CHAPTER 3

Poisoned World: The Racial Gradient of Environmental Neurotoxins

I grew up an Army brat, which made moving to a new military base, a new town, and sometimes a new country every few years the norm. But I was anchored by the adopted hometowns of Croton-on-Hudson, New York, where my maternal grandparents lived, and, thirty miles away, the Harlem home of an aunt and uncle.

Whenever I visited Croton, I’d join playmates and cousins in daily routines of outdoor games like hide-and-go-seek, skating, and cycling as we ranged for miles across vast neighborhood gardens and the pristine surrounding woods, collecting butterflies, tadpoles, and less savory samples of nature.

But Harlem’s big-city sophistication contrasted sharply with my grandparents’ sleepy exurban town: flitting to museums, planetariums, art galleries, films, and shopping by subway and bus ruled my days as we walked blocks on streets choked by fuel emissions in that pre-lead-abatement era. My Harlem playmates had a familiarity with culture that eclipsed that of Croton, or for that matter, on Army bases.

Eventually I realized that they had something else I hadn’t encountered in Croton: asthma. It’s purely anecdotal, but I cannot recall a single Harlem playmate, including my cousins, who didn’t suffer bouts of wheezing, carry an inhaler, or tell of frightening nights spent struggling to breathe while suffering from coughing, chest tightness, and narrowing of their airways.

Every child in the thirty-story building didn’t have asthma, of course, but it was commonplace, sometimes culminating in a white-knuckle ride to Harlem Hospital, ten blocks down the street.

As a child, I made no connection between the plight of my asthmatic playmates and the fact that the 146th Street Depot¹ and its hydrocarbon-laden emissions were right across the street from my aunt’s building, which is within a large African American residential complex. And this depot, now named the Mother Clare Hale Depot, wasn’t alone: nine of New York City’s ten bus depots were located in Harlem.

Asthma is still common in many African American communities partly because the oil and natural gas industries located predominately in or near them violate EPA air-quality standards for smog due to natural gas emissions. “Dirty” emissions from power plants combine with motor-vehicle pollution to form ozone smog, which triggers respiratory ailments, including asthma.

In this dense city of 8.5 million people, Harlem, the South Bronx, and other heavily industrialized ethnic neighborhoods are marked by higher asthma rates and lower vigilance over environmental pollution. This results in more than 138,000 asthma attacks among New York schoolchildren and at least 100,000 missed days of school each year.

The CDC reports that the combined national annual cost of asthma includes 10 million lost school days, 1.8 million emergency-room visits, 15 million outpatient visits, and nearly 500,000 hospitalizations, to say nothing of its $14.5 billion cost in 2000. African Americans and Hispanic Americans are three to four times more likely than whites to be hospitalized or to die from asthma.²

One would think these airborne risks would strike more democratically, given that we all must breathe. But do we all really breathe the same air? For that matter, do we all share the same environment?

Across the nation the befouled air hangs heaviest over communities of color. University of Minnesota researchers found that about 69 percent of Hispanic children, 68 percent of Asian American children, and 61 percent of African American children live in areas that exceed EPA ozone standards, compared with 51 percent of white children. African Americans and other people of color breathe 38 percent more polluted air than whites and are also exposed to 46 percent more nitrogen oxide than whites.³

More than 60,000 chemicals were registered for commercial use in the United States by the 1970s, most, as noted in Chapter 2, without human-safety tests. They found their way into a dizzying array of consumer products, from mattresses to computers to cookware to flame-resistant sleepwear and plastic sippy cups for babies.

Today the United States has safety data for only a fraction of the 85,000-plus commercially used chemicals (the European Union puts the global number at 145,000). Public-health studies show that exposures to these are now “ubiquitous.” Among the many undertested chemicals pervading our nation are manganese, high levels of fluoride,^* the pesticide chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), tetrachloroethylene (TCE), and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) used as flame retardants, all of which epidemiologists finger as developmental “neurotoxicants”—neurological poisons that harm the brain. These six pollutants are especially dangerous to the developing nervous systems of fetuses and very young children and are prime drivers of intelligence loss.

Even exceedingly low concentrations of some toxic chemicals can have disastrous effects on intelligence and behavior, especially if exposure occurs during early brain development. For many of these chemicals, there is no apparent threshold or safe level, even though government safety standards and testing protocols assume that there is.⁴

African Americans and other people of color are 79 percent more likely than white U.S. residents to live in neighborhoods where these potent “brain thieves,” emitted from bus depots, lead smelters, petrochemical plants, refineries, garbage dumps, incinerators, and even nearby highways, pose the greatest health danger.

This level of disparate exposure characterizes African American communities in nineteen states, compared to Hispanic neighborhoods in twelve states and Asian enslaves in seven states. More than 68 percent of African Americans live within thirty miles of a coal-fired power plant⁵—the distance within which the maximum effects of the smokestack plume tend to occur—compared with the 56 percent of whites and 39 percent of Latinos who live in such proximity to a coal-fired power plant.⁶

As longtime Norco, Louisiana, resident Margie Richard told sociology professor Robert D. Bullard: “I am surrounded by 27 petrochemical companies and oil refineries. My house is located only three meters away from the 15-acre Shell chemical plant. We are not treated as citizens with equal rights according to U.S. law and international human rights law.”⁷

Houston, We Have a Problem

Bullard, director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University, has written a dozen books about environmental health in America, including his 1990 classic Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. Because of his analyses, we first learned that race, not income, is the single most important factor in the siting of many sources of brain-harming environmental exposures, a revelation which spurred development of the environmental justice movement.

“African American households with incomes between $50,000 and $60,000 live in neighborhoods that are more polluted than neighborhoods in which white households with incomes below $10,000 live,” he wrote.

Bullard, then Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University and founder of the EPA Office of Environmental Equity, explained that the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) sentiment regarding toxic sites that many Americans share has another face: “LULUs.” “Race is still the potent factor for predicting where Locally Unwanted Land Uses (LULUs) go. A lot of people say it’s class, but race and class are intertwined.”⁸

Bullard adds that African Americans’ own ability to invoke NIMBY is hampered by their relatively low home-ownership rate. This disparity is driven by racial discrimination, including mortgage redlining. “In 1999,” he wrote, “only 46 percent of Blacks in the nation owned their homes, compared with 73 percent of Whites.”⁹

Prior to Bullard’s work, no rigorous studies by scholars had examined the connection between race and toxic environmental sites. Bullard first demonstrated the primacy of the race connection when he conducted the first U.S. investigation of race and the placement of noxious waste sites. In 1983 the report based on that study, Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community, determined that all five of that city’s garbage dumps, six of its eight garbage incinerators, and three of its four privately owned landfills were located in African American neighborhoods, although only 25 percent of the city’s population was black.¹⁰

In 1979, Bullard and his wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, sued to stop the siting of yet another municipal landfill in Houston’s suburban Northwood Manor neighborhood. Except for the fact that it was over 82 percent African American, this suburban middle-class community was an unlikely location for a garbage dump, illustrating that African American neighborhoods, middle-class and poor alike, were preferential toxic waste sites.

Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., which charged race-based environmental discrimination, was the first suit of its kind in the United States, as citizens contested the siting of public facilities in their ethnically distinct communities or neighborhoods. “Without a doubt, this was a form of apartheid where whites were making decisions and black people, brown people and people of color, including American Indians on reservations, had no seat at the table,” summarized Bullard.

But the courts decided against the plaintiffs, noting, “An intent to discriminate must be demonstrated. Decisions that may appear poorly based to some people are not necessarily unconstitutional or illegal.…” The Supreme Court decided a series of similar cases including Washington v. Davis (1976) and Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Corp. (1977), each time maintaining that demonstrating a racially disproportionate impact was not enough: to win, complainants must prove an intent to discriminate based on race.

This requirement that the injured communities show intent presented a much higher hurdle than demonstrating the foreseeable disparate impact on ethnic communities. Many saw it as a serious blow to attempts to hold municipal governments and polluters accountable for environmental poisoning of communities of color, but Bullard and other activists he inspired were not deterred.¹¹

Why in toxic siting is the disparity so often characterized as being driven by economics or class?

This may reflect discomfort with acknowledging U.S. racial harms and race in American culture. But there’s also another factor—missing national data. It is easier for many to assuage guilt by entertaining the concept of poisoning hazards stratified by income than by race, because the latter would constitute racism, which evokes feelings of shame in many. Moreover, some definitions of socioeconomic strata include education, which serves to ascribe risk to the undereducated—a subtle form of victim blaming. If studies do not investigate race in the context of environmental hazard placement, it’s easier to ignore the phenomenon of race-based siting. If it’s not studied, it can’t be quantified. As a result, studies tend to focus on environmental hazard placement in the context of class.

Bullard explained to me that “funders simply don’t fund studies of race and environmental exposure, so they don’t get done.” When the epidemiology of race as a driver of environmental exposure rarely enters the canon, race as a risk factor becomes invisible.

Moreover, the focus on socioeconomics in opposition to race is compounded by the mercurial concept of race in popular culture and expression—including within science. Many of us have been taught to think of race as a fixed, genetically mediated, biological characteristic of humans. However, “‘race’ is chiefly a social category that encompasses what is commonly referred to as ethnicity—common geographic origins, ancestry, family patterns, cultural norms and traditions, and the social history of specific groups,” explains Professor David R. Williams of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Medical journal articles and reports that refer to race rarely define it, and when they do, the definitions are inconsistent and vary in their validity. The same is true of government health information sources. For example, Williams points out that racial categories have changed with every census. Furthermore, data on race are collected inconsistently. When race is ignored, economics is focused upon, even if race is the more predictive variable.

Evaluating the nature of the harms done by pollutants is even more complex than determining the relative roles of race and economics. The work of two scientific disciplines is key to analyzing environmental harms to health: toxicology and epidemiology.

Toxicologists use tools like cell cultures and animal models that mimic human disease to test and to tease out the effects of poisons. They seek to control for or eliminate confounding factors like different diets, genetic susceptibility, and even other environmental exposures in order to characterize the nature and strength of a pollutant’s health effects.

Epidemiologic studies can identify associations between exposure and harm, but single correlations do not rise to the level of proof. (Multiple well-conducted studies that point to the same culprit, however, can lend power to these correlations.)

We often hear this criticism summarized as “correlation does not establish causation.” But what does? The answer varies, but to prove that a pathogen causes a disease, for example, scientists no longer rely on the pat formulae of old, such as the German physician Robert Koch’s oft-invoked postulates. His tenets hold that pathogens responsible for a disease must

•  be isolated from the diseased host and grown in pure culture,

•  cause the disease when a pure culture of the bacteria is inoculated into a susceptible host, and

•  be recoverable from the experimentally infected host.

We now know that not every pathogen can be grown in culture, that there are not good animal models for every disease, that not every infected person grows ill, and that even “harmless” bacteria can sicken the immunocompromised or people made susceptible by trauma or surgery that permits bacteria access to their viscera. Today, we must rely upon sophisticated new tools in establishing causality.

Life—And Death—Along the Fence Line

Not all the deadly clouds hover over crowded cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Houston: they also assault suburban and rural fence-line communities that abut toxics-spewing industries, chemical dump sites, and Superfund sites.¹²

According to a 2014 report, Who’s in Danger: A Demographic Analysis of Chemical Disaster Vulnerability Zones, the percentage of African Americans in the “fence line zones” near chemical plants is 75 percent greater than for the United States as a whole, and the percentage of Latinos is 60 percent greater. These fence-line communities are most often home to people of color, but they rarely receive the media attention of Love Canal, and they are not always poor.

Middle-class African Americans are far more likely than their white peers to live surrounded by belching factories and plumes from dump sites. Airborne exposures are everywhere, but they concentrate in ethnic enclaves. As usual, race rather than poverty dictates the location of Superfund sites, “dirty” industries, and their ilk.

Triggered by their proximity to polluting industry and dump sites, African Americans and Hispanics, the largest minority groups in the United States, suffer triple the U.S. asthma death rate for whites. We know that dust mites, pets, tobacco smoke, cockroaches, and mold¹³ are among the risk factors for asthma, but poor external air quality drives not only asthma but also cancer rates, which are higher among African American and Hispanic populations.

Noxious airborne toxins inflame blood vessels, including those in the lungs, which produces life-threatening respiratory disease. Rampant brain damage strikes adults and children alike thanks to airborne heavy metals like lead and mercury as well as hydrocarbons in fuel exhausts and industrial emissions. These directly threaten intelligence by impairing neurological function. And as if all this were not dire enough, I was surprised to learn from global studies that the asthma driven by pollution itself causes a loss of intelligence and a reduction in IQ.

Losing Breath and Brain: The Scourge of Air Pollution

In relatively affluent and white areas, policing of the environment is visibly stringent. In wealthy, white neighborhoods of New York City, trash collection is frequent and complete, and even noise and pet pollution is diminished by signs citing high fines for horn blowing, pet droppings, and dumping. These are warnings that do not appear in areas of the city populated by the poor and people of color.

Disproportionate risks for communities of color hang in the very air. Our vulnerable brains are awash in chemical threats, but national data tell us that a largely invisible, intangible culprit tops the list of hazards: air pollution. Its toxic components damage even our intelligence, lowering our IQs.

These communities are far from alone. The World Health Organization (WHO) found that more than four of every five urbanites on the planet, most in the developing world, live in neighborhoods where air quality falls below minimal health standards.

Cities like Karachi, Lagos, and Beijing¹⁴ are notorious for their visible smog, which shrouds their citizens in a witches’ brew of poisonous chemicals and brain-draining particles.

But the relatively clean air of the United States also features plumes of pollution that impair health. According to Nature, air pollution kills 55,000 Americans annually.¹⁵

An October 2017 report¹⁶ in The Lancet identified air pollution as the number one cause of pollution-related illness and death worldwide. Gases like carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), and ozone (O₃) are one component of air pollution. “Particulate matter”—vanishingly tiny suspended solids that threaten human well-being—is another.

The developing brains of children are the most dramatically injured because they have a greater lung surface area relative to their body size, giving them a greater relative exposure to noxious gases and suspended particles than adults. Fetuses and infants fare worst of all.

African American asthma rates are driven in large part by living, working, and studying in toxics-laden environments. The greatest proportion of pollution-exposed African Americans live within half a mile of the active oil wells, gas wells, and processing plants of Texas, Ohio, and California. The next highest proportion lives in Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, where industries violate the often-inadequate EPA standards for air quality.¹⁷

Doris Browne, M.D., president of the National Medical Association, told NBC News that the effects of this pollution include 138,000 asthma attacks annually in school-age children. “It’s a significant problem and we should all be concerned by these health disparities.”¹⁸ The report added that black communities in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and New York City were also targets because airborne pollutants disperse for miles before becoming ozone smog.¹⁹

Asthma may grow milder with age, but it doesn’t always: This lifelong malady kills adults, like actor Moses Gunn and newscaster Harold Dow, as well as children. African Americans account for 13 percent of the U.S. population, but 26 percent of asthma deaths.

Although animal dander and dust mites are known to trigger asthmatic attacks, studies revealed that living in homes infested by cockroaches also elevates risk. Children also encounter these vermin in antiquated schools where racial minorities are more likely to spend their days because school racial segregation is worsening rather than abating.

IQ and Oxygen

But what has the heightened African American asthma rate to do with lowered intelligence and depressed IQ scores?

Everything. People with asthma suffer episodes where they struggle to breathe, sometimes for very long periods. In so doing they often experience hypoxia, the deprivation of oxygen to the brain. If this continues for too long, asthmatics, near-drowning victims, and others who suffer hypoxia can experience lifelong aftereffects, including “lower neuropsychological performance,” according to Harvard researchers who studied perinatal exposures and later cognition.²⁰ They write that “a significant impact on multiple behavioral and cognitive outcomes” was found in newborns who had suffered hypoxia when they were tested at age seven. This included a decreased verbal IQ.²¹

Air pollution doesn’t lower intelligence only through triggering asthma. The University of California’s Anthony S. Wexler and Pamela J. Lein write that other aspects of air pollution cause a legion of brain disorders, including “degenerative disease, in particular, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and diverse neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), learning and intellectual disabilities and schizophrenia.”²²

In recent decades, new tools and closer scrutiny have allowed us to see how diesel fuel residues and air pollution directly damage the brain and lower intellect.²³ A 2008 Harvard School of Public Health study²⁴ of 1,000 pregnant Boston women who carried backpacks to measure their air-pollution exposure until they delivered found that they were constantly exposed to about 0.53 μg/m3 of black carbon, exposures associated with intellectual decline.²⁵ When these women’s children underwent a battery of cognitive tests eight to eleven years later, these exams revealed measurable decreases in verbal and nonverbal intelligence as well as in memory. They found lowered scores consistently, at all levels of exposure. These linear regression–based analyses^* did not establish causation, but this is strong evidence.²⁶

A subsequent study found that children around age ten who had been exposed to air with high levels of black carbon (soot) “suffered a decrease in cognitive function across assessments of verbal and nonverbal intelligence and memory constructs.”²⁷ The scientists concluded that particulate matter—tiny airborne pieces of various carbon compounds and heavy metals as a result of burning fuel—was largely responsible.

Referencing both studies, the Harvard scientists confirmed that “ultrafine particles can reach the brain… [raising] the question of whether traffic particles can have neurotoxic effects.”

The resulting degree of cognitive and memory impairment is comparable to that caused by other environmental neurologic poisonings. A 10 microgram per deciliter (µg/dL) increase in blood lead is associated with a loss of about five IQ points. Children whose mothers smoke moderately have an average decrease of four IQ points. In the group of Boston children, a 0.4 µg/meter³ (0.4 micrograms per cubic meter) increase in airborne black carbon predicted a three-point decrease in IQ.²⁸

Few of us who are nonscientists can meaningfully compare these exposures—how does 10 µg/dL of blood lead compare to 0.4 µg/m³ of inhaled carbon, for example?

But we can see that for these common exposures, the drop in IQ range is similar: around three to five points. As laid out in Chapter 2, a five-point drop in IQ is not trivial. It has serious individual and societal implications, including the ability to drag down the national average IQ, the number of intellectually gifted persons, and the income of the entire nation.

Elevated carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels also lower intelligence when they impair breathing, inducing oxygen deprivation and often triggering asthma.

So befouled air degrades cognitive development and brain function, depressing the IQ three to four points in some studies. But studies also show that such oxygen deprivation also induces anxiety, depression, and suicide as well as lowered intelligence.

Magnetic Malady

Scientists don’t understand every specific route of air-pollution injury. But Environmental Health Perspectives reports one known mechanism by which “particulate matter” like black carbon from the incomplete burning of fossil fuels injures the brain.

It consists of millions of tiny spheres of several carbon forms including, for example, magnetite and iron oxide, better known as rust. These are already known to cause preterm births and disability. Although they are imperceptibly small—one must join 250 of these nanospheres to achieve the thickness of a human hair—“these particles are made out of iron, and iron is very reactive, so it’s almost certainly going to do some damage to the brain,” explains Professor David Allsop, an Alzheimer’s specialist at Lancaster University.²⁹

When it comes to Alzheimer’s, air pollution has become a prime suspect. Recently, laboratory studies have suggested that iron particles like magnetite contribute to the disease’s characteristic protein plaques. In the journal F1000Research, Soong Ho Kim reports that the characteristic amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s quickly appeared in mice after they were exposed to tiny components of polluted air, called nickel nanoparticles.³⁰

When people who died in heavily polluted Mexico City were autopsied in 2004, amyloid plaques and inflammation were found throughout their brains. The tiny particles of magnetite in air pollution have also been linked to dementia and to Alzheimer’s by other U.S. studies.³¹

As Time magazine notes, the plaque-and-inflammation-affected populations tend to be poor, black, and Hispanic ones concentrated in low-income areas.³² African American rates of Alzheimer’s are as much as 100 percent higher than those of whites, constituting what the Alzheimer’s Association calls a “silent epidemic” among black Americans. This type of pollution may help explain why, and understanding its role in causing the disease may present a route to a cure. However, scientists writing in Current Alzheimer’s Research think that a potential solution exists now: prenatal choline supplementation, which is also touted as a potential treatment for Down syndrome and as a preventative measure against fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.³³

Airborne nanoparticles of magnetite cause all this neurological mayhem because they literally invade the brain. This ore, more magnetic than any other natural mineral in the world, is unleashed into the air by diesel-burning vehicles.³⁴ When polluted air is inhaled, magnetite travels from the nose to the brain along the olfactory nerve. Animal studies also indicate that particles can migrate from the upper respiratory tract to the nervous system and the brain.³⁵

Skeptics who question magnetite’s danger to cognition point out that it occurs naturally in the human brain and therefore is unlikely to be an agent of harm. Magnetite is found naturally in the brain, but “natural” and “safe” are not synonyms.³⁶

In 2016, scientists found an abundance of human-made magnetite in about forty representative samples of human brains from Mexico City and Manchester, England. They knew the magnetite came from air pollution because naturally occurring magnetite and the pollution-borne type—the one suspected of causing disease—are quite different. Intrinsic magnetite is jagged and crystalline, but the high heat of industrial engines produces “pollutant” magnetite that is smoothly rounded, and this foreign type is present in the brains of pollution-affected people in far greater quantities—as much as one hundred times the amount of the naturally occurring form.³⁷

A research study described in Scientific American also links Alzheimer’s to DDT, and suggested that genetic vulnerability may combine with DDT exposure to create the most devastating cases.³⁸

Air pollution damages the brains and undermines mental abilities of adults, too,³⁹ and even the elderly. Cognitive damage was measured in older women from both rural and urban environments with long-term exposure to air pollution from heavy traffic, and it was found to be cumulative, increasing over time. Of course, in order to interpret this damage, researchers had to correct for many confounding factors. These included sporting activities, age, education level, depression, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), chronic vascular disease, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and diabetes.⁴⁰ Having done so, they were confident in concluding that air pollution poses a threat to the intelligence of the elderly.

Petrochemical Corridors

According to American companies’ own Toxic Release Inventory filings for 2010, 21,000 U.S. facilities reported discharging 3.9 billion pounds of toxic chemicals into U.S. land and air.⁴¹ In Louisiana alone, 361 industries released 130 million tons of hazardous wastes and emissions, fully 64 percent of which was dumped into the black parishes that are home to cities like Alsen, which is 98.9 percent African American. The industry calls this “the petrochemical corridor,” but for its residents, the plethora of excess disease has earned it the sobriquet “Cancer Alley.” Bullard adds, “The playgrounds in Norco, La., which sits in Cancer Alley, are across from a huge Shell refinery. You stand there 15 minutes, and you can’t breathe.”

Moreover, industries have dumped 21.8 billion pounds of industrial waste into the water,⁴² and African American, Hispanic, and Native American communities are in closest proximity to these toxics-spewing industries.⁴³ Native American communities in particular, which often lack access to potable water, basic health care, or even electricity, are plagued by waterborne pollutants, poisoned fish, and coal-fired energy plants that disgorge mercury. One of every ten U.S. power plants sits on Native American land.

In this chapter, I describe a few of these poisoned communities and how they have been plagued by intellect-sapping toxic exposures. But first, I recount a mid-1980s encounter that brought home to me the realization that some U.S. industries poison unsuspecting Americans with impunity.

Manufacturing Confusion: Benzene, Sulfides, and Fence-Line Communities

I met Cecil Fisher^* only once, but I will never forget him. His brother Eric was a fellow movie buff who, as we caught up between show times, told me that Cecil had nearly died of leukemia.

As Eric and I stood beneath a theater’s marquee in Rochester, New York, early one summer evening, a man approached us with a strange gait, unsteady yet rapid. His skin was coarse, his face gaunt, his eyes sunken, and his pale cotton shirt billowed around his precariously thin form. His crinkly reddish-brown hair was so sparse that his entire scalp was visible. Smiling, he drew closer and clasped hands with a beaming Eric, who exclaimed, “Cecil—you’re walking without the cane: All right!” Only then did I realize that this was not a wizened older man but Eric’s twentysomething brother.

As we chatted about our lives and jobs, Cecil mentioned that he had felt well enough to begin job hunting but decided to postpone it on his doctor’s advice. “I feel okay, but I have trouble filling out the forms and remembering the simplest things. I felt like an idiot when I couldn’t remember my birthdate or the name of my high school, and they wouldn’t let me take the form home with me. My doctor says memory problems sometimes happen and I should give it time.” He paused. “I’ll need a new job, though.”

Cecil had recently been dismissed from the furniture factory where he’d worked for years, but said he was glad because his job had been to stand inside a vat containing benzene, dipping chairs into it, and he hated the smell. “It gets into everything.”

I was appalled. “Benzene—B-e-n-z-e-n-e?” I asked, hoping that he meant benzine, a word with which it is easily confused. “Are you sure?”

“That’s what the sign says.”

The brothers continued to laugh and banter, but I was too stunned to hear another word. I worked in a poison control center, and I knew that benzene can cause leukemia.

I moved away soon after and lost touch with his brother, so I don’t know whether Cecil recovered. But I now know that surviving cancer may not have ended his medical problems,⁴⁴ and his memory problems may have stemmed from his benzene exposure as well. According to the CDC, benzene causes more than cancer, blood diseases, and impaired reproduction.⁴⁵ It also assails the brain with neurological and cognitive effects like short-term drowsiness, convulsions, confusion, and mental impairment. These thinking problems may not abate with time.⁴⁶

In fact, a Toxicology report based on the study of 2,143 utility workers found that “high exposure to solvents was significantly associated with poor cognition; for example, those highly exposed to chlorinated solvents were at risk of impairment on the Mini-Mental State Examination.” Moreover, pregnant women face a dual risk: one to their own health, and one to the health of their fetuses.⁴⁷ Benzene can also induce neurobehavioral changes in babies that lead to cognitive damage.

Benzene plagues workers beyond the urban factory where Cecil was employed. In 2015, Tonawanda Coke, of Tonawanda, New York, was ordered to pay $12 million in civil penalties for violations of the Clean Air Act after its failure to follow safety regulations resulted in releases of coke oven gas, which contains benzene and other harmful chemicals.⁴⁸

In all, more than 6.7 million African Americans—who constitute 14 percent of the national population—face toxic exposures to benzene and sulfur dioxide emissions from oil refineries in ninety-one counties.⁴⁹ “Fumes Across the Fence-Line: The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil and Gas Facilities on African American Communities,” a 2017 report by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and the NAACP, found that more than 1 million African Americans live within half a mile of an oil and gas operation.⁵⁰

This is not news to pioneering environmental sociologist Robert Bullard, father of the environmental justice movement. Since the 1990 publication of Dumping in Dixie, his first book on environmental racism, he has decried the high disease rates plaguing fence-line communities of African Americans.

Jobs or Health?

Some areas, like Houston, have no zoning laws to protect residents from sharing their space and air with toxic industrial effluents. Other municipalities, especially but hardly limited to poor Southern towns and cities, accept these undesirable industries because they want the jobs and the tax base they bring with them. Politicians and industries often seek to justify the unpleasant and dangerous presence of polluting companies by arguing that they provide jobs that give otherwise unemployed poor residents of color better lives. A dirty, even hazardous job in a polluting industry, they imply, is better than no job at all.

But studies such as a 2011 report in Occupational and Environmental Medicine have dismantled this argument. In addition to the direct exposures that can cost workers and their families their health and lives, the OEM study of 7,000 workers documented that such jobs destroy mental health as well. People in poor-quality jobs where high demands are coupled to low autonomy and rewards are out of synch with effort suffer far worse mental health from the malignant stress than do the unemployed.⁵¹ Moreover, polls show that these communities are unwilling to trade jobs for unhealthy environments.⁵² “African Americans support clean energy, clean jobs, and clean power plants, with 83 percent support in favor of setting limits on carbon pollution from coal-and gas-fired power plants in concert with the Clean Power Plan’s standards that the Environmental Protection Agency finalized in August,” concluded a 2015 CleanTechnica poll.⁵³

Nonetheless, Bullard’s publications continue to document how these disparate racial exposures have grown rather than abated, and Marcus Franklin, author of the “Fumes Across the Fence Line” report, agrees. “There’s a growing threat faced by ‘fence-line’ communities.”⁵⁴

Anniston Apocalypse: PCBs Are Unleashed on a Company Town

Shirley Carter, a nurse, deftly ties on a surgical mask before opening the door. But she’s not striding into the operating room: she is about to mow her lawn, which is ringed by a high chain-link fence festooned with biohazard signs.

Carter lives in Anniston, Alabama, sixty-three miles from Birmingham. Her city of 24,000 is 52 percent African American, but mostly it’s the city’s black residents who inhabit the neighborhoods that have fallen into decay wrought by widespread pollution. These form a patchwork quilt of moribund communities and biological “dead zones” where nothing grows.

Behind some doors, the unemployed fight cancer, paralysis, memory loss, and a bewildering array of poorly characterized diseases. Subdued children play, eerily quiet, against a backdrop of toxic lawns, oily creeks, tainted vegetation, and sere trees.

Other neighborhoods are already dead. Vegetation has overtaken blocks of abandoned houses, with streetlights gone permanently dark, empty churches, and, always, the biohazard signs. Everywhere in Anniston, worried parents shoo children from parks and playgrounds. Many backyard creeks run blood red. Homeowners have forsaken their poisoned gardens to grow greens in sterile plastic buckets.

Children here seem slower and sicker than most, says Shirley’s husband, David, whose own brother died at sixteen after years of illness. His daughter displays an assortment of behavior problems and has been relegated to special-education classes. A ten-year-old girl down the street has uterine cancer, he says, and he repeatedly assured me that several children nearby have been born with “two brains.” I wonder whether he means that they were born without a normally developed corpus callosum, which separates the brain’s hemispheres, but I can’t find out: their parents don’t return my phone calls.

For many Americans, a modern dread of contamination has been distilled into cathartic postapocalyptic film fare such as 28 Days Later, Right at Your Door, or Dawn of the Dead that feature poisoned lands and communities thronged with those so degraded by infection and environmental exposures that they have lost their intelligence and even their humanity. Confronting these cinematic horrors allows us to share a benign frisson of fear, secure in the knowledge that when the lights come up, we’ll emerge into normalcy.

But for Anniston, the apocalypse is all too real—and for most, inescapable.

Once, from 1929 to 1971, Anniston was a company town. First, the Swann Chemical Company produced polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) there. Then Monsanto Industrial Chemicals took over the plant in 1935.⁵⁵

The $20 billion⁵⁶ corporation Monsanto, which brought the world the sweeteners saccharin and aspartame, boasts versatile chemical production, a checkered past, and a highly controversial present. Monsanto has produced synthetic fibers, plastics including polystyrenes, pesticides, and agrichemical products. It has also acquired many chemical and electronics companies that make products as varied as aspirin and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Just last year, it merged with the equally rich and powerful Bayer Corporation.

Monsanto first devised or marketed DDT, dioxin, 2,3,7,8-tetra-chlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD), 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T^* PCBs, other halogenated hydrocarbons that are carcinogenic even in small doses, and dioxins.

In 1960 an “agricultural” division was established, which trafficked in the hazardous defoliant Agent Orange⁵⁷ as well as the controversial recombinant bovine somatrophin^* hormones used to increase the milk yield of cows.

By 1969, the plant was Anniston’s major employer, discharging 250 pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek, at the heart of the city’s black residential community, every day.⁵⁸ PCBs are “brain thieves” that erode the structures and functioning of the brain and nervous system, and they are also endocrine disruptors that impede the healthy physical and mental development that is normally guided by hormones (see Chapter 4). Although the company and its apologists insisted that one can tolerate significant amounts without ill effects, this reassurance rang hollow in Anniston neighborhoods that found themselves suddenly battling a legion of ailments from cancers to memory loss, confusion, and a slew of other intellectual problems. Children’s behavioral problems snowballed in Anniston, along with rates of attention-deficit disorder and poor school performance.

The news media often focus their outrage on cancer clusters and visibly crippling lung and mobility ailments caused by PCBs. But PCBs’ most persistent legacy is the invisible harm they wreak on the brains of the young. Industry and some media accounts downplay small exposures as innocuous—claiming that “50 bathtubs’ full” of PCBs at low concentration is required to do harm—but this has not been proven.⁵⁹ In reality, extremely small amounts of PCBs harm the developing nervous systems of fetuses and children. Even very low concentrations are harmful for immature brains during their critical windows of development. In 2000, researchers calculated that a PCB concentration of just 5 parts per billion in a pregnant mother’s blood can have adverse effects on a developing fetal brain, giving rise to attention and IQ deficits that appear permanent.⁶⁰ Five parts per billion is equivalent to one drop in 118 bathtubs full of water.

Anniston Apocalypse

David Baker, Shirley’s husband, is one of many who have borne witness to the painful toll of PCB poisoning. Growing up, he and his brother Terry would play in the neighboring woods and rivers, exploring, shooting arrows, and splashing in creeks that ran with water containing PCBs. But their bond was severed in 1970 when Terry sickened dramatically and died of a spectrum of diseases that are usually associated with aging: lung cancer, hardening of the arteries, and a brain tumor. He was sixteen years old.

Anniston, Alabama, environmental activist David Baker stands over the grave of his brother Terry, who died at just sixteen, felled by lung cancer, a hardening of the arteries, and a brain tumor—an assortment of environmentally triggered illnesses. (Courtesy of Mathieu Asselin)

Denise Chandler, forty-six, has also had a front-row seat to death caused by reckless pollution. She, too, regularly played with her brother in one of the neighborhood’s chemical-imbued ditches. “We floated our little boats in it and waded in it, but we didn’t know it was loaded with PCBs,” she recalled. Decades later, when they were finally tested, they discovered that they both had high blood PCB levels. She suffers from sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease characterized by widespread tissue inflammation. Her brother suffered myriad health problems before he died of kidney failure at age forty.

But their problems are more than physical: two of Chandler’s three children were diagnosed with learning disorders.

From 1935 until 1971, without warning its neighbors, Monsanto disposed of tens of thousands of pounds of PCBs by dumping them into creeks or burying them in and around Anniston. But industry wasn’t the only source of Anniston’s chemical exposures: in 1917, the military established Fort McClellan there, and the U.S. Army manufactured and trained heavily with them from World War I until its closure in 1999.

Despite being saturated with environmental poisons, Anniston became an icon of normalcy when it was named the “All American City” in 1978. The very next year, Snow Creek began to run red, heightening residents’ suspicions about the effects of chemical exposures in their communities. In 1996, one of the dumps started leaking. It was then that residents began learning the extent of their contamination. Years of unchecked chemical dumping had utterly poisoned the lands of Anniston’s black neighborhoods.

A former union organizer, David Baker took action, channeling the pain of his brother’s loss into ensuring that the citizens of Anniston receive justice. He created Community Against Pollution in 1998 to force the chemical companies to clean up the contamination and compensate those harmed by it. At his urging, the EPA tested Anniston’s soil and water as well as the blood of its residents. It was alarmed to find that the blood of Anniston’s townspeople had the highest recorded levels of PCBs in the nation.

This depot stored an array of toxic industrial chemicals in Anniston, Alabama. (AP Photo/Dave Martin)

But their complaints drew a desultory response from industry, so Baker organized residents, who filed a number of lawsuits against the unresponsive Army and against Monsanto.

As the evidence of Anniston’s poisoning mounted, Monsanto shed its industrial-chemical fibers business into a separate company called Solutia. It also began trying to buy up heavily tainted properties, including a local church. This further fueled residents’ suspicions that despite its denials, the company had long known how dangerous its dumped chemicals were.

They were right. In 1966, Monsanto had hired the late Mississippi State University professor Denzel Ferguson to investigate the health effects of its PCB pollution in Anniston. When Ferguson’s team of biologists lowered bluegill fish into the city’s creeks to monitor the water’s health effects, all twenty-five fish died within three and a half minutes. “It was like dunking the fish in battery acid,” one team member told the Washington Post. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said another. Yet Monsanto ignored the biologists’ urgings to warn residents and clean up the waters.

Monsanto did respond with alacrity to concerns about the fiendish toxicity of PCBs voiced by Swedish scientists the very next year. A Monsanto official wrote Emmett Kelly, the company’s medical director, beseeching him, “Please let me know if there is anything I can do so that we may make sure our business is not affected by this evil publicity.” In 1979, Monsanto closed the Anniston chemical factory.

Wake-up Call

In 2002, the people of Anniston suddenly learned from a 60 Minutes investigation that theirs was one of the most toxic cities in the nation. PCBs are widely disseminated in industry products, so widely in fact, that the average American has PCB blood levels of 2 parts per billion (ppb).

But the mostly black victims of Anniston suffered huge exposures. Howard Frumkin, M.D., told me, “Anniston has the highest levels of PCB exposure of any town in America, of any town that I’ve ever heard of.” David Baker has PCB blood levels of 341 ppb. Most of the residents know their levels.

As in most toxic communities, the PCBs in Anniston were not acting alone. Anniston is blanketed by a mixture of asbestos, arsenic, and other unstudied chemicals. Even if their effects had been known, mixtures of chemical exposures can act in an unexpected manner. One chemical might mute or potentiate the effects of others in an additive, or even a synergistic, manner.

Lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury are pollutants that are commonly found together, and all have long-lasting effects on the brain. According to a 2016 study published in Environmental Toxicology Pharmacology, the metals share many common pathways for causing cognitive dysfunction, and all bind to a particular receptor, which makes their effects synergistic: harmful exposure to the mixture results in a greater poisoning than the added effect of poisoning by each of its members.⁶¹

Anniston residents filed class-action suits against Monsanto Chemical, alleging that it had knowingly dumped PCBs into the local water supply for decades. Like the Anniston Army Depot, Redstone Arsenal, and other industries, Monsanto had also exposed residents to asbestos, which can cause diseases like the deadly lung cancer mesothelioma.

Residents settled a case against the company in April 2001 for $43 million, and in 2003, a jury determined that the Anniston Monsanto plant had imbued Anniston with PCBs. Monsanto and Solutia agreed to pay $600 million to settle the claims, but Solutia declared bankruptcy that very year.

Its forty-year monopoly on PCBs left Monsanto with a long history of injury and abandonment that was revealed to the world when incriminating Monsanto documents were posted on the Chemical Industry Archive website as a result of the lawsuits.⁶² The documents indicate that Monsanto long knew of the severe damage it caused by dumping millions of pounds of PCBs into Anniston for four decades.⁶³

In 2003, the Department of Defense began destroying the chemical-weapon stockpile, including nerve gas, stored at the Anniston Army Depot.

Most of the settlement funds went to lawyers and cleanup efforts, leaving the people of Anniston unemployed, impoverished, sick, mentally hobbled, and, in many cases, dying. They were unable to sell their homes and flee. The Army and EPA had failed to protect them and they were unsure where to turn next.

David Baker, now the executive director of Community Against Pollution, was sure of one thing: they needed a powerful champion. He found one: Johnnie Cochran.

Baker approached Cochran, who was fresh from securing O. J. Simpson’s not-guilty verdict, and after hearing stories of Anniston’s poisoning and rampant illness, Cochran agreed to help them obtain compensation for their property losses and a health clinic to address their cancer, liver disease, and mental problems.

As he denounced the failure of the government to protect Anniston residents, Cochran declared, as I noted in this book’s Introduction, “There is always some study, and they’ll study it to death, then thirty years later, you find out it’s bad for you.… We know it’s bad for us right now!”

Cochran’s class-action suit procured the largest settlement ever won in the United States. The victims of Anniston won $300 million from Monsanto, its subsidiary Solutia, Pfizer, and other firms, none of whom admitted any wrongdoing. Fifty million dollars was reserved for a health clinic to address the medical aftermath of Anniston’s poisoning.

Anniston’s Aftermath

The celebration was short-lived. About 47 percent of the settlement—some $142 million—went to the 18,447 plaintiffs. Adults received an average of $9,000 each, and each child $2,000, an absurdly low amount considering that each faces a lifetime of disability, including reductions in IQ, that erode earning ability. With the exception of the portion of the settlement set aside to fund the health clinic, the rest of the money went to pay the lawyers.

The townspeople’s expectation of life-altering financial compensation evaporated, and most remained trapped in their tainted homes. The health clinic ran out of funds and closed in 2017.

In comparison, victims of Japan’s Minamata poisoning, caused by the release of methylmercury from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory from 1932 to 1968, reaped $1 billion in compensation, an average of $20,000 per person.

Today, Anniston’s community meetings are thronged with the sick, who tend to introduce themselves by ticking off their sky-high PCB levels and bestiary of diseases. Even the relatively young compare their cancers and frailties. Baker speaks of filing another lawsuit, but without his old fervor; he has received anonymous death threats from neighbors who felt betrayed by their low compensation from the earlier settlement. Even an outsider can see that their solidarity is diminished.

“Monsanto did a job on this city,” summarizes Opal Scruggs, sixty-five, who, like everyone else in her neighborhood, has elevated blood levels of PCBs. “They thought we were stupid and illiterate people, so nobody would notice what happens to us.”

Arsenic and Old Waste

Around 1962, the city of Fort Myers, Florida, began searching for land to buy in its historically black Dunbar community, whose racial demographic was long maintained by de jure, and later, de facto, segregation. Residents and other property owners were asked to sell their lots “for municipal purposes”: the city said it would use the purchased property to build affordable housing in a development called “Home-a-rama.” Although nothing was ever built, the name stuck.

Instead, the city dumped waste from its water treatment plant in the site’s ponds and grounds, beginning with 25,000 cubic yards of sludge in pits extending deeper than the water table. The site bore no identifying signs, was unfenced, and was surrounded by African American families whose numbers soon grew explosively in a building boom.

“All this time, we bathed in that water, we cooked in that water, kids played in that water. We played cops and robbers in there, hide and seek, built club houses and played in the trees,” said Shanon Reid, one of a family of fourteen who lived in Dunbar during the 1970s. “In certain spots it was like soft clay. We called it ‘orange slide’ because it was squishy and slimy.”⁶⁴

Curtis Sheard also grew up near the dump in Dunbar, playing with his friends in “the orange slide.”

Milton “Shorty” Johnson recalls that land across the street from his home had what they called “quicksand”—lime sludge that had been dumped there by Fort Myers in the 1960s. A 2006 EPA official’s photo of a child’s toy atop the dirt beneath which arsenic-laden sludge festered attests to the fact that children still played at the contaminated Home-a-rama site—which still bore no fencing or warning signs. Only in 2017 did the city finally erect a handful of no-trespassing signs.

But the residents did not learn until 2007 that arsenic and other toxic substances had been dumped regularly in Home-a-rama, the heart of their community, for nearly five decades. Ten micrograms per liter is the acceptable standard for arsenic in drinking water, but levels on some parts of the property have ranged from 11 to 22 micrograms per liter—more than twice the limit. In 2012, tests showed that the toxic sludge dump exceeded the EPA safety levels by as much as five times.

Arsenic is a human carcinogen, and people are exposed via many industrial routes, like coal-burning factories and mines. Some people are exposed by ingesting soil or by eating unwashed produce. People affected with pica, a condition that makes one crave nonfood items like dirt or chalk, are also susceptible. Arsenic is even a component of tobacco smoke. But exposure most often comes from tainted water, as it did in Dunbar.⁶⁵

Sheard, who ran for mayor in 2015, speaks for many when he decries the lack of transparency. “We have a water-line break and the city is responsible to notify the public in forty-eight hours, but no one notified the Dunbar community of the toxic sludge.”

“That’s something I wasn’t aware of happening in my own backyard,” Dunbar’s Jumar Hillards agreed in an interview for WINK News.⁶⁶

“Is this happening in every neighborhood? No. It just seems like the low-to moderate-income black, brown people constantly get the short end of the stick,” Dunbar resident Crystal Johnson said.

“Whatever the garbage and junk, whatever they don’t want, they give to Dunbar,” Johnson said.

“Those people, they didn’t care what happened out here [in Dunbar],” says retired truck hauler Clarence “Pappy” Mitchell, who worked for the city of Fort Myers in the early 1960s and often dumped toxic sludge in the Dunbar section. “This was a dumping area.”⁶⁷

Mitchell recalls that when a resident asked for coquina shells to harden the neighborhood’s dirt roads, Mitchell’s supervisor responded, “Hell, ain’t nobody live out there but a bunch of niggers. Take a load of sand instead.”

If you’re tempted to believe that such sentiments died with racial segregation, reflect that segregation has never ended. In fact, it has worsened since the time Mitchell recalls, thanks to the widening adoption of conservative policies.

According to Professor David R. Williams, if there has been any decline in segregation, this has had no impact on the very high percentage of “black” census tracts. This residential isolation of most African Americans, along with the fact that the concentration of urban poverty remains so high, means that racial parity could be achieved only if 66 percent of the black population moved to nonblack areas: economists call this extreme level of segregation hypersegregation.⁶⁸

A study of the 171 largest cities in the United States concluded that there is not even one city where whites live under equal conditions with blacks. “And the worst urban context in which whites reside,” avers Williams, “is better than the average living conditions of blacks.… One of America’s best-kept secrets is how residential segregation is the secret source that creates inequality in the United States.”

Its actions suggest that the city of Fort Myers knew how dangerous the sludge was. “In 1994, they tried to sell [the polluted land] to Habitat for Humanity. In 2001, they tried to say it had no sludge. The City of Fort Myers’ attempts to pass off the toxic Home-a-rama site in Dunbar go back farther than officials have publicly said,” wrote Patricia Borns in the News Press.⁶⁹ In 2002, the city asked for a site assessment to provide liability protection against any hazardous waste cleanup. Fort Myers then declared that “no sludge” existed at the site, but the assessor, Steve Hilfiker, insists he had not given the site a clean bill of health.⁷⁰

In a videotaped interview, Hilfiker qualifies that his was only a “preliminary assessment.” He went on to say, “we did not identify anything on the ground surface but… subsurface testing would be necessary,” and cleanup would indeed be needed to “excavate and properly dispose of material.”⁷¹

The children who once played in the pond every day are now middle-aged and worried. They demand answers. When I spoke with Tangela Rodgers, she asked, “This coming out now, after forty years? How many lives has it affected? Why dump it here, in our neighborhood?”

Testing in 2008 showed unacceptably high arsenic levels, but regular groundwater testing was delayed for two years because of municipal foot-dragging, according to the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). “Approximately 700 days elapsed without a written response to our inquiry by the responsible party (the city).” In 2017, Fort Myers renewed its denials when the mayor claimed, “I see no reason for residents to be concerned. There’s no evidence that they should be concerned.”⁷² But that year, the city finally erected a handful of no-trespassing signs at the site. Dunbar native Almeda Jones says she still sees children playing in the vacant lot and that the city needs to clean it up. “It’s not good for your health.”

She’s right. As the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences notes, arsenic in drinking water is a significant and well-established environmental cause of cancer.

But less well known is the catalog of arsenic’s neurological effects, which have been unearthed by scientists around the world. Arsenic is able to invade the developing brain where its effects are toxic. Not only does the blood-brain barrier (BBB), whose function is to shield the brain from harmful exposures, fail to keep it out, arsenic itself can weaken and disrupt it.

In animal models, perinatal arsenic exposure shrinks the brain, reducing the numbers of neurons as it distorts the activity of neurotransmitters.

Fifteen epidemiological studies of humans indicate that early exposure is associated with lowered intelligence and reduced memory.⁷³ Even worse, exposures below the allowable limits trigger these brain effects. Some neurocognitive consequences become apparent only later in life, and exposures to other chemicals and the timing of the exposure all seem to affect the intellectual consequences.

As is often the case, infants and children seem more vulnerable, probably because of their relatively greater consumption of food and water. However, arsenic is not excreted in breast milk, so breastfeeding may offer some protection by replacing the consumption of tainted water and food.

The federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry determined that acute toxic exposures to inorganic arsenic have been shown to lead to emotional lability and memory loss.⁷⁴

Low-level and chronic exposure to arsenic is also associated with serious effects on intellectual function across a broad age range, according to about twenty studies conducted around the globe. These investigations used a wide range of cognitive tests—about fifty—including variants of the Raven Colored Progressive Matrices Test, Wechsler Intelligence Scale, and the DSM-IV.⁷⁵

Seventeen epidemiological studies assessed for neurocognitive or behavioral outcomes, and of these, fifteen showed neurocognitive or intellectual deficits associated with arsenic exposure, while two failed to show these effects.

A meta-analysis of arsenic-exposed children also indicated intelligence deficits; the overall mean IQ score of children who lived in arsenic-exposed areas was more than six points lower than that of unexposed children.

Adolescents who had been exposed to arsenic-contaminated water early in life performed more poorly in three of four neurobehavioral tests compared with unexposed controls.

Even the elderly suffer from long-term exposure to arsenic. A study of a geriatric population showed that long-term low-level arsenic exposure, even at levels below the current safety guidelines (10 μg/L in adults), was significantly associated with “poorer global cognition, diminished visuospatial skills, reduced language, slower processing speed, impaired executive functioning, and diminished short-term memory.”

One of these elderly people is Almeda Jones’s sickly brother, whom she cares for. She worries that his health woes may be tied to arsenic exposure from the “smelly” water in his backyard that has been “gushing, coming out of the ground… They [city of Fort Myers] must take care of it.”

Why don’t Dunbar residents simply move? Like most denizens of fence-line neighborhoods, they are financially trapped by the disappearance of jobs as local industry flees in the wake of the toxic-exposure lawsuits and revelations. Moreover, their houses won’t sell. “No one wants to live on a toxic waste site,” summarized Anniston activist David Baker.

Their bank is even refusing to let Dunbar homeowners Tambitha Blanks and her husband refinance their house because arsenic showed up in the groundwater as recently as 2012. The appraiser told her the poisoned groundwater affects the value and ability to refinance for anyone within 3,000 feet of the site. “If you know there’s toxic stuff near the property that you’re looking at, you’re not going to buy it,” Blanks said. “That’s just evident. What do you do? We’re kind of stuck in a hard place right now.”

Residents of heavily African American and Hispanic communities like Dunbar; Anniston, Alabama; and East Chicago, Indiana, have grown up breathing noxious air. Many suffer physical damage including cancer, diabetes, and neurological impairment that lands them in wheelchairs or nursing homes. But even banned poisons can devastate communities, as the people of Triana, Alabama, know.

Triana, Alabama: This Is Your Brain on Pesticides

Visionary biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. At once rigorous, powerful, and poetic, Carson’s warning of a future in which nature stands in ruins, depleted beyond her ability to renew herself, struck a deep national chord.

Carson warned specifically of overusing chemicals like the pesticide DDT, which she blamed for the waning of species like the double-crested cormorant, the herring gull, and even America’s iconic bald eagle.

The book drew critical vitriol from pesticide makers and their scientists, but Carson had portrayed the deadly persistence of human-made poisons in a manner that stoked the heart of America’s environmental conscience. DDT was banned in the book’s aftermath, around 1970, and for most of the nation, Silent Spring was a disquieting wake-up call.

But for the people of Triana, Alabama—86 percent of them black⁷⁶—it was already too late.

Today, Triana is a town of five hundred on Alabama’s northern border near Huntsville. And not only is it black, it is also poor, with a median annual income under $10,000. But in the past, the Huntsville River softened the town’s privation. Commercial fisherman Donald Malone recalls that he made seven hundred dollars a week from fishing in the 1970s,⁷⁷ and many other townspeople supplemented their income by selling fish. More importantly, most of the 1,178 people who then lived in Triana grew their own food and fished to fill their pantries.

However, the fish were dying in large numbers and in the 1980s tests found the river to be tainted by high levels of DDT. Fish taken from the waterway harbored DDT in amounts as high as 200 parts per million (ppm)—forty times the federal limit.⁷⁸ DDT was still with them, and it is still with us today because it does not break down naturally in the environment. It has persisted in the food chain concentrated in animals, including edible fish.

“I was born and raised on the river,” recalled Malone. “We made our living off it, and that’s been taken away from every commercial fisherman.”⁷⁹ Eating the fish from the river is now out of the question, and so is gardening for subsistence: DDT persists in the ground, rendering the food grown in contaminated soil poisonous.

In fact, much of the community’s rampant disease today is ascribed to DDT exposure even though the pesticide was banned decades ago, in 1970.

Because the Army owned Redstone Arsenal, the local facility where DDT had been manufactured, the EPA ordered it to clean up the river and test residents of Triana for DDT contamination. But the Army refused, pointing fingers at the nearby Olin plant. The EPA asked the Justice Department to force the Army to clean up the DDT, but the justices in turn washed their hands of the matter, denying that the department had any power to force the fractious agencies to comply.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control studied the debility and illness in Triana’s remaining five hundred residents and found staggeringly high levels of DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which are known to increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, and kidney problems. The bodies of Triana residents harbored thrice the DDT levels found in poisoned workers at DDT plants, but none of the tested Triana folk had ever worked in such plants.

Although this major health threat to residents of Triana was discovered in 1978, the federal government did not act until five years later, after the mayor of Triana filed a class-action lawsuit in 1980.

One eighty-five-year-old resident, Felix Wynn, had 3,300 parts per billion of DDT in his blood, more DDT than has ever been found in any other human being.⁸⁰

In 1980, Triana residents settled out of court with Olin for $19 million, $6.8 million of which paid legal fees, leaving each resident only about $2,000 annually for five years—money that is now long gone. The remaining $5 million went to address health care.⁸¹

DDT was so widely used that most Americans are still exposed to it.⁸² High blood levels of DDT or its metabolites are associated with neurodevelopmental problems in children.⁸³ Because it persists in the soil, food, environment—and in our brains—Rutgers University scientists were able to measure DDT in their subjects’ brains and correlate it with some disease patterns.

They found that people with Alzheimer’s have levels of DDT and its metabolites that are four times higher than their peers without Alzheimer’s. However, the sick had more than high levels of DDT: they also shared a genetic predisposition, suggesting that interaction between DDT and the genes may be needed to develop the disease. Alzheimer’s would not be the first pesticide–neurological disease link: pesticides have already been strongly implicated in Parkinson’s disease.

Other neurological diseases are also the product of interactions between genetic susceptibility and the environment, making it very difficult for epidemiology to identify clear associations between an exposure and a disease, especially in nations like the United States, where a broad range of genetic susceptibility reigns.

Organophosphate pesticides, such as the chlorpyrifos used widely in agriculture, on golf courses, and for mosquito control under the names Dursban and Lorsban, are neurotoxic. Prenatal exposure can lead to structural abnormalities of the brain, according to several studies. On November 6, 2018, this insecticide was approved in the United States and the EU “on the basis of a toxicity test that has now been found to be faulty,” writes Philippe Grandjean on his website, where the specific testing flaws are detailed.⁸⁴ He adds that its residues cling to fruits and “appear in the urine of children, even those living in countries that don’t use the product.”

The United States had planned to gradually eliminate its use, but the Trump administration’s EPA canceled this banishment even though, notes Grandjean, “a federal appeals court ordered the EPA to ban the pesticide due to the risks to brain development seen in studies of children.”⁸⁵

Tetrachloroethylene (also called TCE or perchlorethylene) is a widely used solvent in dry cleaning, paint, spot removers, and suede protectors. According to Neurological Teratology, early childhood exposure⁸⁶ carries an increased risk of neurological and psychiatric problems.

David C. Bellinger, professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and professor in the Department of Environmental Health at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, calculates that pesticides alone cause a cumulative national IQ loss of 16.9 million points, and the largest portion of that loss—5.7 million points—comes from prenatal exposure.

This conversion of brain damage to IQ points gives us only a rough understanding of the damage, as Philippe Grandjean points out in Only One Chance, because chemicals vary in their effects on the brain. Some don’t affect general intelligence, but instead erode specific elements of cognition.⁸⁷ Methylmercury hampers memory; lead shortens the attention span; pesticides distort spatial perception. The polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) used to render children’s clothing and furniture flame-resistant, are also linked to cognitive and behavioral performance in school-age children.⁸⁸

Quite a few other chemicals common in fence-line neighborhoods have been shown to poison the brain, including azides, carbon monoxide, cyanides, decaborane, diborane, fluorides, hydrogen phosphide, hydrogen sulfide, pentaborane, phosphine, and phosphorus.⁸⁹

Toxic Reservations: Poisoned Earth, Troubled Waters, and Lowered IQs

In 2016 a national spotlight fell on the Dakota Access pipeline, and the Standing Rock Sioux tribe soon became the most visible victim of the Trump administration’s disastrous changes in environmental policy. When he reversed the Obama administration’s decision to deny a permit to drill beneath the Missouri River, some wondered whether the $500,000 to $1 million Trump had invested in the pipeline provided motivation. Although a spokesperson claimed Trump had sold his shares, Kelcy Warren, chief executive of the pipeline’s builder, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), had donated $100,000 to Trump’s presidential campaign.⁹⁰

Trump appointed Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency despite his well-known hostility to the agency’s agenda. Until his July 6, 2018, departure, protections for beleaguered fence-line communities seemed to be neglected in favor of multibillion-dollar oil and gas companies. From Pruitt’s status as a climate-change denier to his determination to eviscerate environmental protections, the EPA’s new direction overshadows the government’s actions pertaining to Standing Rock. ETP planned to complete the approximately twelve-hundred-mile-long $3.7 billion pipeline in order to carry 470,000 barrels of crude oil daily across four states. The pipeline will swell profit margins for oil companies, but the Standing Rock Sioux point out that it will also contaminate drinking water and desecrate sacred burial sites. They refuse to accept the pipeline’s construction, and their statement of resistance reads in part, “Americans know this pipeline was unfairly rerouted towards our nation and without our consent.”

Native Americans and their supporters, including the environmental activist group Greenpeace, have gathered in North Dakota camps to hold sacred ceremonies⁹¹ and to protect the Missouri River, the only water source for the Standing Rock tribe. The news media have taken note with regular updates that bring unwonted attention to Native Americans threatened with environmental hazards.

Trump’s former law firm filed a complaint on behalf of ETP that characterized Greenpeace and other Sioux Nation supporters as “wolf packs” of corrupt NGOs. It deployed the RICO Act, typically used to facilitate organized crime prosecutions, against them. But an ACLU “friend of the court” brief argued that “the First Amendment prohibits companies from suing their critics out of existence.”⁹²

Even before the pipeline’s completion, Sioux fears materialized as it ruptured, spilling 84 gallons of oil in Tulare, South Dakota, south of the resistance camps.⁹³

Eagle Mine

Standing Rock is one of many skirmishes that have broken out between indigenous nations and the U.S. government over industrial wastes dumped on Native American reservations.

Some tribal governments have accepted waste storage, even nuclear waste, or mining for the millions of dollars of income they bring to a demographic that suffers twice the poverty rate of the United States as a whole. Only external pressure, including pressure from the National Congress of American Indians, prevented the Skull Valley band of Utah’s Goshute tribe from committing their land for the storage of spent nuclear fuel. The tribe’s home is already surrounded by a chemical weapons depot, a military test site, and a facility for the production of magnesium.⁹⁴

But the primary “beneficiaries” of coal mining and power plants on indigenous lands often are not the native tribes. In the case of the Black Mesa region of Arizona, indigenous home of the Diné (Navajo) and Hopi peoples, four of five people living on the affected Navajo site do not have running water: their water aquifer has been tapped to supply the former coal slurry pipeline. Moreover, only half of those living on the Navajo and Hopi reservations have electricity, despite the fact that the power transmission lines cross the reservations to deliver electricity to the southwestern United States and California.

These communities rely upon natural resources for survival and hold reverence for the earth and good stewardship of these resources as cultural pillars.

This cultural mandate is threatened as Native American reservations have become the preferred sites of uranium and coal mines, leading to polluted waterways and tribal lands.

One is the Eagle Mine, the nation’s only primarily nickel-and-copper mine, which is located on Michigan’s Yellow Dog Plains and owned by Lundin Mining Corporation. It began production in late 2014, and is expected to generate 360 million pounds of nickel, 295 million pounds of copper, and small amounts of platinum, palladium, silver, gold, and cobalt by 2022. A coalition that includes the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the National Wildlife Federation appealed the issuance of its mining permit and groundwater discharge documentation based on concerns about water contamination. Their fears have a compelling basis. The Eagle Mine uses the sulfide mining method, which extracts metals from sulfide ores. When these ores are crushed, the sulfides are exposed to air and water, catalyzing a reaction that produces highly caustic and toxic sulfuric acid.

The acid drains into nearby waterways and groundwater, a phenomenon called acid mine drainage.

When water sources become acidified, plants, fish, and other wildlife that have provided food for centuries are poisoned, and the people lose not only potable water but the fruits of their treaty rights for hunting, fishing, and gathering.

But the most direct environmental threat to cognition and IQ is posed by coal-fired plants, which release neurotoxic methylmercury. This is the form of mercury that most often causes brain and spinal cord damage, that reduces IQ and causes mental retardation as well as permanent motor dysfunction.

We’ve known this for a long time. England’s industrial revolution heightened workers’ exposure to mercury’s cognitive dangers, one of which was so familiar that it made its way into Victorian children’s literature. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a still-popular escapist fantasy, features the Mad Hatter, whose condition was a genuine feature of British industrial life. English haberdashers used mercury to process wool into felt for hats, and hatmakers who inhaled its volatile vapors suffered brain damage, memory loss, tremors, and loss of intelligence. This was compounded by psychological changes like irritability, low self-confidence, depression, apathy, and shyness.⁹⁵ These signs and symptoms marked a disease that physicians called erethism mercurialis and the public called Mad Hatter disease.⁹⁶

Methylmercury is especially damaging to the developing brains of fetuses and young children, depending upon the amount and time of exposure. Most people are exposed by the consumption of mercury-contaminated seafood, like that which caused the devastating, decades-long outbreak in Minamata city, Japan.

The epidemic was caused by the release of methylmercury in the industrial wastewater from the Chisso Corporation’s chemical factory from 1932 to 1968. Methylmercury bioaccumulated in shellfish and fish in Minamata Bay and the Shiranui Sea, and was eaten by residents for thirty-six years while the government did nothing. People with Minamata disease suffered a movement disorder called ataxia, hand and feet numbness, muscle weakness, the loss of peripheral vision, and damaged hearing and speech. But the neurological damage could also be extreme, including insanity, paralysis, coma, and even death within weeks. Minamata disease also offers an example of the complex interplay between genetics and environmental poisoning because a congenital form of the disease affects fetuses in the womb.

In the United States, minority groups are most heavily affected by mercury poisoning.⁹⁷ A few examples of the coal-fired plants in and near impoverished Native American reservations include the following:⁹⁸

The Four Corners Steam Plant,⁹⁹ one of the largest coal-fired generating stations in the United States, is located on Navajo land in Fruitland, New Mexico.

The Peabody Western Coal Company and the Desert Rock¹⁰⁰ coal-fired plant are just two of the many coal-fired plants and strip-mining operations in the Black Mesa region, with approximately 21 billion tons of coal and a value of $100 billion.¹⁰¹

The Absaloka Mine¹⁰² of southeastern Montana was extended into 3,660 acres of the neighboring Crow reservation in 2008.

Colstrip Steam Plant, Montana’s largest coal-fired power plant, sits on lands of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, surrounded by five large strip mines.

In 2012, the Associated Press analyzed EPA data and found that 10 percent of all U.S. power plants operate within twenty miles of reservation land. Moreover, many of these fifty-one energy-generating centers are more than half a century old and operate without protections for the fifty reservations they abut. Moreover, the EPA is considering reducing these meager protections. In February 2019, its acting administrator Andrew Wheeler indicated he will take steps to undo the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS)¹⁰³ regulations that limit the mercury and other toxic effluents that plants are allowed to release into the air.¹⁰⁴

Although most Native Americans live outside reservations, the wealth of coal-fired plants in and near impoverished Native American reservations with little or no access to health care preferentially assails the intelligence and IQ of this marginalized ethnic group.¹⁰⁵

Unlike African Americans and Hispanics, Native Americans constitute a relatively small ethnic group—only 2 percent of the U.S. population¹⁰⁶—but we should remember that it is small because of centuries of genocide.

Nonetheless, Native American lands are home to coal mining and coal plants that disproportionately subject indigenous people to the brain-damaging environmental hazards of the coal industry.¹⁰⁷

In 2006, NYU School of Medicine professor Leonardo Trasande and a team of other environmental health scientists calculated how much health damage can be attributed to mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants by analyzing mental retardation associated with methylmercury in all U.S. babies born in 2000. They then calculated how much is attributable to coal-fired power plants.¹⁰⁸

Their results? All human-generated exposures of methylmercury cause a lowering of IQ that results in 1,566 additional cases of mental retardation every year. This represents 3.2 percent of new cases of mental retardation in the United States, which has cost the nation $2 billion annually.

Mercury emissions specifically from U.S. power plants cause 231 cases of mental retardation cases annually. In other words, one in every two hundred cases of mental retardation in America is caused by emissions from power plants. These cases alone cost the country $289 million every year. But the real cost of mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants is its injury to the brains of American children, particularly children on the reservation, whose risk is greatly magnified by their proximity to these toxic sites.¹⁰⁹

Protecting the brains of these children entails far more than preventing exposure to emissions at home or school. Protection must begin in the womb, as the next chapter explains.