By Pratap Chatterjee
SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 14 1997 (IPS)

Three years after President Bill Clinton signed an order, requiring several federal agencies to take steps to end what is now called ‘environmental injustice’, native communities remain dissatisfied.

It is now eight months since a group of native Americans blocked a railway line near Bad River, Wisconsin to prevent trains from carrying billions of litres of sulphuric acid into a Chippewa Indian reservation for dumping in an old copper mine.

The sulphuric acid was being shipped from Texas by the Canadian company INMET for the purpose of extracting copper from pillars in the old mine shafts.

Walt Bresette, a Chippewa from the neighbouring Red Cliff reservation who had just been appointed to a federal committee to advise the government on environmental racism, dubbed the mining plan “terrorism in the Midwest.”

He is the first chairperson of the indigenous subcommittee of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Panel — a position that is the direct result of a February 1994 ‘executive order’ signed by Clinton. The order requires that 13 major federal agencies, including the Departments of Energy and Transportation, take steps to prevent environmental injustice.

The order was designed to address the fact that three times as many people from minority groups — African-Americans, Asians, Latin Americans, and Native Americans — live in areas near hazardous waste facilities than in areas without such operations.

This phenomenon has energised a number of grassroots groups who collectively call themselves the “environmental justice” movement and who played a key role in bringing about the presidential order.

But in recent months, doubt has set in among Bresette and other activists, who say that the effect of the order has been simply the addition of a new layer of bureaucracy.

When the train cars began to arrive with sulphuric acid last July, Bresette used his new position to demand a federal investigation into the violations of the 1842 treaty between the Chippewa and the federal government which guarantees subsistence rights to the tribe. He pointed out that the acidic waste released during the old mining operations and the air pollution caused by an accompanying smelter provided clear examples of “toxic racism”.

For 40 years, this mining waste has poisoned the Mineral River, which flows five miles from the mine into Lake Superior and which has been a traditional source of water and fish for the Chippewa tribe.

When no investigation was forthcoming, Bresette took the law into his own hands. Together with several other Chippewa activists he sat down on the train tracks in early July to prevent the acid from being brought into the reservation. Bresette marched into the regional offices of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Chicago later that month to demand proper hearings on the matter.

In October, the EPA took the decision to suspend the mining permit while an “environmental analysis” was conducted. But by that time, Bresette had renounced his advisory position with the government and returned home to the Red Cliff reservation.

“The problem with (Clinton’s) executive order is that it is only an expression of the president’s wishes. It is not a law,” says Clarisse Gaylord, the director of the office of environmental justice at EPA.

Gaylord, who heads a staff of 11, says her job is often frustrating. “What we might call a success today could be reversed tomorrow,” she says.

Take, for example, the Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. Last summer, Gaylord and her staff convinced the Department of Transportation (DOT) not to build a highway across the college property, saying it would violate the spiritual and cultural values of the local native community. The Army Corps of Engineers charged with building the road rejected the agreement this winter and decided to proceed with the original plan.

For such reasons, Bresette remains highly sceptical of the executive order.

“Pitted against the politics of Washington and the economic might of Wall Street, environmental racism has always prevailed,” he says.

Gaylord, who also has to tackle matters faced by Asian, Latin American, and African-American communities, is still hopeful despite the lack of progress.

“Without the executive order, it may have been impossible for us to sit down with the (Department of Transportation) in Kansas in the first place,” she says.

But the office is slowly being overwhelmed by new petitions: In northern Arizona, a company called Peabody has been extracting coal for decades on the land of the Navajo and the Hopi, drawing out massive amounts of water from the desert; a native American community in Virginia has asked for help because the state government is seeking to build a dam on a local river; the Eyak tribe in Alaska wants a logging company thrown off their traditional land; while the native basket weaver’s association in California wants help in preventing pesticide poisoning of their principal resource.

And there are other cases.

In southern California’s Ward valley, a company called U.S. Ecology plans to dump low-level radioactive nuclear waste near the desert town of Needles and near land belonging to the Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Quechan, Cocopah, and Colorado River native tribes.

Although the EPA sides with the tribes, the government of California takes the opposite view. Governor Pete Wilson has taken the EPA to court in an effort to allow the company to proceed with the dumping plan.

Meanwhile, the Native American community is yet to get its act together in helping Gaylord’s office. Several months after Bresette vacated his position as head of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Panel, the indigenous subcommittee appointed a replacement — Jean Gamache of Alaska.

In late February, two months after she was appointed, Gamache stepped down from the position, citing constraints on her time. The head of EPA’s environmental justice department is now seeking the third person for the job in less than a year.

The EPA has devoted an entire office to ending environmental justice. Other federal bodies like the Pentagon and the Department of Energy have appointed staff members to an inter-agency taskforce that meets every two months to discuss common issues.

And the EPA has recorded some successes. Galord and her staff have convinced the Civil Aviation Authority not to extend the runways of Logan airport in Boston into a predominantly African- American community. Through negotiation with the local community, an alternative extension plan has been devised.

But activists like Bresette are not optimistic that the new committees, plans, and negotiations will change things for his people.

“The idea is a good one, but the bureaucracy gets in the way,” he says. “Plus, I don’t think that these non-native people understand the issue of our sovereignty.”

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