The best-seller (followed by a movie) about an infamous industrial water-pollution case in Woburn, Mass. , in the 1980s.

Via OtherWords.org

Our government just told polluters they are free to pump deadly chemicals into our air and water. That’s because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has suspended all enforcement indefinitely, until the COVID-19 crisis is over.

This terrifies me. I know firsthand that giving polluters free rein will cost thousands, even millions, of lives.

As a young mother in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in the 1970s, I watched toxic chemicals bubble up through our lawns, poisoning our children. When my neighbors and I discovered that our neighborhood, Love Canal, was built on a toxic waste dump, our advocacy led to the creation of the first Superfund site by Congress in 1980.

Today the EPA acknowledges more than 40,000 communities across the United States are dangerously polluted with toxic chemicals, from rural areas to major cities like Birmingham and Detroit. At the 1,344 sites targeted for cleanup by Superfund, polluters are required to pay — at least when they can be found.

But there are tens of thousands more communities where the pollution continues unabated. These are known as “sacrifice zones” — places where the health of residents is permanently sacrificed to industrial contamination.

Already, 36 percent of all school-age children — over 19.6 million — live in sacrifice zones. But if the EPA abandons its oversight of polluting industries now, this number of dangerously uninhabitable communities will grow exponentially. Many more people will die.

In short, the EPA just gave polluters a license to kill.

On March 26, the EPA said it will not “seek penalties for noncompliance with routine monitoring and reporting obligations” from polluters until further notice. This came days after the American Petroleum Institute sent a 10-page letter to the EPA, asking them to suspend enforcement.

And while the EPA now claims the pandemic is the reason, this change has been coming for months. Last November, they rolled back requirements that companies take safety measures to prevent chemical releases, calling these regulations “burdensome,” “costly,” and “unnecessary.”

If we told drivers there are no more traffic rules, most would still do the right thing and drive safely. But a handful will drive drunk, blow through stop signs, and run over pedestrians. A few scofflaws make our country a much more dangerous place.

That’s especially true in sacrifice zones where residents are being told to shelter in place because of COVID-19 — they can’t leave. Often this may apply to communities they had previously been told were toxic.

Imagine how a shelter in place order must feel to people like Eddie Ramirez.

He’s one of the 60,000 Texans who were ordered to leave — then return, and stay home — after a petrochemical plant explosion in Port Neches last November released dangerous amounts of butadiene, which causes nervous system damage. After Eddie returned home, authorities realized dangerous chemicals were still in the air, so they ordered residents to evacuate a second time.

TCP Group, the Houston-based petrochemical company that owns the Port Neches plant, had to pay more than $378,000 in penalties for more violations last year. If the EPA suspends even minimal penalties like these, polluters have no incentive to do the right thing.

Dozens of refinery fires and factory explosions emit toxic chemicals into the environment every year. If we remove penalties and enforcement, there will be more.

And right now, because of COVID-19 and our government’s refusal to protect our environment, the residents of sacrifice zones like Port Neches are like sitting ducks. They have no place to go. It is our responsibility to keep them safe.

Lois Gibbs is the founder of the Center for Health and Environmental Justice, part of the People’s Action network of grassroots groups. She helped win recognition for the first Superfund site at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, N.Y., in 1980.

*Hurricane Dorian off George on Sept. 4*

From OtherWords.org

Donald Trump discusses immigration as if the benefits of residence in the U.S. are a pie. When immigrants get more, the people who were already here get less.

In general, that’s not true. When immigrants come here, they don’t just take some jobs (often low-wage jobs U.S. citizens don’t want), they also create new jobs. They need housing, transportation, food, and clothes, and they buy all of those things, creating more jobs for other people in this country.

However, in one way, Trump is turning his viewpoint into a self-fulfilling prophecy: He’s using our finite government funds to pay for incarcerating immigrants in detention facilities, which means he’s shifting that money away from other uses that could benefit the American people.

In that sense, it’s not immigrants who are taking from us. It’s Trump

For example, disaster relief. Trump’s using over $100 million in federal disaster aid money to pay for detention centers for immigrants — even as hurricane season gets underway

Does that worry him? Apparently not.

When asked about Hurricane Dorian, which was then a category 5 storm nearing the Atlantic coast, Trump actually said: “I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of a category 5.” He said the same thing last year about Hurricane Michael. And the same thing again the year before, about Hurricane Irma

Hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters are threats that definitely harm Americans. Historically, we as a nation take care of one another by appropriating some of our tax dollars for federal disaster relief

Nobody plans to be the victim of a natural disaster, and we can’t predict which communities will be hit by them. We can prepare for them as a nation so that when they happen, we are as ready as we can be, and we have the resources to deal with the aftermath

While we can’t control whether or not we get hit by hurricanes or tornadoes, we can control whether we invest in being prepared — or whether we waste that money instead on locking up immigrants in taxpayer-funded detention facilities.

We don’t need to do that.

When we take money from disaster relief and use it to imprison people who pose no safety threat to the American people, we are also harming the victims of natural disasters who need aid they won’t receive=

By moving money within the Department of Homeland Security from other areas (the Coast Guard, FEMA, etc.) to pay for beds in detention centers for people who have crossed the border illegally but represent no safety threat to this country, the Trump administration could leave America open to other types of threats instead.

Rather than spending tax dollars needed for actual threats to national security on detaining immigrants, we need comprehensive and humane immigration reform that keeps families together. Then we can use our money on what we actually need, like disaster relief.

OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson is a sociologist.