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In Puerto Rico, environmental injustice and racism inflame protests over coal ash.
Low-income residents in Puerto Rico are fighting disposal of toxic coal ash in their communities. They're also campaigning to shift from coal energy – the source of the problem – to solar power.
December 8, 2016 9.08pm EST
Author
Hilda Lloréns
Faculty in Anthropology, University of Rhode Island
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Hilda Lloréns does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
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A five-story coal ash pile next to the AES electric power plant in Guayama, Puerto Rico. Hilda Llorens, Author provided
For scholars like me who study environmental justice, it has been encouraging to see residents in Flint, Michigan and the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota organize against threats to their homes and health. But elsewhere in our country, other struggles are happening out of the spotlight – and often dragging on for years.
In Puerto Rico’s south, protests are building over the disposal of toxic coal ash in landfills. Small-scale protests began in 2014, but opposition has grown. A recent demonstration drew an estimated 1,000 people. Protesters have been routinely harassed by police and arrested.
As a native of the island’s southeast, I have been following these developments closely. Historically this region has been a zone of human exploitation and natural resource extraction. In the struggle over coal ash disposal, poor and mostly black communities in Puerto Rico’s hinterlands are being forced to sacrifice their health and the health of their environment to support the island’s energy-intensive economy and lifestyle.
The AES coal-fired power plant in Guayamas, Puerto Rico. Hilda Llorens, Author provided
This crisis illustrates two closely connected problems: environmental injustice and environmental racism. The first refers to disproportionately high levels of exposure to environmental risks experienced by some segments of the population. The latter describes cases in which those unequal impacts fall on communities of color. Both are factors in this conflict and reflect Puerto Rico’s socioeconomic history.
But even as locals fight these problems, there is one hopeful development: the spread of rooftop solar power as a replacement. Coquí Solar, a project initiated in a Jobos Bay community near Guayama’s AES plant, is working to define an alternative to the underlying problem – coal-fired energy – and find ways to achieve it.
A sacrifice zone
Like many places that struggle with environmental injustice, Puerto Rico’s Guayama-Salinas region along the island’s Caribbean coast is a low-income area with a high fraction of minority residents. The median yearly household income is US$15,000, and more than half of residents live below the poverty line. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, 17 percent of people in the region self-identified as black or African-American, compared to the national average of 12.4 percent. (In Puerto Rico, large concentrations of black residents are a marker of poverty.)
The area has suffered historically from high unemployment and poverty rates. It lies far from the national capital, San Juan, and was highly dependent on sugar cane agriculture for many years. Because of this legacy, the coastal environment is especially valuable to residents. It provides resources that buffer them against local and global economic crises – much like resource-dependent communities along the U.S. Gulf Coast that face similar environmental justice struggles.
One recent study quotes a saying among Puerto Rican artisanal fishers: “Nos defendemos con pescado fresco,” meaning, “We defend ourselves with fresh fish.” Another study found that people in this region who made a significant part of their living from fishing in the ocean and foraging in the mangroves derived a sense of cultural identity and well-being from these activities, along with food and income.
Coastal mangrove forest in Puerto Rico. Mangrove forests provide habitat for many species of fish and shellfish. Ricardo Mangual/Flickr, CC BY
The source of the coal ash is a 454-megawatt coal-fired electric power plant in Guayama owned by the utility AES that has been operating since 2002. The plant is adjacent to a Superfund site where Chevron Phillips operated an oil refinery from 1966 through 2002.
Throughout the area, former sugar cane fields, mangrove forests and oceanfront lands have been converted to housing developments, shopping plazas, manufacturing and power plants over the past 50 years. Residents thus already bear a heavy burden from development that has compromised their health and the natural resources that many rely on for their livelihoods.
Broken promises
The coal ash generated by AES in Guayama is known to contain high levels of arsenic, heavy metals and radioactivity. Under current EPA regulations, coal ash can be disposed of in surface impoundments and landfills, in surface-waste ponds or recycled into products such as concrete and drywall. These methods are widely practiced throughout the United States and other parts of the world.
AES pledged in 1996, before the plant started operating, that it would not deposit coal ash in landfills on the island. The company’s initial strategy was to ship thousands of tons of ash to two rural coastal communities in the Dominican Republic. But after local doctors reported increases in spontaneous abortions and birth defects near those areas, AES was ordered to clean up the ashes and paid $6 million in a legal settlement with the Dominican Republic’s Environmental and Natural Resources Agency.
AES then developed a construction product called Agremax, a filler based on coal ash. Some two million tons of coal ash were used throughout Puerto Rico to build roads, parking lots, malls and as fill in tract housing developments, including sites near public water wells, farms, wetlands and beaches. Alarmed by fugitive dust and other impacts, environmental groups sued. In 2014, lacking customers, Agremax was retired from the construction market.
In response, Puerto Rico’s Environmental Quality Board and the island’s public power company (which buys the coal plant’s electricity) allowed AES to reverse its pledge and deposit coal ash in local landfills. But according to the EPA, a majority of Puerto Rico’s 29 landfills are over capacity, and some are open dumps that do not comply with current regulations. The agency currently has legal agreements to close 12 landfills. In sum, the ash disposal controversy is worsening a landfill crisis.
Taking core samples at the site of a coal ash spill on the Dan River in North Carolina, 2014. Steve Alexander, USFWS/Flickr, CC BY
Slow violence
The struggle over coal ash is rooted in colonial and economic policies that have turned Puerto Ricans into migrants, consumers and debtors over the past century. These circumstances illustrate what Princeton University’s Rob Nixon calls “slow violence”: a steady accumulation of gradual, and often invisible, environmental harms endured by vulnerable individuals and communities during capitalist expansion.
Southeast Puerto Rico was populated in the 18th century by enslaved Africans, and later free blacks and mixed-race individuals, who worked on sugar cane plantations. When the island industrialized in the mid-20th century, many workers left farms for factories, while others sought agricultural work in the United States. Massive migration to U.S. cities became a way of life for Puerto Ricans, and multinational corporations began to build facilities on empty agricultural land.
As a result of these processes, people in this part of Puerto Rico have little political or economic clout and are vulnerable to exploitation by corporations like AES. But they recognize that landfilling coal ash threatens the resources that they depend on, and are trying to end it.
A solar-powered future?
Residents of the Coquí neighborhood in the Bay of Jobos are working with scientists at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez to build and install solar panels throughout the community. If this initiative succeeds, it would be the first solar-powered community in Puerto Rico. Community volunteers will receive training in the hopes that they will be able to install and maintain the equipment locally. Perhaps anticipating this shift, AES has opened a solar energy farm on fallow agricultural land in Guayama.
Many other communities in places far from the public eye face what can seem like insurmountable obstacles in their own struggles against enduring environmental injustice and racism. Every case is unique, but as pioneering environmental justice scholar Robert Bullard argues, the central challenge is the same: providing equal protection to disenfranchised communities, and ensuring that their voices are heard.
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This Price is not right.
President-Elect Donald Trump would have been hard-pressed to pick someone more frightening than Rep. Tom Price, the Republican from Georgia, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services.
This Price Is Not Right
Donald Trump has tapped U.S. Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Women, the LGBT community, and the poor will suffer.
12.02.2016 / BY Judy Stone
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PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump would have been hard-pressed to pick someone more frightening than Rep. Tom Price, the Republican from Georgia, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services. After all, Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the outgoing governor of Indiana, have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its protections for women, the LGBT community, and poor people. Price will undoubtedly work to fulfill those goals.
Both Price and Pence have long-standing histories of extremist views about women’s health needs. They are rabidly anti-abortion, even in the case of serious fetal abnormality or risk to the mother’s health. Price currently enjoys a 0 percent rating from Planned Parenthood and a 100 percent rating by the National Right to Life Committee.
In Indiana, two women of color were imprisoned for fetal losses under Governor Pence’s fetal homicide law. Price and Pence both believe that life begins at the moment of conception. Pence even wants miscarried fetuses to be buried or cremated, although spontaneous miscarriages commonly occur early in pregnancies. Both Indiana and Texas have passed such laws.
In 2012 Price told ThinkProgress that there’s “not one” woman who doesn’t have access to birth control. In fact, a Hart research survey commissioned by Planned Parenthood found that 55 percent of women aged 18 to 34 reported trouble affording this necessity. If his claims were true, why would more and more U.S. women — 20.2 million as of 2014 — need publicly funded family planning services?
Many women rely on Planned Parenthood for family planning and screening for breast and cervical cancer, HIV, and sexually transmitted diseases. The triumvirate has repeatedly called to defund the group, which serves almost 3 million people, although they provide essential services not covered elsewhere. This vindictive stance is driven by ideology, not science — and certainly not sound policy. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that defunding Planned Parenthood would cost taxpayers $130 million over 10 years due to costs of unintended pregnancies. Further, if curbing abortion rates is the goal, why cut contraceptive benefits and promote inaccurate, ineffective, abstinence based “education?”
Laws criminalizing abortion don’t work. Instead, they drive patients to seek dangerous alternatives to safe abortion. I’ve seen sepsis from abortion; I hope never to again. A recent study showed that the abortion rate per 1,000 women fell from 46 in 1990 to 27 in 2014, largely due to the increasing availability of effective contraceptives.
Yet access to contraceptives is likely to be one of Price’s first targets, as he described a requirement for making contraceptives available as “a trampling of religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.” Other “essential services” (now provided by Planned Parenthood) include screening and counseling for domestic violence, screening for diabetes during pregnancy, breastfeeding counseling and equipment, screening for HPV and HIV, and one preventive care visit annually. These benefits weren’t made on a whim — instead, the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine recommended that these preventive services should be covered without cost sharing, and the Health Resources and Services Administration adopted the recommendations. There is concern that the new administration may be able to rewrite the regulations according to the dictates of their fundamentalist ideology, against sound public health and scientific advice. This could be done by administrative fiat without Congressional approval or through attempts to repeal the ACA.
Currently, maternity care is mandated under the ACA. But Price’s cynically named alternative, the “Empowering Patients First Act,” eliminates all the current essential health benefits guaranteed by that legislation. Insurers could choose to not cover maternity benefits, and could again deny women coverage because of pre-existing conditions, which in the past have included yeast infections and even domestic violence. Insurers could resume the inequality of “gender rating,” or charging women much higher rates than men.
Women of color are at special risk of suffering from funding cuts, as they already face greater health disparities. For example, African-American women have a four-fold higher death rate during childbirth than white women, and higher deaths from breast cancer as well. Latinas and Vietnamese women have higher rates of cervical cancer. Native American women are 2.4 times as likely to develop diabetes than white women. The ACA is critical to addressing the health disparities in these groups and among low-income communities.
Price and Pence demand constitutional protections for unborn persons from the moment of conception on. But this flies in the face of a woman’s autonomy, relegating her to being viewed only as an incubator for embryos and fetuses. Women could again be forced to have medication or surgeries against their will, or be imprisoned for doing anything that might harm the fetus. The woman’s own survival would be valued less than even a nonviable fetus.
WHILE PRICE AND PENCE claim a religious belief in the sanctity of an unborn child’s life, their concern seems to evaporate once that child is born. Both voted repeatedly against public health funding, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Price has advocated for state, rather than federal control of some Head Start programs, and he wants to cut assistance for families or people struggling with disabilities.
Price opposed the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act and both he and Pence oppose nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community. Refusal clauses they support basically would allow discrimination against a wide array of people, trumping civil rights in the name of religious beliefs.
If they attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any viable alternative, the wealthy white troika risks rebellion as their base awakens to the reality of a future of insurmountable medical bills and no safety net. Trump lost the popular vote by at least 2.5 million votes. Add the nearly 5.5 million white people who Paul Krugman estimates just voted themselves out of health care and the 55 million women who risk losing their preventive care, and Trump will surely face growing opposition to his draconian plans.
While it’s only a fantasy on my part at this time, maybe if our fears about the destruction of healthcare in this country come to pass, women will take a lesson from the Greek playwright Aristophanes, whose heroine Lysistrata persuaded the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges until their husbands and lovers negotiated an end to the Peloponnesian War. In this war — which is over women’s health, dignity, and rights — the stakes are clear.
The head of the Department of Health and Human Services has a moral responsibility to care for all people. Based on his track record, Price — an orthopedic surgeon himself, as well as a Christian — seems poised to make basic health care more difficult for millions of women and children. That would make a mockery not just of a doctor’s obligation to do no harm, but also the tenets of his own faith, which call for care and compassion for those in need.
Dr. Judy Stone is a Maryland-based physician specializing in infectious disease, and she is a frequent contributor to Forbes.
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