Environmental Inequalities.

Until the late 1980s environmentalism was generally considered a white middle-class issue. The exposure of Love Canal in 1979 and the increased concern among African-Americans about the location of toxic dumps in their neighborhoods, along with a general feeling that poor communities suffered adversely the effects of polluted water and air, gave rise in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the possibility of a new environmental allegiance which would bring together middle-class environmentalists with working-class whites and African-Americans into a new and renewed environmental movement. Andrew Hurley's study of environmental inequities in Gary, Indiana provides some serious historical lessons to anyone interested in such a movement. Hurley tells an important story not only about the nature of and persistence of environmental inequity, but also the limits of environmental reform.

Hurley tells two stories in his work on Gary. He tells how environmental quality both inside the work place and in the community reflected patterns of class and race status in the larger society. In this story Hurley argues that "domination of nature involves and necessitates the control of human beings"(p. 182). But the environmental landscape shifted through the post-war years as rank-and-file activists on the job alleviated some of the most egregious racial inequality of the work environment, while geographic mobility increased environmental inequality outside the mills. Increasingly in the late 1960s and 1970s middle- and upper-middle-class whites fled the most polluted areas of the city, leaving behind blacks and poor whites who stayed in their already polluted neighborhoods or moved into the polluted neighborhoods being abandoned by better-off whites.

The story of the shifting pattern of environmental inequality is only one of the histories Hurley unfolds. The other is the story of the complex pattern of struggle against environmental degradation and the uneven record of success.

Hurley succeeds in bringing out not only the complex, but also the unexpected and ironic in both his stories. In his history of environmental inequality, he notes that housing patterns and discrimination played themselves out in such a way that in the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s few of Gary's citizens enjoyed the privilege of a clean environment. The middle class as well as the city's poor found their neighborhoods inundated with foul air and polluted waters. Indeed, because of intense discrimination the black community was slightly less plagued by bad air as they were kept out of the downtown shopping areas and confined residentially further away from the mills than more prestigious middle-class areas or white working-class areas (although on the job African-Americans found far greater risk to their health by being limited to the most polluted jobs and areas of the mills). By the 1960s this pattern of more equitable community pollution exposure began to change as middle-class and upper-working-class whites fled the more polluted urban core for areas far removed from the city's smokestacks. As whites fled, African-Americans began to move into these areas, giving rise by the 1990s to significant inequalities in racial composition of environmentally compromised living areas.

Gary is an obvious place to situate a study of environmental degradation and its impact on different members of the urban community. Hurley was also wise in chosing Gary for the second part of his story. Contrary to what one might imagine as one drives through Gary today, the city, more than most American cities, combined a number of factors which lent themselves to the creation of a broad based environmental movement. Gary was a blue collar city whose workers in the post-war years had built a strong and powerful trade union. The city's African-American community mobilized politically and in 1979 elected one of their own as mayor. The mayor, Hatcher, was committed to cleaning up the city's environment and understood that to do that he would have to take on the city's largest corporations. The city also had a politically active and involved middle class, particularly women in the League of Women Voters, which not only was concerned about environmentalism, but had also developed the research and political skills to get that concern heard.

Gary's environmental problems affected whites as well as African-Americans, poor as well as rich, but they did not affect those groups in the same fashion. Whites who fled to the eastern edge of the city were anxious to keep polluting industry away from their new neighborhoods and maintain the rustic quality of their lakeside community. African-Americans who were kept out of those areas and also the beaches because of discrimination were more interested in mitigating their exposure to pollution on the job and reducing pollution emanating from smokestacks near their homes and dumped into the rivers that flowed by their yards. Mayor Hatcher for a brief moment was able to bring these disparate groups together and formulate a political program to address the city's notorious environment. Unfortunately there was a limit to what Hatcher could do. Partly, Hatcher was hindered by the conflicting needs and concerns of those concerned about the environment. When middle-class whites got what they wanted, they were less interested in pursuing the needs of the African-American community, and they were especially reluctant to integrate African-Americans into their efforts and their movement as full and equal participants. African-Americans, on the other hand, were suspicious of white middle-class environmentalists' commitment to what we today would call environmental justice. White union leadership was reluctant to embrace either a strong commitment to environmental equity and clean up on the job or the anti-corporation approach favored by both African-American rank and filers and radical working-class whites.

Ultimately it wasn't the tenuous nature of this alliance which limited Gary's environmentalists' reform efforts. It was the power of the corporations which operated in the city. Using a variety of strategies from closing down or threatening to close down mills rather than comply with environmental restraints, lobbying on the state level to undermine local efforts, or just manipulating the general economic slowdown to punish local activists and politicians, Gary's corporations were successful in limiting the actions they needed to take or removing local demand for environmental clean-up.

At the end of the campaign the local coalition of environmental reformists had little to show for their efforts. Yet the city of Gary is cleaner. Here is the last of Hurley's ironies. Much of the clean-up which finally came to Gary's air and water was not the result of local activism which was great, but the result of national legislation and national enforcement. As much as the people of Gary may have wanted to clean up their environment, the power of large national and now international corporations frustrated local efforts. It was at the national level where the political will and muscle existed and where action could be taken which made a significant difference for Gary. It is a lesson which is well worth remembering as we redebate national environmental protection.

Andrew Hurley has written a book which adds much to current discussion. Hurley could have told this story with more character or personality, but it is an important book which anyone interested in cities, the environment, social justice, or just our modern age should read. It is a book which will quickly become the standard reference in the field.

John T. Cumbler University of Louisville