and press accounts. I found several articles dating back to 1991 from The News and Observer. These were sent to me directly from the paper. Wake County librarians did a computer-aided search of The News and Observer electronic database and found nothing I didn't have already. It appeared that the press had written little about the landfill decision. This surprised me given the controversial nature of landfill siting procedures, especially the heated debate in Orange County. This also confirmed a suspicion that the county had made little effort to alert the public to its intention to open a new solid waste facility, although officials and consultants had been working on that siting decision for years.

At the county commissioner's offices, I examined meeting minutes as far back as the early 1970s concerning solid waste disposal, landfills and Holly Springs. I also found a copy of the county's landfill feasibility study, submitted by the consulting firm Camp Dresser & McKee to the solid waste section at DEHNR. The report is titled Site Plan Application for the New South Wake Solid Waste Management Facility. The December 1992 study is the first of two voluminous reports that is required before the state can approve a new landfill. This was by far the most important find.

Technically, the report is a checklist that the planned landfill site meets every requirement of state and federal solid waste laws. The report methodically describes how each criteria is met by the county's planned facility. The information includes site drawings, maps, hydrogeological investigations, survey reports and the history of the county's decisions and land transactions. In the report I discovered a study dated December 1988 by previous engineering consultants. That study concluded: "...it is our opinion that with appropriate design, preparation, construction, development and operation plan, we consider the site to be suitable for the development of a sanitary landfill."

Based on this evidence, it appeared that county officials had long ago determined to open a new facility adjacent to the county's existing Feltonville landfill. That decision had to wait until 1991, when the county commissioners approved of property purchases to accommodate the planned facility. This decision was made without public hearings and with little public dialogue. For board meetings, the agendas mentioned only expansion at the Feltonville landfill and never a new facility. It is important to keep in mind that most residents in the black community that will border the new dump said they weren't aware of the county's decision until this year. Some residents didn't know of the decision until our interviews.

As I researched the issue, I also contacted numerous state lawmakers and Sierra Club lobbyist Bill Holman. From Holman, I learned about the state's first environmental justice legislation, which was ratified in July 1992. The measure says that a solid waste landfill cannot be sited within one mile of an existing facility without first considering other sites, conducting a socioeconomic and demographic study and holding a public hearing. The measure was designed to redress a controversy in Wilson County, where low-income and minority residents adjacent to a county dump were opposing a new county landfill that would adjoin their community. This was exactly the situation in Wake County, where officials planned a new facility next to an existing dump, both of which adjoined a low-income, minority community. It appeared that state lawmakers had developed a legislative remedy to a LULU siting problem that environmental justice activists claim is burdening poor, minority communities.

The main story was built around questions I tested. How public was the process? When did the commissioners decide to open a new facility in Holly Springs? Were county officials aware that an all black neighborhood bordered the proposed site? Were county officials aware that the previous county landfills bordered all-black neighborhoods? Were county officials aware of a state law that was designed to prevent the repeated siting of unwanted land uses in minority communities? Was a method for equitably distributing unwanted land uses factored in the siting decision? Did officials believe that the new landfill provided adequate environmental protection, particularly to ground water pumped by Holly Springs for domestic use?

Answers to these questions combined with my interviews and research provided the background for my main article on landfills in Holly Springs.

Concurrent to my research on Holly Springs I gathered secondary and primary research on environmental racism. I used Bullard as my starting point. A Nexis search turned up more than 30 articles by wire services, magazines and papers on the issue of environmental racism and environmental justice dating from 1992. It was clear that this had become a public issue, particularly since 1992, following publication of The National Law Journal stories on EPA inequity in Superfund enforcement. The EPA also sent me copies of their research. The agency has published two reports on what they call "environmental inequity." They agency devoted an entire edition of their in-house publication to the issue in 1992.

My research of law journal articles gave me the most current information on legislation, litigation and relevant scholarly studies. I used these reviews extensively as secondary sources. I backed these up with interviews of environmental justice activists in North Carolina, including grassroots leaders and more national figures, such as Robert Cox, a UNC speech professor who also is a member of the Sierra Club's national board of directors. My conversations with state officials included state senators, the governor's press secretary and other spokespersons. I was sent copies of all state laws concerning solid waste disposal and a newly proposed bill to create an environmental justice study commission.

This research is incorporated into the story that summarizes the environmental justice movement, both nationally and statewide.

I also contacted experts in the field of waste disposal. I spoke with professors, geologists and government scientists. One, the water quality expert named G. Fred Lee, sent me a thick information packet that summarizes his studies of the "Subtitle D" rules. To counter Lee's criticisms against Subtitle D rules, I interviewed solid waste officials at the solid waste section of DEHNR to hear their side. I also had county waste planners comment on whether the proposed Holly Springs dump would meet the new rules and whether the facility would provide adequate ground water protection for Holly Springs' municipal water source. Finally, I ran another Nexis search of newspapers and wire services concerning ground water contamination by landfills and Subtitle D regulations. My final story on landfill technology incorporates the results of this research.

My research is presented as an article series. The stories are intended to frame a local issue of landfill sitings and landfill technology with the larger and interrelated story that ties environmental racism with the federal response to the social and environmental problems generated by our throw-away society. Because solid waste regulations are constantly revised, some of my stories' facts may be outdated shortly. The dates for the Holly Springs landfill opening may also change due to possible construction or permitting delays or due to changes in the county's waste flow.

Barring public outcry, it seems likely that the planned landfill will open in Holly Springs before the new century. Perhaps then the issue of siting unwanted land uses adjacent to black communities will hit the front page, once residents have the facility placed in their backyard and voice their grievances. Or perhaps the residents of Holly Springs will quietly submit and cope with the mega-dump.

What is clear, however, is that unwanted land uses will continue to be sited in areas of least resistance unless legislative remedies and public protest by communities and environmental justice leaders present alternative models for waste production and disposal. I hope that these stories provide a starting point for other researchers interested in the complex, interwoven problems of racism, social justice, pollution, environmental regulation and ground water protection.

Last fall, Wiley Cofield started seeing work crews enter the forested land behind his home that he built in the Holly Springs neighborhood of Easton Acres.

"I had seen county trucks going in there, and I started wondering what was going on," said the Holly Springs native.

Only later did Cofield realize that the crews were studying property for the county's proposed 471-acre landfill that officials have dubbed the South Wake Solid Waste Management Facility. That discovery unsettled the neighborhood resident of 10 years.

Cofield, a black man, says none of residents of the low- and middle-income black community were informed of the county's intentions.

"When we found out about it, everything was done," said Cofield, 42. "If I had known they were going to build one there, I wouldn't have built my house in there. It's going to devalue my property."

Cofield's complaint is repeated by many residents of poor, minority communities who, without consultation, have locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) from municipal landfills to hazardous waste incinerators built next door.

In Wake, many of those LULUS are dumps. And their distribution has tilted toward Holly Springs.

With less than 1 percent of the county's population and land, Holly Springs area has received one-fifth of the county's debris and municipal solid waste facilities. The new dump will be the county's largest. With it, landfills will occupy 876 acres in the Holly Springs area, or about one-half the county's total debris and solid waste landfill acreage.

Two Holly Springs area dumps are active, including the second largest dump in Wake County, the Feltonville Solid Waste Landfill. All of the facilities were placed next to established black neighborhoods. And affected residents claim they were never informed by county or local officials before the dumps went in.

The pattern is being repeated for the south Wake landfill. The planned $8 million facility is scheduled to open in 1998 on property adjacent to the Feltonville dump. By 2008, the new landfill will receive 100 percent of Wake County's municipal solid waste.

That facility has emerged quietly through a siting process that virtually excluded public participation. Site feasibility studies began in 1988 and recommended development. Land purchases began in 1990 and ended this spring.

While Easton Acres residents say they weren't informed, county waste officials say the siting followed state approved procedures. They say county board meetings and town meetings on the issue adequately informed local residents.

Discussions may not have ended. Revisions to the state's solid waste law effective this October will allow citizens to request a public hearing for landfill decisions. But one state lobbyist said late-coming comments may not alter already costly ventures.

To date, the county has spent $2 million on property purchases and another $1 million for engineering studies. Wake County still must get approval from the state's solid waste section before it can submit a construction design plan.

The engineering studies estimate that the facility will receive 400,000 or more tons of garbage a year. The dump will entomb 12 million tons of garbage when finally sealed in 2023. Design drawings depict a closed structure towering 240 feet above the ground--a monument to solid waste.

The long-planned decision came without opposition, unlike in nearby Orange County. There, residents and officials noisily have debated a still unchosen landfill site since 1990. Few in Orange want the dump near their house.

Wake County Commissioner Stewart Adcock knows first-hand why residents protest landfills. "There is nothing more detrimental to a piece of property than a landfill," said the four-term commissioner, whose wife Kay Adams Adcock owned an 84-acre tract that Wake County condemned and acquired this year for the proposed south Wake dump.

Health and pollution concerns also generate anti-landfill sentiments vented toward local government officials.

"Acquiring a landfill is one of the most difficult things a public body can do," said Wake County Manager Richard Stevens. "Everybody wants their trash removed but nobody wants it in their backyard."

But that NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) phenomenon of recent years has educated public and private officials about how to overcome citizen opposition against unwanted dumps that bury the nation's annual 195 million tons of municipal solid waste.

So whose backyard receives the LULUs? A study published this spring by Duke University professor James Hamilton found that commercial hazardous waste facilities will pursue expansion plans in areas with lower voter turnout and a smaller probability of collective action.

Academics call this the "path of least resistance." Scholars say those with the least resources will lose in hazardous waste and other LULU siting decisions. Historically, those with the fewest political, economic and legal resources are low-income and minority groups.

And the loser for the new countywide landfill was Holly Springs, the historically poor and black town 15 miles south of Raleigh.

Holly Springs lies midway between Fuquay-Varina and Apex along Route 55 in southeast Wake County.

"It's a nice little town with a lot of good, friendly people," said Hattie Davis, the red-haired owner of Bud's Pickup. Around her gas and food shop in downtown Holly Springs, the 117-year-old community resembles a movie set of old Dixie.

Next door is Dewars antique and flower shop. Across the street sits one of the town's seven churches--Holly Springs Baptist. The red, brick building shares Main Street with numerous century-old wood homes.

On side roads, poverty is visible in many dilapidated trailer and low-income homes in some of the town's black neighborhoods. Still, those homeowners tend attractive gardens and lawns. "I'm proud to say I'm from Holly Springs," said one resident.

A 1984 UNC--Chapel Hill study described Holly Springs as "outhouses in the shadow of the State House, old-fashioned poverty at the door-step of high-technology, unemployment among job creation, and stagnation surrounded by development."

That year, the town's population was 80 percent black. Then the community had no school, no medical facility or doctor, a 15 percent unemployment rate and 25 percent of its population below the poverty line. Most of the poor were black.

Holly Springs residents and officials attribute many of the town's education and development problems to its status as a rural, poor minority community.

"This town was completely ignored by every political force in Wake County for years," contends Holly Springs Mayor Gerald Holleman.

To this day, grocery chains have avoided Holly Springs. "We're perceived to be a minority town and nobody wants to put a grocery store in minority areas," Holleman added.

Wake County's first black and first female commissioner, Elizabeth Cofield, recalls that Holly Springs did not get equal consideration as other areas from county officials when she served on the board from 1972 to 1984.

"The emphasis was not on Holly Springs as much as it was other places, and only recently has it gotten on the map," the former commissioner said. "There was no business and industry. You didn't have the impact other places had. Cary used to be a little pocket, but it always had some impact."

As recently as 1990, county commissioners approved $27 million in long range school improvements across the county but did nothing to fund a still badly needed elementary school in Holly Springs. These decisions have angered Holly Springs officials.

"The county commissioners have made the schools everywhere else but here, and I think it's because of the black population," said Holly Springs Commissioner Sarah Morton. "If the population had been 70 percent white and 30 percent black, it would have been different."

Holly Springs' last elementary school closed in 1972. Since then, all children have had to attend schools in Apex, Cary and Fuquay-Varina.

In the mid 1980s, the town borrowed $2.7 million to install sewers. "Nothing could be brought here because it didn't have public sewers," said Holleman.

With sewers, Holleman successfully recruited industry and homes. In 1990, Warp Technology installed a polyester fiber factory that employs 70 workers.

Census data from 1990 shows a town in transition. Blacks now make up one-half of Holly Springs residents.

Housing developments aplenty have sprouted on the edges of old Holly Springs' rural, low-income neighborhoods. Many three-story homes in exclusive neighborhoods such as Sunset Ridge start at $180,000. Plots for more than 1,400 middle- and high-income housing units are drawn.

"We're getting some rich white folks in here, so we'll see some changes," predicted Holleman. To bond the old and new and black and white, Holleman wants an 800-child capacity elementary school and a $900,000 community center.

But more than 40 percent of town residents 25 and older never finished high-school. Jobs remain scarce.

"We have some of the hardest working people in Holly Springs," said Davis. "We need industry in here so we can live like people in Cary."

The 1990 census puts the town's unemployment rate at 6.3 percent, nearly double Wake's rate of 3.4 percent. Holleman places the town's rate at 12 percent. Even these numbers hide the economic gulf separating the old black residents and new white homeowners. The 1990 census data show that 26 percent of the town's blacks still live in poverty.

For some black residents in town, landfills are as prevalent as that poverty. "It doesn't surprise me another one is coming here," said Davis. "It's not fair to the people who have homes there."

Luncie McNeil, Holly Springs public works director, wonders if it was chance alone that put dumps by black neighborhoods.

"The community that is always affected is black," said the 39-year-old, lifelong area resident. "Black folks live behind the tracks, and everything that is undesirable in a community is always behind the tracks. That includes landfills."

Two of the area's small, inactive dumps lie in rural land just outside the town limits. Cary ran a 14-acre facility from the 1960s to the early 1970s off Holly Springs Road. On Bass Lake Road, Wake County opened the Holly Springs Landfill. The 16-acre dump was privately-run from 1971 to 1975.

In 1975, the county opened the 300-acre, unlined Feltonville landfill just north of town. As the second largest landfill in Wake County, it now receives one-fifth of the county's municipal solid waste.

The 75-acre construction and demolition debris landfill run by Browning-Ferris Industries opened inside Holly Springs in 1991.

All are within a four-mile radius. Black neighborhoods predate and border each facility.

McNeil, a black man, says few in the community have opposed the sites due to apathy and exclusion.

"People have just stood back and let things happen," said McNeil. "We as a people have that attitude--why should I say anything? They are going to do what they want to do anyway."

But some residents who had landfills placed in their neighborhoods say that black homeowners couldn't block the dumps. They add that officials could have sited dumps on more remote land.

"We didn't like it, but it was a done thing," said longtime area resident Delores Wilson. The Holly Springs Landfill was put less than 300 feet from her home. When it operated in the early 1970s, 10 other families lived close by.

"We didn't have the know-how to advocate for ourselves," Wilson said. "We knew minorities didn't have the decision-making power of whites."

Another local resident said he saw everything from dead horses to chemical barrels left at the dump. The stench was so bad, he shut his windows on hot days. Rats gnawed beneath his home at night.

Today, Wilson is concerned whether the underground waste stew poses a health risk to her and her neighbors. "Right now my drinking water table is probably underneath where all this stuff is," she said. "I'd be lying to you if I said that didn't bother me."

The entire Bass Lake Road community by Wilson's home relies on well water. Three black-owned homes on the Utley homestead adjacent to the old Cary dump on Holly Springs Road also use ground water.

Other black residents complain that officials ignored the communities that had landfills sited next door.

"The county never notifies you, and next thing you know they put a landfill in there," said Preston Baker, a Feltonville native and president of the Feltonville Community Organization. "Back then, people didn't have much knowledge of the landfill. If they did, they probably would have done something."

None of the residents of the all-black, low-income Feltonville neighborhood just north of Holly Springs say the county contacted the 21-home community before the Feltonville dump opened in 1975.

Each day, about 100 monstrous dump trucks storm by Feltonville's single story homes en route to the trash pits.

"They don't slow up for the children," says Louise Jones, a resident of 26 years. "I'm so scared my children are going to get killed."

Besides fear, the Feltonville homemaker expressed helplessness. It is a condition often described by Holly Spring's low-income black residents when discussing county politics. "We can't do but so much because we're poor people," Jones said. "Our voice don't count for anything."

Like residents by the Holly Springs Landfill, some in Feltonville worry whether dangerous waste was buried close by. Many said trucks made illegal nighttime hauls shortly after the dump's 1975 opening.

"I heard they were dumping dangerous chemicals down there," said Baker, "It got pushed down right quick."

State environmental officials say toxic material frequently entered state landfills before the federal government passed tougher pollution laws beginning in the late 1970s.

"I guarantee you hazardous waste did go in landfills many years ago," said Doug Holyfield, branch head of the state's hazardous waste office.

The state's Superfund section, responsible for hazardous waste pollution, lists the Feltonville and Sorrells dumps and two other landfills in Wake County as having some hazardous material contamination.

Records show that 100 tons of waste from the Allied Chemical Corporation's Moncure Plant were deposited in Feltonville in the 1970s. Wastes included paints, oil sludge and asbestos.

The still active Sorrells landfill in Apex, an unlined pit similar to the closed landfills near Holly Springs, also is contaminated. It received about 155 tons of highly toxic pesticides in the 1970s.

There are no records whether state investigators have examined the closed Holly Springs dumps.

Today hazardous waste is banned from municipal solid waste landfills. New municipal solid waste facilities, such as the south Wake dump, must follow the "Subtitle D" regulations of the federal Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Effective this October, the state's solid waste regulations must be in compliance with these rules.

The rules calls for protective liners and a plumbing system to collect the landfills' toxic garbage juice called leachate.

The state solid waste law also states that a municipality's governing board must first approve a landfill before it can be sited in its jurisdiction. The law also requires reports on how a landfill might impact endangered species or historic monuments.

But that law does not require impact assessments for communities adjoining proposed landfills. Instead the law mandates local characterization studies to identify nearby buildings, wells and homes.

In December the county's engineering consultants, Camp Dresser & McKee, submitted the site feasibility study to the state's solid waste section. Neighborhoods in a one-quarter mile radius are listed, including 20-year-old Easton Acres.

The study describes Easton Acres as a "subdivision consisting primarily of trailers and mobile homes;" the study did not describe its racial composition.

Visitors to the three streets just off state Route 55 find many well-kept, single-story homes. Residents say improvements followed the subdivision's annexation by Holly Springs several years back. In 1992, the town put in sewer lines and paved the streets. The town maintained good communication during the process.

But many residents say officials did not contact residents about the new dump. Some didn't know of the landfill until interviewed.

Holly Springs native and town planning board member Laverne Cofield, 38, was perhaps the first Easton Acres resident to learn of the site late last year. Truck traffic on undeveloped land by her home alerted her to the project that she discovered in full months later.

"The way it was presented was this is what the county is going to do and that's the end of it," she said of the county's voluminous site study that Mayor Holleman presented to planning board officials early this year. "How many people are really going to take a look at this study and see if everything is correct.

"There wasn't a lot of effort to inform the citizens," continued the hard-working mother of three. "If [county officials] know the whole plan, they know how much of the plan to disclose. They present the picture of being open and everything is on the table."

And that process angers Cofield, an Easton Acres resident of 10 years: "There's no growth around here for schools, but there's growth enough for landfills."

Other residents complained that they never heard about public meetings from the county or city, which under Holleman has corresponded openly with Easton Acres in the past.

"He has always told the blacks `you had better come to these meetings and get what you can now,'" said Easton Acres resident Lucille Thorpe of Mayor Holleman. Still Thorpe says she heard nothing about the landfill from the town. "Everyone should have gotten a letter [saying] they wanted to expand," she continued. And Thorpe, who already hears dump trucks one-half mile away at the Feltonville dump, says an adjacent operation would create more disruption.

Others complained that the black neighborhood was unfairly treated.

"If it was put in a white community, they would have made people more aware of it," said Jerry Franks, a father of three. "I'm just shocked they would do this without letting people be aware of it. They should have sent someone in each community."

Despite these allegations, county officials maintain that the siting was publicly announced in two Wake County board meetings and during hearings in Holly Springs in December 1991 and September 1992.

"I can tell you we followed the process that the state has outlined," said Doug Longhini, the county's community development services director.

Town commissioners said residents should have raised questions at those forums. "Public hearings have to be held, which gives [residents] an opportunity to voice their opinion," said Commissioner Otis Byrd.

On Sept. 10, 1992, the town of Holly Springs formally sent its approval to the state's solid waste section, as required by law. The note states that the town waived its zoning regulations because the facility offered "an appropriate governmental function providing a public service."

One month later, the county commissioners forgave the town's $298,291 loan, which was borrowed in the 1980s to construct a waste water treatment plant for the town's sewer system.

The agreement will allow the county to upgrade the plant's capacity to treat the planned landfill's leachate, as required by the new landfill rules. The landfill will produce more than 25,000 gallons of the toxic effluence a day.

Though Holleman said the town did not solicit the facility, he said he was convinced that the landfill posed no danger.

"I didn't think this was a detriment issue to fight," said Holleman. "[The county] needed our signature on the permit, but they could have condemned it. It didn't make a difference whether we approved or disapproved."

Longhini agreed that under state law, property condemnation inside Holly Springs or other municipalities is within the county's power of eminent domain if future uses are intended for government functions.

County officials also say the site's dense clay soil, low property values and sparse population made it an ideal landfill location.

But two geological conditions call into question the planned site's suitability.

The first is the Jonesboro Fault, a geological fracture located one-quarter mile east of the proposed site. Ideally, landfills should be sited far from potential seismic activity areas to prevent damage to the liners.

The second is diabase dikes found on the site. These underground rock structures act like water lines in moving ground water quickly. Their presence could mean quicker ground water contamination by landfill leachate.

"We came to the conclusion it would not be a problem for our landfill," said Phil Carter, the county's solid waste director, about the site geology. He says state waste experts have recommended greater well monitoring near the dikes to check for ground water pollution.

The town of Holly Springs relies on four ground water wells for its municipal water source. Another will be tapped shortly. All are within two miles from the landfill.

What about cost?

At about $4,400 an acre for the 471-acre landfall property tract, the site was a bargain.

But according to Carter, the county's waste director since 1990, the county did not conduct geological site studies for landfill sites other than those on land purchased for the Holly Springs landfill.

Longhini said county waste planning done according to previous and less stringent siting regulations in the early 1980s narrowed the county's future landfill expansion to what became the second county dump. The 216-acre Durant landfill opened in north Wake in 1986.

Longhini added that executive session decisions by board members during that time concluded that the Feltonville landfill should be expanded. That expansion eventually turned into the proposed south Wake facility.

Technically, the expansion is a new facility that must follow all permitting procedures.

However, the board's agenda prepared for meetings between 1990 and 1992 never mentions the issue as a new landfill when the board agreed to purchase property. It wasn't until October 1992, and after receiving Holly Springs' approval, that the board's agenda announced the facility by its name--South Wake Solid Waste Management Facility.

Commissioners say a countywide public hearing was not required because the purchased property was not rezoned for the landfill. "There is no public hearing required on land purchases," said Commissioner Adcock.

Wake's landfill planning differed greatly from Orange County's, which began in June 1990. The Landfill Owners' Group--representing Orange County and the towns of Carrboro and Chapel Hill--organized a citizen-run landfill search committee, placed copies of all records in two libraries and held frequent open-to-the-public meetings.

"We intended the public to be a part of the process," explained Gayle Wilson, Chapel Hill's solid waste administrator. "We knew due to the highly educated nature of citizens in the county and their high level of environmental consciousness, it could happen no other way in this county."

Though Wilson says the still ongoing site selection has been onerous and costly, he says an honest, open process will pay off over the long run. "Once we arrive at a final site, there will be no secret how it was arrived at."

Though vastly less public than Orange County officials, Wake board members claim that their policy has been above-board. Commissioners Adcock, Betty Lou Ward and Abraham Jones add that demographic information of the landfill area was not presented to them before the board approved the facility.

"I didn't realize there was an all-black neighborhood there," said first-term Commissioner Jones. "If I am made aware of any complaints, I will respond to the problem. I am quick to recognize there's a tendency among public entities to place landfills and chemical factories near minority communities."

When contacted, none of the interviewed commissioners, nor the county manager, nor the county's solid waste director were aware of the 1992 state law that has legislated the consideration of race in landfill sitings. The N.C. Association of County Commissioners sent out notices to all county governments after the law was ratified in July 1992.

Rep. Milton "Toby" Fitch (D) introduced Senate Bill 1159 following protests by low-income and minority residents against a solid waste landfill in his own Wilson County. The law requires that county and municipal governments consider alternative sites, hold a public hearing and conduct socioeconomic and demographic studies for solid waste landfills sited within one mile of an existing facility.

The new Wake site will border the Feltonville dump.

"We've followed the permitting process as it's been outlined by the state, and we were into the process well before that statute was passed," explained Longhini.

All decisions predating the bill's ratification are exempt.

But unlike Holly Springs residents, Wilson County residents have thrown a monkey wrench in their county's landfill plans.

"They understood they had a landfill and they didn't want another one," said Willie Best, Wilson County's assistant manager, of the siting dispute. The county is doing demographic studies on the five sites now under consideration.

Further south in Fayetteville, an all-black community next to a Cumberland County landfill has forced commissioners to consider relocating the residents. The county landfill opened in 1980, long after the community was built.

Since 1992, as many as 200 Euphala Street residents and activists led by Euphala Street homeowner Jean McDonald have protested county board meetings. A protest blocking the four-county, 356-acre dump resulted in McDonald's arrest in April 1992. The county's health department in October 1992 confirmed the neighbors' complaints of rats, odors and sewage and recommended the county relocate at least 30 families. Cumberland County officials are still reviewing the $1 million buy out proposal.

McDonald says the dump was deliberately sited in a black neighborhood. "Before we started to fight, they were putting anything in there," said McDonald. "Last year they buried over 8,000 animals in there, right in our backyard."

When her local battle ends, McDonald said her next stop is Holly Springs.

Low-income and minority anti-landfill activists such as Euphala Street homeowners are not alone in their pollution protests.

Nationally, hundreds of community-based organizations have demanded what they are calling environmental justice. They have called for an end to alleged discrimination in the siting of hazardous and unwanted land uses in poor, minority areas.

This April, NAACP head Benjamin Chavis testified in Congress for environmental laws to protect pollution-burdened communities.

That month, Chicago Congresswoman Cardiss Collins (D-Ill.) sponsored the "Environmental Equal Rights Act of 1993" as an amendment under to the Solid Waste Disposal Act. The measure would create citizen hearing provisions to prevent hazardous and solid waste facilities from being sited in "environmentally disadvantaged," poor and minority communities already burdened by such facilities.

"Once people have to come out and justify their conduct and explain why they're putting [waste] in a black community, they can't get away with that kind of thing," said N.C. state Sen. Frank Ballance (D), of Warren County.

This May, Rep. Fitch introduced legislation to create an environmental justice study commission. The proposed group would examine socioeconomic and demographic data for all future solid, hazardous and low-level nuclear waste sites. The measure also would increase the participation of low-income and minority citizens in environmental decisions. House Bill 1423 is awaiting action in the house rules committee.

The Public hearing provisions of the revised state solid waste law still may offer individuals a chance to comment on the proposed Holly Springs landfill. But without technical problems to the site application or landfill opposition at a decibel equal to dump protests in Wilson or Cumberland counties, the south Wake facility appears to be what Mayor Holleman has called a "done deal."

ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM:

A NATIONAL AND REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Longtime Northhampton County resident Therese Vick used to work as a drugstore clerk. That changed in 1992 when she joined the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League as a full-time community organizer.

Her conversion from retailer to grassroots environmentalist began in 1990. That year, the German firm ThermalKEM proposed the installation of a $70 million, regional hazardous waste incinerator in Northhampton, near the small town of Woodland.

"Northhampton is 90 percent African American where they want to site it," said Vick.

ThermalKEM promised 250 jobs, millions of tax dollars and county services aplenty in wooing local officials to accept the regional plant that would burn 100 million pounds of toxic material a year. For an impoverished minority county--60 percent black--with unemployment above 10 percent, the deal looked attractive.

But some Northhampton residents such as Vick thought that the plant was poison. They saw it as another example of toxic industries asking poor, minority communities to accept what affluent, white communities can refuse.

"People need to realize this is another form of racism," Vick said. "It's taking advantage of people historically disadvantaged."

Before Northhampton, 20 counties statewide had rejected the facility because of ThermalKEM's poor safety record for its Rock Hill incinerator.

In December 1990, 500 county residents formed the Northhampton Citizens Against Pollution (N-CAP). The members have mobilized voter registrations, marches and speeches to oppose the incinerator. The three-year long siting battle continues.

The struggle by N-CAP is shared by hundreds or other grassroots environmental groups across the country.

Nationally the minority and low-income activists are redefining the environmental movement under the banner of "environmental justice." Through civil rights-style strategies and language, the new environmentalists have demanded equal environmental protection against unwanted pollution.

The grassroots protesters also are attacking what is called "environmental racism."

Since the 1980s, environmental justice leaders such as NAACP head Benjamin Chavis have coined that term to describe an alleged national trend for siting landfills, hazardous waste facilities and toxic industrial plants in poor and minority areas.

"It's people without power being dumped on and poisoned," says UNC professor Robert Cox, a member of the Sierra Club's national board of directors. "The pattern is quite clear and studies are confirming what is already known: that the stuff is being dumped in communities with the least power to resist, and these are predominantly communities of color and low-income white communities."

Cox says several findings document that charge.

--In 1983, a U.S. General Accounting Office study on four Southeast hazardous waste sites found that blacks make up the majority of the population around three facilities.

--In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice found in a national study that race correlated with the siting of 415 commercial hazardous waste facilities. Areas with more than one such facility had nearly twice the percentage of minorities than areas without a facility.

--A 1992 survey by The National Law Journal of the EPA's records of 1,177 Superfund hazardous waste sites found that white communities saw faster responses, better cleanup and harsher penalties against polluters than minority communities. EPA penalties at Superfund sites in white communities were 500 percent greater than those in minority communities.

"I think this is one of the most under-reported stories of the decade," Cox said.

"These people see these issues as all related," continued Cox, who recently visited Columbia, Miss., on behalf of the Sierra Club to meet a low-income white and black community coalition called Jesus People Against Pollution.

"When these people speak of the environment, they're speaking of their homes, work and playgrounds," Cox said, describing the Columbia group's concerns over a Superfund, hazardous waste site in their community. "It's the lifeblood of the community that is threatened when your drinking water is poisoned, when fumes from chemicals drift into your homes, when members of a community are being fired from their jobs for speaking out for the environment."

CAROLINA'S LEGACY

For years, minority leaders had complained that the environmental movement had smothered minority health and housing issues. They also charged that the EPA had perpetuated discrimination through unequal enforcement of environmental laws.

But these did not coalesce into a national issue until 1982.

That year black and white community activists in Warren County, N.C.--then the state's most predominantly black county--put the spotlight on alleged, discriminatory environmental practices.

For the first time citizens employed civil rights tactics with social justice themes to an environmental campaign. More than 500 people were arrested for civil disobedience in their unsuccessful bid to stop the opening of an EPA-permitted, toxic polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill.

The landfill failed to meet EPA's own protective requirements. The citizen action followed three unsuccessful court efforts to block the facility.

Though the 1982 protests failed, they led to the national studies that found race to be a shared characteristic of communities with environmentally noxious facilities. They also inspired similar protests in minority communities in Los Angeles, Louisiana and Chicago.

According to Cox, the grassroots groups wisely have placed their community's concerns first. Cox added that they correctly have faulted public institutions for negligence of what he called the "residual effects of the system of Apartheid in this country."

THE ROAD SINCE WARREN COUNTY

Since Warren County, grassroots organizations have experienced prolific growth. This May the anti-pollution advocacy group Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes announced that it had assisted more than 8,000 local organizations since the organization's 1981 founding.

To organize the thousands of local activists, environmental justice leaders convened a national summit in Washington in October 1991. Nearly 650 primarily minority environmentalists gathered to outline a national environmental justice strategy for the hundreds of disparate struggles across the country.

The movement's synergy of environmental and social justice concerns did not go unnoticed by the EPA. Ever since 1990, the environmental justice activists and EPA officials had worked together on the issue in private meetings and conferences.

As a result, the EPA publicly has acknowledged through studies and internal work groups what it continues to call an "equity" rather than a "justice" problem. The agency issued advance copies of the first of two "environmental equity" reports in February 1992.

But environmental justice leaders were angered by the report's findings that there was a lack of evidence whether environmental health effects were related to racial and economic data.

That anger escalated to outrage following an incident that coincided with the release of the equity report in February. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) leaked a memo stamped "priority confidential," written by Lewis Crampton, then an EPA associate administrator for public affairs.

In the memo, Crampton wrote that the EPA should try to win public recognition for its environmental equity program "before the minority fairness issue reaches the `flashpoint'--that stage in an emotionally charged public controversy when activist groups finally succeed in persuading the more influential mainstream groups (civil rights organizations, unions, churches) to take ill-advised actions. From what we've begun seeing in the news, this issue is reaching that point."

For activists, the incident demonstrated the gulf between the grassroots and the government.

"There is incredible frustration and anger at institutions in our society that should be accountable for public health and environmental protection," Cox said of the activists. "The communities feel that the EPA, EPA scientists and corporate scientists do not want to see what is in front of them."

And the "flashpoint" predicted by Crampton already has been reached. Grassroots organizations are challenging federal, state and municipal officials to clean up hazardous sites and to halt the siting of environmentally unsafe facilities in vulnerable communities.

That struggle is alive and well in Tar Heel country.

ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM IN NORTH CAROLINA

In protests against intensive, unregulated swine farms in eastern Carolina counties and in demonstrations against a two-state solid waste landfill in Cherokee, N.C., minority communities are speaking out.

"There are substantially more black, Native American and other minority people [who] are involved in grassroots opposition to these issues since they have learned about being targeted across the country," said Billie Elmore, director of NC WARN, an umbrella organization of grassroots and environmental organizations statewide.

Elmore, a 63-year-old environmentalist, started the group in 1988 to oppose the siting of a hazardous waste facility in Lee County. She said NC WARN's membership has grown to nearly 60 groups who represent thousands of environmentalists in all 100 Carolina counties.

Northhampton's Vick has been one of the those groups' most vocal leaders.

Vick faults industry and government officials for allegedly racist siting practices of environmentally hazardous operations.

"The federal and state government are really in denial [about] the part racism plays in the siting of these facilities," Vick said.

Vick also blames Gov. Jim Hunt for footdragging on the issue.

"The state government isn't addressing it at all," Vick said. "I'd like to see Hunt be cognizant that counties of North Carolina are being preyed upon by industry."

Several examples support Vick's accusations that poor and minority communities are chosen for noxious land uses.

--In 1984, the hazardous waste firm SCA Services proposed a 500,000 gallon a day toxic waste disposal plant on the Lumber River, where downstream residents in Robeson County were 25 percent black and 35 percent Native American.

--In 1984 another company, U.S. Ecology, proposed a nuclear waste incinerator in neighboring Bladen County, where minorities comprised one-half the population.

--In 1990, the commercial waste firm Chambers Development, Inc. proposed a two-state landfill adjacent to Polkton, in Anson County, where black residents make up one-half the population. Activists in the county already have defeated previous proposals to install a low-level nuclear waste dump and a hazardous waste incinerator.

But Debbie Crane, a spokeswoman for the N.C. Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, said no hard data exists to back claims that race motivated facility sitings: "There haven't been any studies done in North Carolina on the issue of environmental equity and justice."

Rachel Perry, Gov. Hunt's press secretary, added that the new administration has taken leadership on many environmental issues, including environmental justice.

"It's an issue to which the governor is very sensitive," Perry said. "The governor has a strong record on racial justice and a strong belief in equity for all."

In the past, Hunt's critics, such as former Democratic rival and ex-Governor Bob Scott, have blamed Hunt for unloading the 7,223 truckloads of PCB-contaminated dirt in vote-poor Warren County.

Eleven years later between 500,000 and 1 million gallons of PCB-laced water have collected at the problem-plagued dump. County activists want on-site treatment rather than shipping the waste out-of-state.

But Perry said the Hunt administration had taken action on the present problems.

"We're going to work with the local community as to what should happen with this water," Perry said. "We don't think the administration should force a solution on a community."

Jonathan Howes, the state' environmental secretary, wrote to county residents in May. In announcing a new study committee, he acknowledged the residents' concerns that "PCB waste from the Warren County landfill not be transferred to another community, especially to one that is rural, relatively poor, and predominantly African-American, Native American, or Hispanic."

LEGISLATING ENVIRONMENTAL FAIRNESS

To prevent future controversies such as the Warren County landfill, lawmakers in Congress and in states such as New York and South Dakota have written legislative recipes for siting locally unwanted land uses (LULUs).

Since 1989, New York City has used a "fair share" approach to equitably site LULUs and divide amenable public services among different neighborhoods.

To assure fairness in siting practices at the national level, Congressmen Mike Synar (D-Okla.) and Bill Clinger (R-Pa.) this April introduced legislation to the federal Solid Waste Disposal Act to require that the permitting procedure for hazardous waste facilities consider "community information statements." The measure is patterned on already required environmental impact assessments. The community statement would assess the site area's demographic information and study the sitings' effects on a community given the burdens a community already bears.

Perry said that Hunt has not proposed any environmental justice legislation. "I don't know if you can legislate equity and justice and fairness," she said.

However, state lawmakers ratified in July 1992 what has been called the state's first environmental justice legislation.

Following community protests in Wilson County against the installation of a second solid waste landfill in a low-income and minority community, Rep. Milton "Toby" Fitch (D) introduced a measure in the N.C. General Assembly to assure that county governments consider racial information in siting new landfills.

The new law states that a new solid waste landfill cannot be placed within one mile of an existing facility without first holding a public hearing, considering alternative sites and conducting a socioeconomic and demographic study of the site area.

"This represents the General Assembly's first foray into dealing with environmental racism," said George Givens, an attorney to the state's committee on environmental and natural resources.

Because of protests and the new law, officials in Wilson County are now considering other locations for the second solid waste dump.

"We're trying to take the spirit of the law into account," said County Manager Ellis Williford. "We're interpreting it to mean that we do a demographic study, and we're doing a demographic study with all five sites under consideration."

This May, Fitch introduced legislation to create an environmental justice study commission.

The proposed group would examine socioeconomic and demographic data for all future solid, hazardous and low-level nuclear waste sites. The measure also would increase the participation of low-income and minority citizens in environmental decisions. House Bill 1423 is currently in the House Rules Committee awaiting action.

But activists such as Elmore question the power of such legislation.

"The only way we get things done is people power--people forcing the politicians to do the right thing," Elmore said. "And sometimes we have to take to the streets to do that."

But for the moment, Elmore says she and other environmental activists will watch and see how some controversies--such as the siting of a low-level nuclear waste site in Wake or Richmond counties and the proposed hazardous waste incinerator in Northhampton County--are played out.

"We'll always give them a chance, and that's what we're doing with the Hunt Administration," Elmore said.

LANDFILL TECHNOLOGY: FLAWED SOLUTION OR ADEQUATE PROTECTION?

Each day American homes and businesses generate more than one-half million tons of garbage. These mountains of garbage eventually end up in someone's backyard, often in poor and minority communities. And the trash dumped today may poison the water consumed tomorrow.

MOUNTAINS OF TRASH

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 4.3 pounds of municipal solid waste (MSW) are generated each day, per person. The United States produced a whopping 195 million tons of MSW at last count in 1990.

North Carolina topped the national average. In 1990, the state's 160 permitted and mainly publicly-owned solid waste sites took in 7.9 million tons after recycling, averaging 6.5 pounds per person each day.

Though the garbage must go somewhere, the public has cried NIMBY--"Not in My Backyard." That spells trouble for Wake County, the state's second most populous and second largest garbage producing county.

In response to the "solid waste crisis," Wake officials have and will continue to bury household and business trash in landfills. In 1998, the county will open the South Wake Solid Waste Management facility in Holly Springs, N.C. It will contain 12 million tons of waste when closed by 2023.

But Wake and other county's landfill solution presents problems as serious as any siting controversy.

The technically "non-hazardous" refuse at landfills threatens ground water, a dwindling and valuable resource.

POISONED GROUND WATER

Statewide and nationally, one in two persons relies on underground aquifers for drinking water. The resource is shared by city and rural dwellers alike.

Ground water provides rural areas with 90 percent of their drinking water, while 35 percent of all municipal water supplies rely exclusively on ground water. And more than three-quarters of U.S. cities use some ground water for their water source.

But man-made chemicals have already contaminated 20 percent of the country's drinking water aquifers that will become even more valuable in the future. Landfills are one the more notorious ground water pollution culprits.

The EPA estimates that three-quarters of country's 55,000 landfills are polluting ground waters. Contamination occurs via a poisonous byproduct called leachate.

When rain and other water sources mix with the technically non-hazardous garbage at landfills, the two create a toxic fluid that is pulled underground by gravity. This is particularly true for humid regions, such as the Piedmont.

"Leachate is a toxic soup," said Ted Outwater, director of the Clean Water Fund of North Carolina. "We're always concerned about anyone living near a landfill that uses a well."

As far back as 1977, the EPA estimated that 90 billion gallons per year of leachate from solid waste landfills was entering U.S. ground water.

Though only 6,000 MSW landfills are now in operation nationwide, all closed sites are expected to pollute ground water with solvents, batteries and other buried poisons.

In Wake County alone, the state's Superfund section has listed four landfills as having hazardous waste contamination. Records show that the still active, unlined Sorrells landfill in Apex has 155 tons of toxic pesticides that may pose serious risks to nearby ground water used by 5,000 people.

An estimated 75 percent of the state's 150 active, unlined landfills have caused on-site contamination of ground water.

Other states share North Carolina's landfill pollution woes. The state of Florida estimates that one-half of the 350 solid waste landfills closed since 1980 are contaminating ground water.

Once contaminated, underground aquifers cannot be used for drinking water by present and future generations. Experts agree that technology for cleaning up polluted ground water near landfills is inefficient, prohibitively expensive and unavailable for the thousands of contaminated sites.

FEDERAL RESPONSE UNDER "SUBTITLE D"

After numerous stalls, the EPA in October 1991 issued new rules to address the solid waste problem. The release followed a three-year delay and a lawsuit by environmental groups against the EPA for not meeting a 1988 deadline.

The federal response under "Subtitle D" of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) has been to postpone but not prevent the leachate leakage problem at solid waste landfills.

The RCRA rules prescribe "dry tomb" vaults to store wastes indefinitely "to ensure no reasonable probability of adverse effects on health or the environment."

EPA's "high-tech" solution amounts to a covered, double-lined bathtub pit with plumbing. The system will catch the garbage ooze for treatment off site. In EPA's words, these "modern landfills are more secure than ever and adverse environmental impacts can be detected and properly addressed."

But Outwater disagrees that new landfills are safer than old dumps. "All of the new ones will leak too, and it's just a matter of when," he said.

The $8 million South Wake landfill in Holly Springs will follow the EPA's containment approach.

Phil Carter, Wake County's solid waste director describes it as the best means available to contain leachate. Still he acknowledges will leak "at a very reduced rate."

"It's not the perfect solution," Carter said. "It's a lot better than it was 25 years ago." Those were the days of unlined pits, which the state banned in 1991.

The sewer system beneath the new landfill will collect the toxic leachate for treatment at Holly Springs' waste water treatment facility. Officials estimate the landfill will produce 25,000 to 40,000 gallons of leachate a day.

FLAWED TECHNOLOGY?

Outwater is not alone in questioning whether the new landfills are environmentally sound.

"Whenever you bury anything in the earth, it's not going to be permanent," said Alvis Turner, a hazardous waste expert and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "We don't know how long it will be protected."

One national water expert has dubbed the "state-of-the-art" lined landfills endorsed by the EPA as "flawed technology," adopted for economic rather than protective reasons.

G. Fred Lee, a Harvard-educated environmental engineer and author of 500 water quality studies, says the EPA-written rules perpetuate the myth of solid waste landfill safety. Lee describes the regulatory fix as woefully inadequate to solve the disposal and ground water contamination problems.

Lee says that municipal solid waste contains many dangerous materials--hazardous household chemicals, heavy metals, toxic organic chemicals such as pesticides--that remain permanent threats to water quality if buried in landfills.

Though technically "hazardous" materials are banned from municipal landfills, experts agree that removing "hidden" hazardous material from MSW landfills is virtually impossible.

And Lee estimates that 95 percent of the organic materials in solid waste leachate are of unknown composition and cannot be tested in ground water. A high concentration of unidentified chemicals in ground water could pose hazards to human health.

THE FEDERAL RESPONSE

The Subtitle D regulations require a double bottom liner made from a two-foot layer of compacted soil covered with a plastic lining sheet. The landfills must have a cover, a leachate collection system and a ground water monitoring program for contaminants for 30 years following a landfill's closure. Gases, such as methane, must also be vented and monitored and the waste must have a daily soil top cover.

After October 1993, all states must develop landfill standards to meet the new rules. The law's citizen-suit provision enables any aggrieved party to sue for noncompliance.

But the provisions have been faulted--even by the EPA--as inadequate environmental protection.

"None of the systems are ideal to the extent that they limit fluid migration," said Gary Ahlberg, an environmental engineer with the solid waste section at the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. "As long as leachate exists, there is some risk by it to ground water."

CAROLINA FOLLOWS EPA MODEL

Across the state, 28 lined landfills will open by 1998 with the newly required technology. Federal law exempts old landfills from retrofitting.

"I'd define it as a significant improvement in the management of landfills in solid waste from the standpoint of protecting the ground water," Ahlberg said of the new landfills. "We're talking about collecting leachate that was previously headed towards the ground water."

But in 1988, the EPA admitted the inadequacy of its own "dry tomb" method for long-term water quality protection. "Once a unit is closed, the bottom layer of the landfill will deteriorate over time and, consequently, will not prevent leachate transport out of the unit."

The EPA estimates that the best constructed liner can leak leachate from one to 300 gallons a day per acre.

Because the liners and leachate collection system will be buried under garbage far below the surface, they will be impossible to monitor for failure. And numerous studies have shown that the plastic and clay soil liners will fail due to buckling and punctures.

Liners also offer little protection against chemicals such as benzene, which can move through a two-foot clay liner in about five years. Studies also show that many common chemicals quickly degrade the mandated plastic liners. Everything from mothballs to margarine can cause stress cracks, leading to leachate leaks.

Because landfill leachate remains a permanent threat forever, the liners are not the final solution for ground water quality protection. One scientific study found that 2,000-year-old Roman landfills still produce leachate.

State solid waste experts estimate plumbing corrosion and liner deterioration in 70 years. Unless these failures are caught and corrected, hazardous leachate then will enter the ground water table.

THREAT TO HOLLY SPRINGS GROUND WATER

Contamination is a concern to Holly Springs.

The town relies on four ground water wells. Officials will tap another shortly. All are within two miles from the proposed landfill. The wells can draw up to 350,000 gallons of water a day.

Municipal well water is tested for everything from organic chemicals to fecal coliform. But Lee says there is no way of testing for the many toxics that end up in landfill leachate.

In theory, the landfill cover--like the clay cap planned for the south Wake site--will keep out moisture and thereby limit the creation of toxic garbage juice indefinitely. But cover problems ranging from erosion and waste settling in any climate are well-known.

The regulations also require ground water monitoring wells to detect possible contamination.

"The system of ground water monitoring wells are designed to catch things pretty quick," said Carter. The county will conduct contamination tests beyond the 30-year closure rules, he added.

Others are less sure of these assurances.

Lee reports that required test wells cannot adequately detect pollutants at early stages. Lee also has said the EPA has not calculated the true costs of proper ground water protection.

Following the 30-year period, companies are free from financial obligations for landfill maintenance, though the contamination remains forever.

One 1990 study by the U.S. General Accounting Office of the 30-year provision found that "no financial assurances exist for potential but unknown corrective actions, off-site damages, or other liabilities that may occur after the postclosure [sic] period."

In Florida, the cost for cleaning toxins from just one county landfill and upgrading it for future use came to more than $70 million.

Lee estimates the cost for one landfill with cap closure maintenance over a 200-year period, adjusted for inflation, comes to $200 billion.

Few governments or companies can meet this burden. Those shortchanged are future generations who will inherit permanently polluted ground water.

WASTE REDUCTION

One solution to the crisis is waste reduction. State law requires counties to reduce wastes 25 percent by 1993 and 40 percent by 2001.

As of 1992, the state had conducted 39 studies on waste flow. The solid waste section of DEHNR says landfilling should be the last option after waste reduction, reuse, recycling, composting and waste-to-energy schemes.

Despite these plans, the state only recycled 17 percent of its solid waste at last count in 1990.

Special items such as tires, used oil, batteries, white paper goods, medical waste and even yard waste are either banned from solid waste disposal or require special handling. According to 1990 data, the state recycled 30 percent of its nearly 1.2 millions annual tons of special waste.

For its part, county officials estimate that Wake County will beat the 25 percent waste reduction goal. With recycling, waste tonnage has dropped 19 percent from 1988-89, to 500,000 tons a year.

Even with aggressive recycling, landfills probably will remain.

Carter predicts that a new technology will emerge by the time the planned site is capped in 2017: "I don't think there will be another landfill like we have proposed at south Wake."

Turner foresees more recycling and incineration. To cut back on solid waste, Turner advocates education and continued waste reduction.

"We will see a significant reduction in hazardous and municipal solid waste over the next several decades," Turner predicts. "The best thing to do is produce as little as possible."

CHRONOLOGY OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT

1962: Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring, a chilling account of massive, agricultural pesticide poisoning of humans and the ecosystem. Carson is the first of many to articulate a core theme of the later environmental justice movement that humans have a right to be free from toxic pollution and a right to a clean environment.

1970: The creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the first Earth Day. The events are lauded as hallmarks in the environmental movement.

That same year, then Mayor Richard Hatcher of predominantly black Gary, Ind., condemns the movement: "The nation's concern with the environment has done what George Wallace has been unable to do: distract the nation from the human problems of black and brown Americans."

1971: In testimony before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, then EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus said the EPA was a "technical" and scientific body, and it was unable to judge the impact of pollution on minority communities under the federal Civil Rights Act. Ruckelshaus goes on to head a multi-national waste disposal company, Browning-Ferris Industries.

In the second annual study by the Council on the Environment, the first of many subsequent scientific findings emerge that shows the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards.

1975: In a report that year, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights faults the EPA for not enforcing provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which protects all persons against discrimination in any federally funded program. The commission concludes that "unless EPA takes positive steps to insure an end to the systemic discrimination which has resulted in inadequate sewer services in minority communities, EPA will be responsible for perpetuating that discrimination."

1977: In a suit regarding discrimination of a state's hazardous waste facility siting, Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp., the U.S. Supreme Court establishes that litigants must prove the difficult standard of "discriminatory intent" by officials in siting decisions. Since then, courts have rejected three separate charges by minority communities against public officials in Texas, Virginia and Georgia regarding municipal solid waste landfill sitings. In each case, the plaintiffs did not sufficiently demonstrate "discriminatory intent."

1978: Love Canal becomes a national metaphor for toxic dumping. Low- and middle-income white residents of a Buffalo area neighborhood built over a toxic burial ground mobilize under the leadership of Lois Gibbs to demand compensation for the toxic poisoning of their children and community. Hundreds of families are evacuated and bought out following headline-grabbing protests. Two years later, then President Jimmy Carter declares the dump site a disaster area.

June 1979: The EPA approves the disposal facility in Warren County, N.C., for waste laced with highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). For the decision, the EPA waived its own requirements mandating proper soil impermeability and groundwater depth--conditions not met in the low-lying, eastern North Carolina county.

1979: The EPA begins revising regulations protecting farmworkers from exposure to toxic pesticides. After more than a decade and lobbying by farmworker rights groups, the EPA finally implements protective regulations in August 1992 to protect the overwhelmingly minority work force, who suffer up to 300,000 acute illnesses and injuries each year.

April 1981: Former homemaker-turned grassroots organizer Lois Gibbs founds Citizen's Clearinghouse for Hazardous Wastes. The group provides information to citizen groups how to organize against pollution of communities and the environment.

August 1982: The Eastern District Court of North Carolina rejects a NAACP-argued constitutional challenge that a planned PCB disposal facility in Warren County violated the civil rights of the county's residents. Though the county had the highest percentage of minority residents in the North Carolina (then 64 percent), the court found "there is not one shred of evidence that race has at any time been a motivating factor for any decision taken by any official--state, federal or local--in this long saga."

Following this third failed court effort, the first ever protest to use 1960s-style civil disobedience for environmental issues results in more than 500 arrests of black and white county residents.

1983: As a result of the Warren County protests, District of Columbia congressional delegate Walter Fauntroy requests the U.S. General Accounting Office to conduct a study that is later called, Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. The investigation of four facilities in the Southeast, including in Warren County, found that "blacks make up the majority of the population in three of the four communities where landfills are located."

April 1987: The Rev. Benjamin Chavis of the United Church of Christ (UCC), releases the hallmark UCC study Toxic Waste and Race at a National Press Club meeting in Washington. The nationwide investigation found that race--even more than socioeconomic status--was the most significant variable tested when examining the relation between communities and the location of 415 commercial hazardous waste facilities. Areas with one such facility had about twice as many people of color as areas with no facility. The report concludes that the national problem of "hazardous wastes in Black, Hispanic and other racial and ethnic communities should be made a priority issue at all levels of government."

The term "environmental racism," coined by Chavis, enters the public vocabulary.

1988: Industries continue to solicit support from minority groups, while studies continue to show inequity in the distribution of environmental health hazards. At a South Carolina conference attended by the presidents of historically black universities, oil company executives asked the education leaders to drum up support among blacks for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in exchange for a slice of an estimated $297 billion in oil development revenues. That same year, the Federal Center for Disease Control, Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) reports that percentages of black children with excessive levels of lead exceeded the percentages of white children with such levels.

1990: Following a decade of investigations on environmental racism, the environmental sociologist Robert Bullard of the University of California-Riverside publishes Dumping in Dixie. Through a review of existing data, Bullard charges that minorities have been overlooked in environmental movements and decision-making and that government and private industries have followed the path of least resistance in siting locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) in powerless minority communities, particularly in the Southeast.

January 1990: The University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, School of Natural Resources hosts a national conference on environmental justice. The meeting on race and the incidence of environmental hazards was the first of its kind where the majority of presenters were people of color. Then EPA Administrator William Reilly and other ranking EPA officials meet with prominent minority environmental leaders, who challenge the EPA to create an internal group to study environmental racism.

March 1990: In the "letters that shook the movement," two prominent minority, grassroots environmental groups bluntly accuse the so-called "Group of Ten" environmental organizations of racism. The Louisiana's Gulf Coast Tenant Leadership Development Project and the Southwest Organizing Project urge the mainstream and largely white organizations--such as the National Audobon Society and the National Resources Defense Council--to reform their internal and allegedly racist hiring policies and to address the needs of minority people.

July 1990: After follow-up meetings with the Michigan Conference attendees and ranking U.S. officials in Washington, EPA chief Reilly creates the Environmental Equity Group. The work group eventually grows to the Office of Environmental Equity in July 1992 and receives condemnation as a public relations ploy and praise as the first EPA step to resolve the problem of environmental injustice.

October 1991: The first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington gathers the predominantly minority leaders of the isolated, grassroots environmental movements. About 650 participants during the four-day summit hear concerns from Native American, black, Latino and other minority activists and draft a charter outlining the principles of environmental justice.

February 1992: The EPA's releases the first of two reports on what it calls "environmental equity." In the officially-published June 1992 edition, the study claims that though minority and low-income populations have above average pollution exposure and certain disease rates, "there is a general lack of data on environmental health effects by race and income." The findings outrage members of environmental justice movement. Bullard says the report overlooks the history of institutional racism in decision-making.

February 1992: The U.S. Congress holds its first ever hearings on environmental justice, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) The same month, Waxman also releases an internal memo stamped "priority confidential" from Lewis Crampton, then an EPA associate administrator for public relations. In contrast to EPA's public stance, the letter privately calls the environmental justice movement "one of the most politically explosive environmental issues to emerge" and warns that the EPA might become a "potential target" of protest for minority activists. Crampton outlines a public relations strategy to win over civil rights groups critical of the EPA for the agency's inaction on environmental justice issues.

Waxman calls the EPA's public relations campaign a "cynical divide and conquer strategy" that "seeks to drive a wedge between activist groups and traditional civil rights organizations."

1992: In a review of 16 studies regarding the distribution of environmental hazards, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor natural resources professors Paul Mohai and Bunyan Bryant found "clear and unequivocal evidence" that income and racial biases existed. They also found that in six of nine studies that analyzed race and income information--including findings from three national studies--race was more importantly related to these hazards than income.

May 1992: At the Sierra Club's centennial in Harper's Ferry, W.Va., then Executive Director Michael Fisher responds to growing criticism from grassroots environmentalists that mainstream environmental groups have failed to address minority concerns such as housing, lead poisoning and LULU sitings. Fisher acknowledges that the club's "overwhelming white," middle class, backpacker membership did not represent the needs of a multi-cultural country. He calls for "a friendly takeover of the Sierra Club by People of Color."

June 1992: Rep. Paul Lewis (D-Ga.) and then Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.) introduce the "Environmental Justice Act of 1992" to the U.S. Congress. The still unratified legislation is the first federal, legislative effort to require that groups most affected by toxic chemicals participate in the decision process controlling those materials and to "ensure that significant adverse health impacts that may be associated with environmental pollution in the United States are not distributed inequitably."

September 1992: In a widely publicized and damaging report against the EPA, The National Law Journal found in a comprehensive study of the EPA's own record of 1,177 Superfund toxin waste sites that white communities saw faster responses, better cleanups and stiffer penalties against polluters than minority communities. The study discovered that penalties under federal hazardous waste law at hazardous sites with greater white populations were about 500 percent larger than penalties at hazardous sites in minority communities. Abandoned waste sites in minority communities also took 20 percent longer to be placed on the Superfund cleanup priority action list.

April 1993: The NAACP chooses the Rev. Benjamin Chavis--"father" of the environmental justice movement--as its new head. The move is widely applauded. Chavis appears in testimony before Congress the same month with other grassroots, minority environmental leaders to testify on proposed revisions to an EPA bill that would require the EPA to establish a citizens advisory board and require better regulatory enforcement in disadvantaged areas.

Chicago Congresswoman Cardiss Collins (D-Ill.) sponsors an amendment under to the Solid Waste Disposal Act called the "Environmental Equal Rights Act of 1993." The measure would create citizen hearing provisions to prevent hazardous and solid waste facilities from being sited in "environmentally disadvantaged," poor and minority communities already burdened by such facilities. The measure would assess those communities' demographic and socioeconomic information and the effects of existing waste facilities.

May 1993: Citizen's Clearinghouse announces that it has worked with more than 8,000 local groups since its founding in 1981. The organization continues printing its newsletter, Everyone's Backyard, to encourage grassroots empowerment and anti-pollution advocacy.

May 1993: The U.S. Senate passes a major environmental bill that would establish new programs to deal with minorities and Native Americans disproportionately burdened by pollution.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON HOLLY SPRINGS

Allen, Joe et al. "Solid Waste Landfill Site at Holly Springs" n.p., April 1993. Paper presented as requirement for "Conservation and Sustainable Development II," Spring Semester 1993, Duke and North Carolina State Universities.

Beiro, Noreen et al. Existing Conditions in Holly Springs, North Carolina. On file at the Department of City and Regional Planning, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. April 1984.

Fields, Tom et al. Holly Springs Economic and Community Development Analysis. On file at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. December 1992.

Rawlins, Wade. "Board Seeks 317 Acres for Landfill," The News and Observer, 7 April 1992, p. B4.

Rawlins, Wade. "Official Wants Double What County's Offering Wake Commissioner's Land in Path of Landfill," The News and Observer, 6 February 1993, p. B1;

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE

AND ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM

"A Place at the Table: A Sierra Roundtable on Race and the Environment." Sierra (May/June 1993), pp. 51-58, 91, 96.

American Political Network, Inc. dispatch. "Eco-Racism: Minorities Say They Are Pollution Victims." 11 January 1993.

The Associated Press dispatch. "Bill May Tighten Rules On Incinerator Approval." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 16 May 1993, p. B2.

Austin, Regina and Schill, Michael. "Black, Brown, Poor & Poisoned: Minority grassroots Environmentalism and the Quest for Eco-Justice." Kansas Law Journal 1 (1991) and Public Policy 69 (1991).

Bachrach, Kenneth M. and Alex J. Zautra. "Coping with Community Stress: The Threat of a Hazardous Waste Landfill." Journal of Health and Social Behavior 26 (June 1985): 127-141.

Bailey, Jeff. "Some Big Waste Firms Pay Some Tiny Towns Little for Dump Sites." Wall Street Journal, 3 December 1991, pp. A1, A9.

Been, Vicki. "What's Fairness Got to Do With It? Environmental Equity and the Siting of Locally Undesirable Land Uses." Cornell Law Review 78 (Forthcoming 1993).

Been, Vicki. "Locally Undesirable Land Uses in Minority Neighborhoods: Disproportionate Siting or Market Dynamics." Associate Professor of Law, New York University School of Law, 5 February 1993.

Bernard, David and Bradley R. Rice. Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth Since World War II. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984.

Brian, J. and L. Berry, eds. The Social Burdens of Environmental Pollution: A Comparative Metropolitan Data Source. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1978.

Bingham, Gail. "Resolving Environmental Disputes: A Decade of Experience." In Robert W. Lake (ed.), Resolving Locational Conflict, New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1987, pp. 314-323.

Boulard, Gary. "Combating Environmental Racism." The Christian Science Monitor, 17 March 1993, p. 8.

Bronstein, Scott. "`This is an Issue of Life and Death' EPA Gets an Earful of Alleged Racism in Pollution Policy." The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 15 September 1992, p. A3.

------"Toxic Trouble Spots." The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 16 September 1992, p. A3.

Bryant, B. and P. Mohai. "Environmental Injustice: Weighing Race and Class as Factors in the Distribution of Environmental Hazards." University of Colorado Law Review 63 (Fall 1992): 921-932.

------Proceedings of the Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, School of Natural Resources, 1990.

Bryant, Carleton B. "EPA's Policies Racist, Activist Tell House Panel." The Washington Times, 5 March 1993, p. A6.

Bullard, Robert. Dumping in Dixie. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990.

Bullard, Robert and Beverly H. Wright. "The Politics of Pollution: Implications for the Black Community." Phylon 47 (March 1986): 71-78.

------"Environmentalism and the Politics of Equity: Emergent Trends in the Black Community." Mid-American Review of Sociology 12 (Winter 1987): 21-37.

Burtman, Bob. "Peak or Pit?" The Independent. 12 December 1991.

"Call to Action." The National Law Journal, 21 September 1992, p. 12.

Chavis, Benjamin F. Jr. "Environmental Racism Harms Social Justice." Sacramento Bee, 25 January 1993, p. B13.

Cole, Luke W. "Empowerment as the Key to Environmental Protection: The Need for Environmental Poverty Law." Ecology Law Quarterly 19 (1992): 619-683.

Cole, Luke W. "Remedies for Environmental Racism: A View from the Field." Michigan Law Review 90 (1991): 1990-1997.

Colquette, Kelly M. and Elizabeth A. Henry Robertson. "Environmental Racism: The Causes, Consequences and Commendations." Tulane Environmental Law Journal 5 (1991).

Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communities Hazardous Waste Sites. New York: United Church of Christ, 1987.

Covello, V.T. and F.W. Allen. Seven Cardinal Rules of Risk Communication. Washington, D.C.: Environmental Protection Agency, 1988.

Cutter, Susan C. "Community Concern for Pollution: Social and Environmental Influences," Environment and Behavior 13 (1981): 105-124.

Diemer, Tom. "Chavis Describes Racism of Pollution." The Plain Dealer, 7 May 1993, p. 10A.

------"Environmental Race Issues Linked by Rights Veteran." The Plain Dealer, 26 March 1993, p. 5A.

------"Senate Passes Glenn's Bill to Safeguard Environment." The Plain Dealer, 5 May 1992, p. 3A.

Dorman, Peter. "The Distributional Effect of the Uniform Air Pollution Policy in the United States." Review of Radical Political Economy 16 (Winter 1984): 151-164.

Edelstein, Michael R. Contaminated Communities: The Social and Psychological Impacts of Residential Toxic Exposure. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1987.

Elliott, Donald E. Jr. "A Cabin in the Mountains: Reflections on the Distributional Consequences of Environmental Protection Program. Kansas Journal of Law & Public Policy. (Summer 1991): 5-13.

"Environmental Decisions Lack Ethnic Justice--Gore." The Christian Science Monitor, 12 January 1993, p. 9.

"Environmental Policy Tainted by Racism." The National Law Journal, 4 January 1993, p. S4.

EPA Journal. "Environmental Protection--Has it Been Fair?" Vol. 18, no. 1 (March/April 1992).

"EPA Mulls Civil Rights Law at Hill Hearing." The National Law Journal, 15 March 1993, p. 5.

Feagin, Joe R. and Clairece Booher Feagin. Discrimination American Style: Institution Racism and Sexism. Malabar, Fla.: Robert Krueger Publishing, 1986.

Ferris, Deeohn. "Environmental Injustice: the EPA Must Address the Impact of Pollution on People of Color." The Los Angeles Daily Journal. 21 August 1992, p. 6.

Freeman, Myrick. "The Distribution of Environmental Quality." In Allen V. Kneese and Blair T. Bower, eds., Environmental Quality Analysis. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1972.

Freudenberg, Nicholas and Carol Steinsapir. "Not in Our Backyards: The Grassroots Environmental Movement." Society and Natural Resources 4 (1991): 235-245.

Geiser, Ken and Gerry Waneck. "PCBs and Warren County." Science for the People 15 (July/August 1983): 13-17.

Godsil, Rachel. "Remedying Environmental Racism." Michigan Law Review 90 (1991): 394-427.

Gottlieb, Robert and Helen Ingram. "The New Environmentalists." Progressive (August 1988): 14-15.

Greenberg, Michael R. and Richard F. Anderson. Hazardous Waste Sites: The Credibility Gap. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1984.

Guerrero, Michael and Luis Head. "The Environment--Redefining the Issue." In Dana Alston, ed., We Speak for Ourselves: Social Justice, Race and Environment. N.p., 1990.

Hagan, John F. and Darrell Holland. "Chavis to Take Fight for Environmental Justice to NAACP." The Plain Dealer, 10 April 1993, p. 6A.

Hall, Bob, ed. Environmental Politics. Durham, N.C.: Institute for Southern Studies, 1988.

Hamilton, James. "Politics and Social Costs: Estimating the Impact of Collective Action on Hazardous Waste Facilities." RAND Journal of Economics 24, No. 1 (Spring 1993): 101-125.

"Hazardous Waste Sites and the Rural Poor: A Preliminary Assessment." Clean Sites. N.p., 1990.

Hays, Samuel. Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Holland, Darrell. "Cleveland UCC Minister on Clinton's Transition Team." The Plain Dealer, 16 December 1992, p. 3A.

Johnson, K. "Public, Workers, and Parathion: Equity in Hazard Management." Environment 24, No. 9 (1982).

Johnson, W. R. "Should the Poor Buy No Growth?" Daedalus 102, No. 4 (1973): 165-190.

Jordan, Charles and Donald Snow. "Diversification, Minorities, and the Mainstream Environmental Movement." In Donald Snow, ed., Voices from the Environmental Movement: Perspectives for a New Era, N.p., 1991.

Kerr, Mary Lee. "Arsenic and Race." The Independent. 11 September 1991.

Ketkar, Kusum. "Hazardous Waste Sites and Property Values in the State of New Jersey." Applied Economics 24 (1992): 647-649.

Krimsky, S. Environmental Hazards: Communicating Risk as a Social Process. Dover, Mass.: Auburn House, 1988.

La Ganga, Maria L. "Coalition Stresses Plight of Inner City." Los Angeles Times, 6 April 1993, p. 3B.

Lavelle, Marianne. "Activist Tapped for Transition." The National Law Journal, 21 December 1992, p. 3.

------"Discrimination Probe Planned." The National Law Journal, 28 September 1992, p. 1.

------"Environmental Racism Targeted." The National Law Journal, 1 March 1993, p. 3.

------"EPA Enforcement to Be Probed." The National Law Journal, 5 April 1993, p. 3.

------"Negotiations Are Key to Most Fines." The National Law Journal, 21 September 1992, p. S6.

------"Residents Want `Justice,' The EPA Offers `Equity.'" The National Law Journal, 21 September 1992, p. S12.

------"Transition Meets with Minorities." The National Law Journal, 14 December 1992, p. 3.

Lavelle, Marianne and Marcia Coyle. "A Special Investigation; Unequal Protection: The Racial Divide in Environmental Law." The National Law Journal, 21 September 1992.

------"Critical Mass Builds on Environmental Equity." The National Law Journal, 26 April 1993, p. 5.

Lazarus, Richard J. "Pursuing `Environmental Justice': The Distributional Effects of Environmental Protection." Northwestern University Law Journal Review 87 (Forthcoming 1993).

Leavenworth, Stuart. "Some See Racism in Waste Decisions." The News and Observer, 12 November 1992.

Lineberry, Robert L. Equity and Urban Policy: The Distribution of Municipal Public Services. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1977.

Love, Sam. "Ecology and Social Justice: Is there a Conflict?" Environmental Action 4 (1972): 3-6.

Mitchell, Robert Cameron and Richard T. Carson. "Protest, Property Rights, and Hazardous Waste." Resources 85 (Fall 1986): 6-9.

Mohai, Paul. "Public Concern and Elite Involvement in Environmental-Conservation Issues." Social Science Quarterly 66 (December 1985): 820-838.

Mohai, Paul and Bunyan Bryant, "Environmental Racism: Reviewing the Evidence." In Paul Mohai and Bunyan Bryant, eds., Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards: A Time for Discourse. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1992.

Montague, Peter. "What We Must Do: A Grassroots Offensive Against Toxics in the 90s." The Workbook. N.p. 1989.

Morell, David. "Siting and the Politics of Equity." In Robert W. Lake, ed., Resolving Locational Conflict. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Center for Urban Policy Research, 1987, pp. 117-136.

Morrison, Denton E. "How and Why Environmental Consciousness Has Trickled Down." In Allan Schnaiberg, Nicholas Watts and Klaus Zimmermann, eds., Distributional Conflict in Environmental-Resource Policy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986, pp. 187-220.

Moses, Marion. "Pesticide-Related Health Problems and Farmworkers." American Association of Occupational Health Nurses Journal 37 (1989).

Moss, Gary. "County to Buy Landfill-Area Lots." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 16 March 1993, p. 1A.

------"God Worked it Out." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 11 June 1992, p. 1B.

------"Landfill-Closing Plan Offered." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 22 April 1993, p. 1A.

------"Landfill Protest Leader Arrested. Fayetteville Observer-Times, 25 April 1992, p. 1A.

------"Landfill Vote Improper, Keefe Claims." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 23 March 1993, p. 1B.

------"Moving Landfill-Area Residents Questioned." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 6 April 1993, p. 1A.

------"Report Urges Buyout, Move From Landfill Site." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 2 October 1992, p. 1A.

------"Residents Vent Anger at Landfill." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 14 May 1992, p. 1B.

Nader, Ralph; Ronald Brownstein and John Richard, eds. Who's Poisoning America: Corporate Polluters and Their Victims in the Chemical Age. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982.

National Resources Issue: Race, Class, and Environmental Regulation. Colorado Law Review 63 (Fall 1992).

Neiman, Max and Ronald O. Loveridge. "Environmentalism and Local Growth Control: A Probe into the Class Bias Thesis." Environment and Behavior 13 (1981): 759-772.

O'Hare, Michael; Lawrence Bacow and Debra Sanderson. Facility Siting and Public Opposition. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983.

Perrin, Constance. Everything in Its Place: Social Order and Land Use in America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977.

Plough, A. and S. Krimsky. "The Emergence of Risk Communication Studies: Social and Political Context." Science, Technology and Human Values 12, Nos. 3-4 (1987): 4-10.

"Polluters Get Fined Less in Minority Communities." Jet, 12 October 1992, p. 30.

Popper, Frank J. "The Environmentalist and the LULU." Environment 27 (March 1985): 7-11, 37-40.

Reich, Michael. Toxic Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Reilly, William. "EPA's Reilly Replies to `Unequal Protection.'" The National Law Journal, 25 January 1993.

Russel, D. "Environmental Racism." Amicus Journal 11 (Spring 1989): 22-32.

Science Advisory Board. Reducing Risk: Setting Priorities and Strategies for Environmental Protection. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, September 1990.

Seley, John and Julian Wolpert. "Equity Issues and Location." In Roger E. Kasperson, ed., Equity Issues in Radioactive Waste Management. Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1983, pp. 69-93.

Shalal-Esa, Andrea. "Native Americans, Blacks Accuse EPA of Environmental Racism." Reuters Limited dispatch, 28 April 1993.

Smith, J.N. Environmental Quality and Social Justice in Urban America. Washington, D.C.: The Conservation Foundation, 1974.

Stocking, Ben. "Old Landfill Fears far from Buried." The News and Observer, 13 July 1993, pp. 1A, 8A.

Suro, Robert. "Pollution-Weary Minorities Try Civil Rights Track." The New York Times, 11 January 1993, p. A1.

"Taylor, Richard A. "Do Environmentalists Care About Poor People?" U.S. News and World Report 96 (2 April 1982): 51-52.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Environmental Equity Reducing Risk For All Communities (Volume 1: Workgroup Report to the Administrator). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1992.

------Environmental Equity Reducing Risk For All Communities

(Volume 2: Supporting Document). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1992.

U.S. General Accounting Office. Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities. Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, 1983.

"Who Gets Dumped On?" The Atlanta Constitution Journal, 25 February 1993, p. 18A.

Weisskopf, Michael. "The Federal Page--EPA's 2 Voices on Pollution Risks to Minorities." The Washington Post, 9 March 1992.

------"The Federal Page--Minorities' Pollution Risk is Debated; Some Activists Link Exposure to Racism." The Washington Post, 16 January 1992, p. A25.

Wilson, William J. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner city, the Underclass and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Wright, George. "Hazardous Waste Disposal and the Problems of Stigmatic and Racial Injury." Arizona State Law Journal 23 (1991).

Yates, Scott. "`Deliver Us,' Landfill's Neighbors Ask City." Fayetteville Observer-Times, 12 January 1992, p. 1A.

Zwerdling, Daniel. "Poverty and Pollution." Progressive 37 (January 1973): 25-29.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ON GROUND WATER,

LANDFILLS AND SOLID WASTE REGULATIONS

Arrandale, Tom. "Toxic Groundwater." (Editorial) Sacramento Bee, 18 May 1993, p. B7.

Beasley, Alex. "What We Ditched We May Drink Tomorrow." Orlando Sentinel Tribune, 18 October 1992, p. A1.

Beasley, Alex and John Glisch. "How Much More Poison Has Yet to Surface." Orlando Sentinel Tribune, 13 December 1992, p. A1.

Environmental Research Foundation. Rachel's Hazardous Waste News 182, 23 May 1990.

------231, 1 May 1991.

------271, 5 February 1992.

------316, 16 December 1992.

Freedman, Mitchell. "Court Rejects Towns' Bid to Keep Landfills Open." Newsday. 19 February 1993, p. 6.

Furuseth, Owen J. and Mark S. Johnson. "Neighborhood Attitudes Toward a Sanitary Landfill: A North Carolina Study." Applied Geography 8 (1988): 133-145.

Ichniowski, Tom. "U.S. Issues New Waste Rules." Engineering News-Record, 23 September 1991, p. 8A.

Knopes, Andrew. A Study of the Effect of the Orange Regional Landfill on Neighboring Land Values. On file at the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 1991.

Lee, G. Fred and R. Anne Jones-Lee. "Groundwater Pollution by Municipal Leachate Composition, Detection and Water Quality Significance." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, El Macero, Calif., May 1991.

------"Groundwater Quality at Lined Landfills: Adequacy of Subtitle D Approaches." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, El Macero, Calif., May 1993.

------"Landfills and Groundwater Pollution Issues: `Dry-Tomb' vs F/L Wet-Cell Landfills." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, El Macero, Calif., December 1992.

------"Municipal Landfill Post-Closure Care Funding: The `30-Year Post-Closure Care' Myth." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, El Macero, Calif., July 1992.

------"Revisions of State MSW Landfill Regulations: Issues for Consideration for the Protection of Groundwater Quality." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, El Macero, Calif., May 1993.

------"Supplemental Material for Groundwater Quality Monitoring at Lined Landfills: Adequacy of Subtitle D. Approaches." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, El Macero, Calif., May 1993.

Lee, G. Fred and R. Anne Jones. "Comments on US EPA `Solid Waste Disposal Criteria' Final Rule -- October 9, 1991." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, October 1991.

------"Landfills and Ground-Water Quality." Ground Water 29, No. 4 (July/August 1991): 482-486.

------"Municipal Solid Waste Management in Line, `Dry-Tomb' Landfills: A Technologically Flawed Approach for Protection of Groundwater Quality." Report by G. Fred Lee & Associates, March 1992.

Mayer, Jim. "Landfill Officials Down in the Dumps Over New U.S. Rules." Sacramento Bee, 11 April 1993, p. B1.

McNeil, Robert. "Tighter Landfill Regulation to Bring Many Changes." State News Service dispatch, 19 October 1992.

Montgomery, Leland. "Down in the Dumps." Financial World, 23 June 1992, p. 30.

North Carolina. North Carolina Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources, Division of Solid Waste Management. Solid Waste Management Rules. Title 15A, Chapter 13 (as amended 10 June 1993). Raleigh, 1993.

North Carolina. North Carolina Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources, Division of Solid Waste Management. North Carolina Recycling and Solid Waste Management Plan Executive Summary. Raleigh: Roy F. Weston, Inc., February 1992.

Site Plan Application for the New South Wake Solid Waste Management Facility. Prepared by Camp Dresser & McKee. On file at the Solid Waste Section of the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. 4 December 1992.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Decision-Makers Guide To Solid Waste Management. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1989.

Young, David. "New Landfill Rules May Help Big Operations." Chicago Tribune, 12 September 1991, p. C1.

------"Waste Firm Still Hauling Image Woes." Chicago Tribune, 6 October 1991, p. C3.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PERSONAL INTERVIEWS

Personal interviews with the residents of neighborhoods around Holly Spring, N.C. May and June 1993.

Adcock, Stewart. Wake County Commissioner. Telephone interview. 27 May 1993.

Ahlberg, Gary. Environmental Engineer with the Solid Waste Section of the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. Personal Interview. 8 June 1993.

Ballance, Frank. North Carolina state Senator (D). Telephone interview. 15 May 1993.

Baldwin, Dean. Solid Waste Management Superintendent, Cary, N.C. Telephone interview. 19 May 1993.

Best, Willie. Assistant County Manager, Wilson County, N.C. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Blackburn, James. General Counsel, N.C. Association of County Commissioners. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Brinkley, Greg. Branch Manager, Waste Industries, Inc., Raleigh. Telephone interview. 25 May 1993.

Carter, Phil. Solid Waste Director, Wake County, N.C. Personal interview. 27 May and 2 July 1993.

Cofield, Elizabeth M. Former Wake County Commissioner. Telephone interview. 18 May 1993.

Cox, Robert. Professor of Communications and member of the Sierra Club's national board of directors. Personal interview. 14 June 1993.

Crane, Debbie. Public Information Officer, North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Culpepper, Philip. Land Development Supervisor, Wake County, N.C. Telephone interview. 27 May 1993.

DeRosa, Pat. North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, Superfund Section, Division of Solid Waste Management. Personal interview. 8 July 1993.

Elmore, Billie. Director of NC WARN. Telephone interview. 20 May 1993.

Ferruccio, Ken. Member of the Ecumenical Environmental Leadership Coalition, in Warren County, N.C. Telephone interview. 22 June 1993.

Givens, George. Attorney with the North Carolina State Senate Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. Telephone interview. 19 May 1993.

Holleman, Gerald. Mayor of Holly Springs, N.C. Personal interviews. 10 and 17 May 1993.

Holyfield, Doug. Branch Head, Hazardous Waste Section, North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, Division of Solid Waste Management. Telephone interview. 2 July 1993.

Jesneck, Charlotte. North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, Superfund Section, Inactive Hazardous Site Branch Head, Division of Solid Waste Management. Personal interview. 13 July 1993.

Jones, Abraham. Wake County Commissioner. Telephone interview. 29 May 1993.

Kelly, Mike. North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, Deputy Director, Division of Solid Waste Management. Personal interview. 13 July 1993.

MacDonald, Jean. Head of the Euphala Street Landfill Committee, Fayetteville, N.C. Telephone interview. 25 May 1993.

Mathews, Dexter. North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources, Solid Waste Section Chief. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

McNeil, Luncie. Director of Public Works, Holly Springs, N.C. Personal interview. 10 May 1993.

Outwater, Ted. Director of the Clean Water Fund of North Carolina. Telephone interview. 2 July 1993.

Pendleton, Gary. Wake County Commissioner. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Perry, Rachel. Press Secretary to North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt (D). Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Rutledge, Brad. Administrator with the Solid Waste Section, North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. Telephone Interview. 2 July 1993.

Smith, Robert. County Manager, Alamance County. Telephone interview. 26 May 1993.

Speed, James. N.C. State Senator. Co-chair, Solid Waste Committee. Telephone interview. 26 May 1993.

Stevens, Richard. County Manager, Wake County, N.C. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Thomas, Larry. Public Works Director, Apex, N.C. Telephone interview. 24 May 1993.

Turner, Alvis. Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Personal interview. 24 May 1993.

Vick, Therese. Community Organizer for the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League. Telephone interview. 25 May 1993.

Ward, Betty Lou. Wake County Commissioner. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Williford, Ellis. County Manager, Wilson County, N.C. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.

Wiseman, Joe. Environmental Engineer, Project Engineer, Camp Dresser & McKee. Telephone interview. 28 May 1993.