The beginning of the 20th century gave us the rise of the American environmental movement with three American icons: Gifford Pinchot, John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt.
Their battle over the conservation movements in our forestlands placed environmental regulation into the forefront of public discussion for the first time in history.
But the plight of these early environmentalists differs greatly from the reality of environmental issues today. We are no longer fighting for the preservation of pristine, unpolluted swaths of federal land. In today’s America, environmental activism exists in urban landscape in the city, as well as far away in our national parks.
It is a common perception to view nature as “out there” — away from our towns, our cities and our daily lives. In the minds of most, environmentalism is something unfamiliar that occurs where no paved roads or tract homes exist.
Unfortunately, the fight for a clean environment has long been at our front door, closer to home than many would care to know.
Phoenix, which has a long history of environmental disasters due to lack of regulation, is a perfect example.
Most residents would be horrified to learn of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of industrial pollutants that have seeped into groundwater under certain areas of the city.
Superfund sites, which are Environmental Protection Agency-designated sites for the dumping of toxic waste, exist all over the city. Water Quality Assurance Revolving Funds are Arizona-designated superfund sites.
As Andrew Ross writes in his 2011 book, “Bird on Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City,” dozens of these Superfund/WQAF sites are situated under heavily populated areas of the city.
One of the worst Superfund sites, Ross writes, in the country lies in the West Valley city of Maryvale, where gasoline that leaked into underground aquifers resulted in levels of trichloroethylene, a toxic solvent, reaching 350 times the federal standard. Phoenix News Times’s Terry Sterling report in 1996 reinforces Ross’s accusation of Maryvale as a “cancer cluster.”
Phoenix also has an extensive history of airborne toxic catastrophes from industrial fires. The worst of which, Ross mentions, was in August 2000 when Central Garden in south Phoenix, the valley’s largest supplier of pool and lawn chemicals, caught fire and burned for two days.
Ross furthers that because of lax regulation on the city’s part, no records were kept on what type of chemicals was stored in the company’s warehouse that caught fire. To this day, there is no knowledge of what type of industrial solvents the public was exposed to.
According to Ross, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality claimed there was no public health concern, despite studies that showed levels of arsenic 100 times the federal standard in drinkable water a month after the incident.
It is no surprise, then, that in nearby communities where Superfund/WQAF sites are, located levels of cancer, miscarriages and childhood illnesses far exceed the national average.
It’s hard to imagine that early environmentalisms like Pinchot, Muir and Roosevelt could have conceived what the reality of environmental issues would be today. No longer is the fight for the environment about preserving trees or wetlands — those battles have been long lost.
The air we breathe, the water we drink and the land under our feet deserve our full attention. Our cities have long been, and continue to be, used as toxic waste sites for the companies and governments that profit off their pollution.
Reach the columnist at Damills3@asu.edu or follow him at @Dan_iel_Mills.
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