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Contemporary Justice Review, 2013

Vol. 16, No. 4, 394–411, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2013.857094

‘Becoming a waste land where nothing can survive’: resisting state-corporate environmental crime in a ‘forgotten’ place

Meghan G. McDowell*

Justice & Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA (Received 7 May 2012; accepted 15 October 2012)

Environmental justice advocates have made visible the practice of dispropor tionately siting hazardous waste facilities in low-income communities of color throughout the USA. Typically, state-corporate actors decide where to place these environmentally undesirable projects, with an eye toward the bottom line rather than the health and safety of particular community members. Through an analysis of secondary data and archival materials, ranging from public hearings to court documents and newspaper accounts, a case study of state-corporate environmental crime and how one rural, historically African American town in Arizona organized to resist the siting of a fourth landﬁll in their community is explored. Theoretical concepts advanced by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, such as ‘forgotten places’, are put into conversation with the literature on state-corporate crime. An examination of the relationship between environmental inequality, state-corporate crime, and people’s capacity for resistance is presented.

Keywords: environmental racism; state-corporate crime; Arizona; forgotten places

In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice (UCCRJ) released its now famous report, Toxic Waste and Race. The UCCRJ study con cluded that hazardous waste sites are disproportionately located in low-income communities of color. Then UCCRJ director Benjamin Chavis, coined the term ‘environmental racism’ to describe this phenomenon. The report not only sparked a nationwide social movement for environmental justice, it also laid the foundation for an emergent ﬁeld of study that sought to examine patterns of environmental inequality. Since UCCRJ’s initial report, scholars have broadened Chavis’ deﬁnition of environmental racism to ‘any policy, practice, or directive that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race’ (Bullard, 2000, p. 98).

The communities and people targeted by complex dynamics of environmental racism have rich histories of resistance that have been documented in the recent literature (Bullard, 2000; Lerner, 2005, 2010; Pellow, 2002). Mobile, Arizona is a historically Black agricultural community located thirty-ﬁve miles southwest of Phoenix. As Phoenix grew into the sixth largest metropolitan area in the USA, Mobile, encompassing an area of just six square miles with roughly 96 inhabitants, became a ‘dumping ground’ for the city’s waste. Presently, Mobile residents live between three landﬁlls, the now closed 118 acre Sierra Estrella landﬁll, the 238

*Email: Meghan.G.McDowell@asu.edu

acre Rainbow Valley construction and debris landﬁll, and the 690 acre Butterﬁeld Station landﬁll – the largest in the state – operated by the Waste Management Cor poration (Leonard, 2002). The siting of several additional ‘undesirable projects’ have also been proposed for Mobile, including an oil reﬁnery, a women’s prison, and a massive hazardous waste incinerator (Leonard, November, 2003, pp. B–8; see also Pitzl, 2003).

In his book, Garbage Wars, Pellow (2002) argues, ‘environmental racism unfolds in ways that are more complex, more disturbing, and more unsettling than most written accounts of environmental justice struggles reveal’ (p. 4). What happened in Mobile is no exception.

The path of least resistance: race, class, and waste

Earth Day was ﬁrst celebrated in the USA in April 1970. The nascent environmen tal movement led to an increase in public concern about hazardous waste facilities, treatment, and storage (Mohai, 2005). The nationwide environmental movement coupled with strong local opposition to the siting of hazardous waste facilities (i.e. the NIMBY, ‘not in my backyard’ mentality) encouraged state actors and corporate administrators to approach siting decisions by ‘following the path of least resis tance’ (Mohai, 2005). In many cases, the path of least resistance, having been cleared by decades of racial discrimination, led directly into the backyards of low income communities of color.

Twenty years after the UCCRJ report, Mohai and Saha (2007) conducted a ‘national reassessment’ of scholarship on inequality and the distribution of hazard ous waste. They argue that explanations of this relationship can be organized under three themes: economic factors, sociopolitical factors, and racial factors (Mohai & Saha, 2007, p. 345). Studies that attribute environmental inequality to economic factors make the case that hazardous waste facilities are strategically sited in areas where land values and productions costs are low (Mohai & Saha, 2007; e.g. see Daniels & Friedman, 1999; Rhodes, 2002). In other words, ostensibly neutral eco nomic calculations drive siting decisions, rather than neighborhood demographics, such as race and class. An additional explanation that emerges from this body of literature is the claim that once a hazardous waste facility is located in a given area, property values decline and wealthier residents move away, citing ‘quality of life’ as a factor in their move (Mohai & Saha, 2007).

Studies employing sociopolitical factors to explain patterns of environmental inequality diverge sharply from these arguments. Scholars in this camp point to the racial wealth gap, along with additional sociopolitical factors, such as residential segregation and economic disinvestment to not only dispute the claim that eco nomic factors are ‘nonracial’, but also to offer further evidence of the relationship between race, class, and environmental inequality (Mohai & Saha, 2007; see also Allen, 2001; Carter, 2006). In effect, these factors drain political and social capital from low-income communities of color making it difﬁcult for residents to organize efforts to resist ‘unwanted land uses’ (Mohai & Saha, 2007; e.g. Aliyu, Kasim, & Martin, 2011; Bullard, 2000; Norton et al., 2007; Pellow, 2002).

Mohai and Saha (p. 345) attribute patterns of environmental inequality to ‘racial factors’ making the case that race is the most signiﬁcant predictor where hazardous waste facilities will be located. Because evidence of overt racial prejudice in siting decisions is sparse, research examining whether and how race plays a role in environmental inequality point to the following factors to support their claims: (1) contemporary patterns of racial inequality in a number of areas (i.e. housing, health care, political representation, and so forth), (2) legacies of racial oppression that have resulted in environmental inequities, and (3) racism and white supremacy are systemic and embedded in our institutions (Mohai & Saha, 2007, p. 364; see also Park & Pellow, 2004; Pulido, 2000; Smith, 2005).

Indeed, many argue that contemporary manifestations of environmental racism must be adequately historicized in order to fully understand how certain communities become targeted as dumping grounds for hazardous waste in the present (Mohai, 2005; Park & Pellow, 2004; Pellow, 2002; Pulido, 2000). For example, in her book, Conquest, Smith (2005) explains that efforts to justify the theft of Native lands were premised on constructing Native people as unable to ‘properly control or subdue nat ure’ and as ‘dirty, impure, and hence expendable’ (pp. 56–57). The point is that the ‘exploitation of people of color and of natural resources have gone hand-in-hand throughout [USA] history and [this] exploitation remains at the foundation of racial domination in the USA today’ (Park & Pellow, 2004, p. 405; emphasis in original).

Given this, historicizing the relationship between current patterns of environ mental inequality and the living legacies of settler colonialism, slavery, and geno cide is necessary, because it opens up a space to ask urgent questions about power relationships. Here, it becomes crucial to determine not only who is disadvantaged by environmental inequality, but also who privileges from the disproportionate sit ing of environmental hazards in communities of color and/or poor, working class, indigenous, and immigrant communities (Park & Pellow, 2011).1 Pulido (2000) argues that examining environmental injustices through the lens of white privilege ‘allows us to see how environmental racism has been produced – not only by consciously targeting people of color – but by the larger [socio-spatial-political] processes … in which whites have sought to fully exploit the beneﬁts of their whiteness’ (p. 33). Systemic environmental inequities, therefore, emerge from and occur within particular historic, economic, political, and social arrangements of power, oppression, and privilege.

Mohai and Saha conclude their comprehensive reassessment of literature exam ining the distribution of hazardous waste facilities with the deﬁnitive remark: ‘we ﬁnd that the magnitude of racial disparities around hazardous waste facilities is much greater than what previous national studies have reported. We also ﬁnd [that racial disparities] persist even when controlling for economic and sociopolitical variables’ (p. 343; emphasis added). In short, 20 years after the initial ﬁndings made by the UCCRJ, the racial composition of neighborhoods remain the strongest, but not sole, predictor where hazardous waste facilities are located in the USA (Bullard, Mohai, Saha, & Wright, 2007; Mohai & Saha, 2007).

Environmental justice advocates have exposed a range of harms committed by state and corporate actors in the decades since the movement began. The struggle to hold people accountable for environmental harms – ranging from environmental racism to oil spills – and to better understand the phenomenon more generally, has become the work of environmental or ‘green’ criminologists.

State-corporate environmental crime

The ﬁeld of environmental or ‘green’ criminology has emerged in recent years and is dedicated to the study of issues pertaining to ‘environmental harms, environmental laws, [and/or] environmental regulations’ (White, 2008, p. 8; see also Lynch, 1990). Those studying the relationship between state actors, corporate actors, and crime focus on the

Political and economic processes that enable state and corporate managers to pursue plans and policies – often in concert with one another – that result in death, ill health, ﬁnancial loss, and increasingly in the globalized capitalist economy, cultural destruc tion, all while being insulated from the full weight of criminalization for these actions. (Kramer, Michalowski, & Kauzlarich, 2002, p. 266)

State and/or corporate actors are often involved when environmental crimes are committed; however, their actions are rarely framed as state-corporate crimes (Bradshaw, 2012).

Reviewing robust literature on state-corporate crime is well beyond the scope of this article, but some ﬁndings are important to highlight here. First, the deﬁnition of state-corporate crime includes acts that are illegal under established law, but also recognizes those actions that are ‘socially injurious’, but not illegal (Aulette & Michalowski, 1993; Kramer & Michalowski, 1990; Kramer et al., 2002). Second, state-corporate crimes can be state-initiated or state-facilitated. State-initiated corpo rate crime refers to instances when the state implicitly or overtly directs corpora tions under state contracts to ‘engage in organizational deviance’ (Kramer et al., 2002, p. 271). State-facilitated corporate crime ‘occurs when government regulatory institutions fail to restrain deviant business activities’ due to shared interests ‘whose attainment would be hampered by aggressive regulation’ (Kramer et al., 2002, p. 272).2 Third, literature on state-corporate crime has contributed to a more com plex understanding of state power by exposing the fact that the ‘normalized exer cise of biopower [is] frequently deeply injurious to particular segments of the society’ (Michalowski, 2010, p. 26; emphasis added).3

A growing body of work brings together these two ﬁelds providing a compre hensive analytical framework for studying state-corporate environmental crimes (Bradshaw, 2012; Clifford & Edwards, 2011; Lynch, Burns & Stretesky, 2010; Simon, 2000; Stretesky & Lynch, 1998; White, 2008). This body of work can be combined to assess whether state actors in Arizona ‘failed to restrain’ corporate actors from Southpoint Environmental Services (SES) from engaging in ‘deviant business practices’ in Mobile, practices that could be characterized as state-corpo rate crime (Kramer et al., 2002, p. 272). As this review on environmental inequality demonstrates, the ‘particular segments’ of society that Michalowski refers to, those most likely to be deeply injured by state-corporate environmental crime in the USA, are low-income communities of color (Bullard, 2000; Bullard & Wright, 2009; Stretesky & Lynch, 1998).

Environmental inequality in the valley of the sun

Arizona is of course no stranger to systemic inequality.4 The state’s early economic development was organized around the ‘Five C’s’: cotton, copper, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism) (Olson, 2011). All ﬁve commodities require a cheap and exploit able labor force. During the Jim Crow era, Arizona’s white elite often published advertisements in east coast newspapers soliciting Black labor (Whitaker, 2000; see also, Crudup, 1998).5 With the promise of better working conditions and relief from the persistent ‘racial, economic, and social marginalization’ of the Jim Crow south, many Black people made their way west (Whitaker, 2000, p. 199). Those who set tled in Arizona found work in the agricultural and mining industries (Crudup, 1998).6

However, in many respects, Arizona proved to be no different than jurisdictions in the South. Whitaker (2000) explains that the white elite in Phoenix, intending to keep Arizona a state ‘run by Anglos, for Anglos,’ vigorously maintained the racial caste system put in place by Spanish colonizers hundreds before (p. 198).7 Like its southern counterparts, state actors in Arizona, alarmed by the rise in mostly male Chinese and Black workers, and fearing inter-racial unions, passed anti-miscegena tion laws in 1901, and by 1909 had passed laws legalizing segregation (Whitaker, 2000). As a result of this discriminatory legislation, by the early 1930s, African American, American Indian, and Latino/residents of South Phoenix were clustered in areas ‘deprived of water services, sanitation, and paved roads, and living in shacks with noxious industry for neighbors’ (Ross, 2011, p. 121).8

These dynamics made South Phoenix into ‘among the most striking case studies of environmental injustice to be found among large American cities’ and have been the subject of a handful of studies (Ross, 2011, p. 122).9 For example, Bolin et al. (2005) demonstrate how land use plans, zoning decisions, racially discriminatory housing and lending practices, racial violence and intimidation, and political disen franchisement contributed to the ‘sedimentation of racial inequality’ in Phoenix (Oliver & Shapiro, 1995, quoted in Pulido, 2000, p. 16). Furthermore, despite the promise of jobs by state and corporate ofﬁcials, the presence of industrial and com mercial facilities in South Phoenix (and corresponding increase in exposure to envi ronmental harms) has not resulted in any demonstrable economic beneﬁts to the surrounding community (Bolin et al., 2005, p. 166).

Later, Grineski et al. (2007) determined that poor communities of color in Phoenix are subject to greater levels of air pollution than white communities. They note that although all residents are implicated in the creation of air pollution, patterns of exposure impact poor communities of color at greater rates. Unequal exposure pat terns were attributed to ‘the role of white privilege in the historical and contemporary development of industrial and transportation corridors in Phoenix’ (Grineski et al., 2007, p. 535). In Phoenix then, much like the rest of the USA, patterns of environ mental inequality can be mapped along lines of race and class (see Hoye, 2003).

‘A geography of despair’: mobile, Arizona10

In 1991, Maricopa County published a ‘Mobile Land Use Plan’ that provided a sketch of Mobile’s history and then outlined plans for the town’s future develop ment.11 According to this report, Mobile was founded in the 1920s by forty Black sharecroppers who ﬂed racial violence in Mobile, Alabama. Accounts of Mobile’s founding, published in newspapers at the time, suggest that these sharecroppers were led by ‘a fraudulent white missionary preacher [to the area that is now Mobile] with the dream of making it the ﬁnest religious center’ in the entire coun try (Whitaker, 2000, p. 200; see also Crudup, 1998).12 The idea of Mobile becom ing the premier religious center in the USA never materialized. By 1941, a ‘Mobile townsite’ was established. According to the Maricopa County report, Mobile was ‘intended strictly [as] a Negro settlement. All adjoining lands including the corporation now existing, whose purpose is for irrigation development of some 20,000 acres of land, belongs 100% to Negro citizens.’13

Despite harsh living conditions and scarce economic opportunities, Mobile was one of the few places in Arizona where African Americans could own land and, according to many residents, for this reason, many elected to stick it out in Mobile. Land ownership enabled a degree of self-determination not experienced picking cotton in nearby Buckeye and Maricopa, where workers often labored under what was in effect a debt peonage system (Nilsen, 2004; see also Crudup, 1998). Reﬂect ing on her parents’ decision to stay in Mobile and raise a family there, one former resident explained, ‘[My family was] trying to establish something of their own – everywhere else they were renting or leasing space’ (Rushton, 2004, p. 7).

Located at the foot of the Sierra Estrella mountain range, Mobile has never been a large town. Its African-American population ranged from 100 to 400 residents at its peak in the 1960s (Nilsen, 2004). Due to a combination of harsh (if not harshly ironic) environmental conditions – ﬂooding and lack of water – coupled with scarce economic opportunities, many residents were eventually forced to relocate (Whitaker, 2000). Newspaper accounts reported that in the 1980s, racial demo graphics began to shift as an inﬂux of white residents moved in and many Black residents left Mobile in search of greater economic opportunities (Nilsen, 2004). It was around this time, that Mobile residents fought their ﬁrst recorded battle against state-corporate environmental crime.

In the mid-1980s, Arizona state ofﬁcials solicited bids for a massive hazardous waste facility to be built in Mobile. The facility would manage mostly out-of-state hazardous waste (primarily toxic PBC sludge) and house up to three hazardous waste incinerators and possibly seven landﬁlls. Two companies submitted bids – Environmental Services Co. (ENSCO) and BKK, Incorporated. A memorandum leaked in 1990, after ENSCO had won the contract, revealed that state and ENSCO representatives had engaged in back door negotiations and ‘other improprieties’ that undermined the ostensibly fair bidding process (Stanton, 1990).

Despite this revelation, plans for the state-owned and ENSCO-operated facility moved forward – roads and power lines were built so ENSCO could begin con struction on the site. State actors, clearly not anticipating any public resistance, began building the facility ‘prior to completing the public hearing process’ (Work on Waste, USA, 1991; emphasis added). During a public hearing in May 1990, held in Mobile, some environmentalists and community members protesting the ‘proposed’ facility, were met with police violence when Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies attacked the protesters with stun guns (Rubin, 1990; Work on Waste, USA, 1991). Reports suggest that the deputies attacked the protesters without war rant (Rubin, 1990; Work on Waste, USA, 1991).

The state never recovered from the image embarrassment that arose from this incident. Activists co-opted the state’s violence to their advantage and public out rage about the attack and the revelation about the facility’s existence forced newly elected Governor Fife Symington to shut down the operation in 1991 (Ross, 2011). Government ofﬁcials paid ENSCO $44 million to sever its contract with the state and cease construction on the hazardous waste facility (Work on Waste, USA, 1991); however, the victory over ENSCO and state ofﬁcials was short-lived. Just 13 years later, Mobile was once again targeted for a state-corporate hazardous waste venture.

Taking on SES

In 2002, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBS) approved a permit request by SES to construct a fourth landﬁll near Mobile. This new facility, planned to be an 18-storey, 692 acre behemoth, would supplant Butterﬁeld Station as the state’s largest. According to Maricopa County ofﬁcials and SES representatives, Mobile was an ideal choice for a landﬁll because of its ‘low population,’ its ‘isola tion from urban residential impact,’ and its ‘proximity to Phoenix’ (MCBS meeting minutes, October 2002). Moreover, county ofﬁcials and SES representatives argued that building another landﬁll was a necessity, because (1) valley landﬁlls were ‘reaching capacity’, (2) a new landﬁll would ‘keep consumer costs down’, and (3) the emergence of a new waste management company, SES, would ‘increase competition’ – characterized as a plus for everyone (Maricopa County Planning and Zoning Commission meeting minutes, November 2002).

During the deliberation process, while MCBS was considering SES’s proposal, residents took every opportunity to voice their opposition to the project – sharing their concerns during numerous hearings before both the Maricopa County Plan ning and Zoning Commission and the MCBS. Residents also organized anti-landﬁll petition drives, conducted newspaper interviews, made calls, and wrote emails to various board members to express their disapproval. Mobile community members articulated three primary concerns: (1) environmental and health hazards, (2) environmental racism, and (3) unethical state-corporate collusion.14

‘Don’t drink the water’: the environmental and health hazards of landﬁlls

Perhaps more than any other group of residents in the state, Mobile community mem bers are intimately familiar with the environmental and health hazards associated with landﬁlls. Landﬁlls are used because they are cheap and relatively easy to construct (Rushton, 2003); however, landﬁlls are also associated with an array of environmen tal and social impacts including but not limited to: ground water contamination, harmful releases of landﬁll gases, air pollution, vector born diseases, birth defects, increased risk of cancer, increased trafﬁc, noise, aesthetic degradation (i.e. littering and smells), and land devaluation (Hirshfeld, Vesilind, & Pas, 1992, p. 474).

Speaking before the MCBS in December 2002, several Mobile residents expressed their concerns about the environmental impact of the proposed landﬁll:

MCBS assured residents that the [previous] landﬁll would not contaminate the ground water; however, after ﬁve short years the operators [Waste Management] posted signs at our Community Center that read: ‘Do not drink the water, doing so can be hazard ous to your health. Bottled water has been provided at the front entrance’.

To allow SES to operate [in the planned area] would put residents of Mobile in between three landﬁlls. The health hazard this poses is unacceptable. ADEQ has not even done an environmental impact study and yet a special use permit has been approved … [T]here must be some standard for how much waste can be put in one area to prevent the area from becoming a wasteland where nothing can survive. [emphasis added]

Additional testimony by Mobile residents (during the December 2002 hearing in front of the MCBS) raised concerns over ‘toxic smells and seepage,’ environmental damage, poisoned water wells, ‘blowing garbage and dust,’ ‘toxic air quality from diesel fumes,’ and chemical fumes emitted by the six methane burners Waste Management operates ‘24 h a day, seven days a week.’

Race, class, and rurality: framing environmental (in)justice

Residents also understood that the environmental hazards in their community were a result of Mobile being targeted by state-corporate actors as a site for a dispropor tionate number of hazardous waste facilities. To articulate this claim, many residents employed an intersectional environmental justice frame of race, class, and rurality:

I personally feel our area has more than done its share. This area they are proposing has historic value, a fact that needs to be considered … I feel it’s extremely unfair to push another landﬁll on a small, poor rural area, simply because they most likely haven’t the means to ﬁght back. We are a small rural area, but there are enough of us to stand up and be heard! Please hear our voices! [Email communication to MCBS]

Mobile was homesteaded in the early 1900s by children of former slaves and has many historical sites. The fact that we are a poor, small, minority community should not make us the site to dump the county’s garbage. [Email communication to MCBS]

Both Maricopa County and the State of Arizona have completely failed to account for the disparate impact the siting of this facility will have on a historically African American area. Indeed, African Americans continue to own a signiﬁcant percentage of land in the area of the proposed Southpoint landﬁll. [Comment submitted to ADEQ, October 2004]

As a low-income, rural, and historically black community, Mobile was vulnerable to exploitation by state-corporate ofﬁcials, who many felt considered residents as ‘powerless’ and ‘voiceless.’ A longtime Mobile resident explains:

Because we are a small community with a small population where most of the resi dents are not very afﬂuent or highly educated, Southpoint and these other industries see us as having the ideal demographics for their undesirable projects. [Comment submitted to ADEQ, October 2004]

Another community member shared a similar concern:

Residents most adversely affected by granting yet another industrial landﬁll waste site are predominately low-to-moderately income [sic], minority and indigent individuals. They do not have the economic means to buy their way out of polluted neighbor hoods in the Southeast Valley and Mobile and move to the more environmentally friendly, afﬂuent, upscale neighborhoods like Northeast Maricopa County. [Comment submitted to ADEQ, October 2004]

Willful lies: debunking myths and exposing state-corporate crime in mobile

Further, testimony and public comments made by Mobile community members made transparent the unethical, and at times illegal, state-corporate collusion that too often results in the siting of ‘undesirable projects’ in places like Mobile, rather than more afﬂuent urban white communities throughout the valley. For example, one resident’s public comment to ADEQ in 2004, exposed how Maricopa County and SES ofﬁcials had a shared interest in seeing the landﬁll built:

Mr Jason Barney is one of the owners of SES, and his father is Denny Barney, a member of the Maricopa County Planning Commission. Karrin Taylor is the attorney for SES and her brother Andrew Kunasek, is the Maricopa County Board Supervisor of District 3. [meaning he had a vote on whether the landﬁll permit should be issued]

Several residents raised the issue of ‘invested interests’ and improper ethical conduct between MCBS and SES ofﬁcials. The Mobile Community Council for Progress mailed a ﬂyer to residents explaining the extent of state-corporate corruption:

Three out of ﬁve MCBS have ties to the Barney family [owners of SES]. The Maricopa County Planning and Zoning Commission willfully lied to the opponents of the garbage dump and falsiﬁed afﬁdavits certifying posting requirements for public meetings.

Indeed, many residents felt that the approval process was tainted by corruption and ‘misinformation.’ One individual describes what happened at a public meeting regarding the landﬁll held by SES in 2002: ‘There was no presentation and it was an open forum run like a cocktail party. They compared the 690-acre site to a small [dump] in Gilbert.’ Another resident echoed this concern stating that because the project was issued a permit in only 90 days, there was no way for folks ‘to get a full understanding of the impact from this potential third garbage dump [on] our small rural community.’ One community member charged MCBS with outright lies:

Our supervisor [Mary Rose Wilcox]15 has been quoted as saying there was no opposi tion from the community and that not many people had shown up at a meeting she held at the Mobile School. I was at this meeting and no one spoke up in favor of the dump. Many people were not notiﬁed of the meeting and many of those that were could not attend at the early hour of 6 pm when they were still working. [emphasis added]

These testimonies indicate that Mobile’s community members were able to identify and expose a series of incidents that make a strong case for the occurrence of state facilitated corporate crime between Maricopa County ofﬁcials, SES employees, and later employees from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. To recall the deﬁnition given earlier, state-facilitated corporate crimes occur when ‘govern ment regulatory institutions fail to restrain deviant business activities’ due to shared interests (Kramer, et al., 2002, p. 272). The desire to support capitalist principles (i. e. competition) and support a pro-business climate in the state, may have led state and local government ofﬁcials to ‘look the other way’ on issues of environmental racism and health hazards already present in Mobile that would have been exacer bated by SES’s proposal to build a fourth landﬁll in the area.

Residents disputed two interrelated claims by MCBS and SES in particular: ﬁrst, was the claim made by state-corporate ofﬁcials that the SES landﬁll had to be built, because other landﬁlls in the area were ‘at capacity.’ Mobile residents gathered and presented data that countered this point, demonstrating that existing landﬁlls in the area have a ‘combined capacity of 300 additional years’ (this does not include the capacity of the landﬁlls currently in operation in the Phoenix metropolitan area), thereby debunking the capacity myth promoted by MCBS and SES (H. Shanker, personal communication, 15 March, 2011).16

The second myth discredited by community members was the claim that Mobile was an ‘ideal place’ to locate another landﬁll. In fact, SES ofﬁcials went so far as to argue that a fourth landﬁll would have a ‘positive impact’ on the community by providing an economic boost to the area. To reiterate, the primary justiﬁcations for siting another landﬁll in the area, according to ofﬁcials, was Mobile’s low popula tion density, existing infrastructure, and proximity to Phoenix. Don Besler, then President of the Mobile School Board, offered a moving response to these ‘justiﬁ cations’ in a testimony before the MCBS in December, 2002:

Southpoint says that no threatened wildlife species exist on the property. I submit to

you that we, the residents of the Mobile area are the endangered species … Ladies

and gentleman if this project goes forward we will continue to have a low population with low development because as you know these go hand in hand. The Mobile com munity is not just a tract of land, a district or a development area. We are a commu nity of people, retirees, businessmen, parents, and children. We are not anti-progress, we encourage development and we only want a safe environment in which to raise our children…you have no doubt heard the saying, ‘not in our backyard’ well in our case we have 3 landﬁlls in our backyard. Do not turn us into ‘the landﬁll capital of Arizona’. [emphasis added]

Besler’s narrative highlights the gravity of the situation for Mobile residents. From the position of residents’ lived experience, the choice by state-corporate actors to site yet another environmental hazard in their town, in effect, made residents ‘endangered species.’ This theoretically rich analysis offered by Besler evokes Gilmore’s (2007) deﬁnition of racism as ‘the state-sanctioned and extralegal pro duction and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (p. 28). To characterize Mobile residents as ‘endangered species’ is to suggest the possibility of premature death as a result of state-corporate environmental crimes.

Ultimately, despite receiving 42 letters of opposition, a petition against the land ﬁll with 12 signatures, three telephones calls in opposition, and four letters of con cern, on 7 November, 2002, the Maricopa County Planning and Zoning Commission approved by a vote of 6–0 SES’s request to build an 18-storey landﬁll on 690 acres adjacent to Mobile. One month later in December 2002, MCBS voted 3–1 to approve a special use permit request submitted by SES to rezone the land they owned from a designation of ‘rural and open space’ to a designation of ‘indus trial use,’ effectively giving SES landﬁll the go ahead, pending an environmental compliance review by ADEQ.

Taking it to the courts: challenging SES and ADEQ

Following this decision, in 2003, Mobile landowners and residents formed the Mobile Community Council for Progress, INC. (MCCP), a not-for-proﬁt corpora tion, hired Tempe-based attorney Howard Shanker to represent them, and ﬁled two lawsuits against the MCBS. The ﬁrst suit charged MCBS with procedural violations stemming from their vote to approval the landﬁll. By law, MCBS needed a two thirds supermajority to approve the zoning change request by SES and given that the board did not meet this requirement, the suit asked the county to nullify its decision and to pay attorney fees (Leonard, 2003). The suit was ultimately dismissed in court, despite a strong case (H. Shanker, personal communication, 15 March, 2011; see also Rushton, 2004).

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) joined MCCP in their second suit charging MCBS in federal court with civil rights violations, namely environmental racism, for ‘approving zoning laws and land use ordinances that have established the community as “the preferred destination for a string of environmentally undesirable projects”’ (Leonard, 2003, B–7). In an irony only beﬁtting of the complex and contradictory nature of environmental justice struggles, this lawsuit also had another backer, Waste Management (WM) the oper ator of the Butterﬁeld Station landﬁll in Mobile. In an effort to avoid the direct competition that the new SES landﬁll would create, WM supported the lawsuits by paying the legal fees associated with each case (H. Shanker, personal communica tion, 15 March, 2011; see also Rushton, 2004).

While the NAACP – MCCP lawsuit was pending, ADEQ approved the ‘South point Solid Waste Facility Plan’ in October of 2004. In their environmental impact report, ADEQ determined the new landﬁll would ‘not create an adverse disparate impact, violating the principles of environmental justice’ (see Mobile Community

Council for Progress, INC., vs. Arizona Department of Environmental Quality,

2006). The approval came with stipulations: SES was to contribute 65,000 dollars a year to the community, conduct daily ‘litter patrols,’ and ‘perform historical studies of the area’ (Leonard, 2004). ADEQ director Steven Owen was quoted as saying that the department did have some concerns about siting another landﬁll in Mobile, but ‘Under state law, there were no grounds to deny this landﬁll’ (Leonard, 2004, pp. B–9). This was the ﬁnal hurdle for SES. With permits in hand, the company could begin construction on the landﬁll.

ADEQ’s ruling deﬁed logic. Researchers hired by lead attorney Howard Shan ker, determined that Mobile is home to 45% of the municipal solid waste landﬁll capacity for all of Maricopa County (but only 0.0000325% of the population of Maricopa County). With the addition of the SES landﬁll that number would increase to 75%. Further, while African Americans represent roughly 3% of the total population of Maricopa County, within a one-mile radius of the proposed SES site in Mobile that ﬁgure rises to 17%. In Mobile, class intersects with race to compound marginalization: 19% of residents live below the federal poverty line (Pijawka, Guhathakurta, & Ozkeresteci, 2005).

Pijawka et al. (2005) also performed a risk burden analysis, measuring individ ual exposure to hazardous waste. They concluded that if the SES landﬁll were built, the average risk burden per person in Maricopa County (population three mil lion), would be 68.4 tonnes. In Mobile, with a population of just 96 in 2000, the average risk burden would be a stunning 122,512 tonnes per person (Pijawka et al., 2005).17 In light of these facts, MCCP ﬁled yet another lawsuit to try and halt con struction on the landﬁll, demanding that the courts review the ADEQ decision. Attorney Shanker, on behalf of MCCP, argued, ‘ADEQ’s ﬁnding of ‘no disparate impact’ is not supported by substantial evidence, was contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and/or an abuse of discretion’ (Mobile Community Council for Progress, INC., vs. Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, 2006, p. 6). ADEQ is no stranger to claims of negligence. The ‘notoriously lax’ organization has an outra geously poor record of protecting Arizona residents from environmental harms, leading some environmental activists to rename it the ‘pollution protection pro gram’ (Ross, 2011, p. 137).18

Ultimately, the lawsuits were never settled. In 2008, Mobile was incorporated into Goodyear and, according to attorney Shanker shortly thereafter, SES sold its 692 acre plot of land to residential developers – effectively nullifying the two pend ing lawsuits. I could ﬁnd no recorded accounts of Mobile community members cel ebrating neither their victory, nor anything to suggest that the coalition formed by residents to promote and protect their interests – the Mobile Community Council for Progress – persists to this day. However, this pattern of ‘issue-oriented’ and ‘short term’ campaigns against environmental harms that has taken place in Mobile is consistent with national trends (Ross, 2011). Ross (2011) explains:

Residents of low-income neighborhoods rarely have the resources, or the time, to take on the task of correcting long-standing, or structural, patterns of land use that burden their communities. Campaigns against a highly visible, single-site polluter are the norm, especially when the health impacts of that site stand out against the backdrop of a history of contamination. (p.123)

During a trip out to Mobile in March 2011, amidst a landscape of hulking landﬁlls and modest homesteads, I imagined the battle against ENSCO, the tasering of com munity members by Maricopa Sherriff’s deputies, and the post-work community action forums that took place in the now shuttered Mobile Community Center. I could not help but think that if one were not privy to Mobile’s remarkable history, it would appear as a most unremarkable place. However, this is not to suggest that the mobilization of Mobile’s residents was not a success.

State-corporate environmental crime and resistance in a ‘forgotten place’

The excavation of histories of white supremacy, colonialism, and racial capitalism suggests that what happened in Mobile was not conspiratorial, but systematic (Gilmore, 2007). Tracing the social, political, and economic development of Arizona illustrates that African Americans who migrated to Arizona beginning in the late 1800s into the mid-1930s, occupied the bottom rungs of the racial hierarchy, and while Arizona did offer the opportunity for limited land ownership, the state never supported the growth and prosperity of historically black settlements, like Mobile. Put another way, contextualizing contemporary manifestations of state-corporate environmental crime enables us to ask different questions, such as, how do histories of white supremacy, colonialism, and racial capitalism continue to be visible in the present? How can we better understand Mobile’s relationship to Phoenix as a ‘dumping ground’? Certainly, Mobile’s relationship to Phoenix: the movement of people migrating out to the Phoenix metropolitan area (primarily for work) and the movement of trash and hazardous waste in to the landﬁlls surrounding the commu nity; the power wielded by state-corporate actors to make decisions that dispropor tionately subject the people of Mobile to environmental and health hazards, and the power of Mobile residents to resist the siting of a fourth landﬁll in their community.

Contemporary scholarship suggests that the prevalence of hazardous waste facil ities in poor communities and communities of color can be attributed to economic factors, or sociopolitical factors, or racial factors (Mohai & Saha, 2007). In Mobile, state-corporate actors often cited economic factors – cheap unused land, existing infrastructure, and the potential for jobs in an area where unemployment is high – as governing their rationale for choosing Mobile as yet again the ‘ideal location’ for a landﬁll. Conversely, most Mobile residents argued that economic factors could not be divorced from sociopolitical and racial factors. Mobile, they protested, was targeted because it was a ‘poor, small, [historically] African American’ and mod estly educated community. At public hearings then, Mobile residents employed an intersectional analysis to describe the persistent targeting of their community for undesirable projects. This suggests that our analyses of environmental inequality should be intersectional – examining how each set of factors is interrelated and mutually reinforcing – rather than vertical – privileging one set of factors over another.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theorization of ‘forgotten places’ provides a useful framework for understanding the dynamics at play in Mobile. According to Gilmore (2007), states are increasingly becoming ‘antistate states’ insofar as they depend ‘on ideological and rhetorical dismissal of any agency or capacity that “government” might use to guarantee social well-being’ (p. 245). Nowhere could this logic be more evident than in Arizona, where state legislators, fueled by a too often lethal amalgamation of libertarianism, thinly veiled white supremacy, and ‘corrupt cowboy capitalism’ (Olson, 2011), have passed numerous discriminatory bills having exacerbated a range of social and economic problems (Levy, 2011; Hensley, 2011).

The ‘antistate state’ also produces ‘forgotten places.’ A place that has been ‘for gotten’ refers to both the quality of being abandoned and ‘intensely occupied,’ and to:

Planned concentrations or sinks – of hazardous materials and destructive practices that are in turn sources of [state-sanctioned or extralegal] group-differentiated vulnerabili ties to premature death. (Gilmore, 2008, p. 35; emphasis added)

Dynamics in Mobile clearly highlight this paradoxical notion of simultaneous occu pation and abandonment by the ‘antistate state’ (Gilmore, 2008). Mobile’s three landﬁlls, coupled with its history of potential undesirable projects, is evidence of its planned occupation by state-corporate interests whose sole purpose is extracting proﬁt. However, the ‘antistate state’ offers little in return to Mobile residents. By offering little in terms of infrastructure, social welfare programs, or even basic utili ties for residents (i.e. people must use well water – a particularly cruel fact given that one of the most serious side effects of landﬁlls is water contamination), state actors underscore their abandonment of the community.

Theoretically, the conceptualization of forgotten places and Gilmore’s reworking of racism as the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, reframes the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of environmental inequality in generative ways. These theoretical tools expose the biopolitical calculations (Ong, 2006) behind siting decisions and work to name the urgency of environmental racism as a force that too often results in premature death for particular groups – most often, but not exclusively, low-income communities of color. Indeed, the decision to site yet another landﬁll in Mobile, in the face of over whelming evidence that the town’s residents had already been disproportionately saddled with environmental hazards, recalls Michalowski’s (2010) point that state corporate crime is an exercise of biopower.

Situating state-corporate environmental crime as an exercise of this racialized biopower, then presses us to consider how environmental inequalities might be linked to the regulation and management of populations more generally. And, importantly, the ways these dynamics operate relationally. The testimonies of resi dents make the operation of environmental privilege visible: by attempting to sub ject the community in Mobile to another environmental hazard, state-corporate ofﬁcials were preserving and privileging the opportunity for extended life for outly ing Phoenix’s urban middle and upper-class residents. This framework reworks the type of questions we can ask of environmental crime and justice. Rather than debating whether race or social class has a larger inﬂuence on siting decisions, or whether ‘neutral’ economic calculations drive these decisions, instead we might ask how systematized environmental inequality operates in biopolitical ﬁeld that lets some live and some (prematurely) die (Foucault, 2003; Gilmore, 2007).

Mobile residents afﬁrm people’s capacity for resistance in the face of state-sanc tioned premature death (Gilmore, 2007). Community members were keenly aware of their standing as a forgotten place. Through prepared statements, emails, news paper interviews, and public testimonies they articulated their interpretation of what has happening to them. Residents argued that state-corporate actors were engaged in illegal and unethical state-corporate collusion that subjected them to environmen tal and health hazards, and environmental racism. Community members were also able to identify that as a forgotten place, Mobile has a particular social relationship to Phoenix. Residents recognized that Mobile’s destruction (‘becoming a wasteland where nothing can survive’) and their dehumanization (we are an ‘endangered spe cies’) enables particular groups of people in Phoenix to enjoy not only a greater quality of life, but also potentially, a longer life.

State and corporate actors imagined Mobile to be the ‘path to least resistance’, but the historical archive proves otherwise. Contrary to the conclusions drawn earlier, Mobile’s story suggests that despite a lack of political and social capital, low-income communities can organize to resist unwanted land uses, even if that resistance is temporary and event-speciﬁc. For environmental justice advocates, what happened in Mobile provokes perhaps more questions than it answers. For example, how can event-speciﬁc mobilizations be turned into sustained movements for environmental justice? How can the struggle for environmental justice be linked between urban (i.e. South Phoenix) and rural (i.e. Mobile) populations and places and across movements (i.e. migrant justice and prison abolition)? What possibilities does employing a state-corporate environmental crime framework create? In other words, can this framework move us toward accountability for environmental crimes by directing our attention ‘toward the people and institutions that create poverty and environmental destruction in the ﬁrst place’: people with wealth and political power (Park & Pellow, 2011, p. 63)?

Part of the response to these questions can be found by examining how ‘ordin ary people who lack resources but who do not necessarily lack “resourcefulness” develop the capacity to combine themselves into extraordinary forces’ for social change (Gilmore, 2008, p. 33). Indeed, state-corporate actors persistently treat Mobile residents and their kin as disposable – as merely by-products of a society organized around the logics of racial capitalism and white supremacy; however, time and again, community members form inter-racial coalitions and organize to contest their relationship to the state as a ‘forgotten place.’

Notes

Park and Pellow (2011) deﬁne environmental privilege as ‘the exercise of economic, political, and cultural power that some groups enjoy, which enables them exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as forests, parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite neighborhoods’ (p. 4).
See Aulette and Michalowski (1993), Chambliss (1989), Clinard and Quinney (1973), Kauzlarich and Kramer (1993).
Following Gilmore (2007), what is important to emphasize about the power of the state is its capacity to organize ‘various factors of production, or enable them to be disorga- nized or abandoned outright.’ This capacity is ‘based in relationship that also change
- ver time and sometimes become so persistently challenged from above and below, by those whose opinions matter, that the entire character of the state eventually changes as well’ (p. 28).
For example, in the late nineteenth century, the USA initiated a ‘war of conquest’ (the Mexican-American War, 1846–1848) in the area that became the southwest (Barrera,
1. p. 7). The American conquest of Mexico was motivated by a number of eco- nomic interests ‘closely tied to the dynamic expansion of [racial] capitalism’ (Barrera,
2. p. 8; Gomez, 2007). Southern and northern elites supported the war, because they were looking to expand their slave empire westward (Gomez, 2007). Post-con- quest, the white colonial elite also used all means at their disposal to ‘ﬁt’ the Pueblo Indians, Mexican peoples, and Black slaves, who had been living in the area since the ‘original colonization’ by Spain, into a racial caste system (Gomez, 2007). These same ‘Anglo capitalists, speculators, and ﬁnanciers whose interests had strongly motivated the Mexican American War’ also concentrated the land into their own hands (Barrera,
3. p. 23).
For example: ‘Mr Farley wants 300 Negro cotton pickers for Gilbert, Eloy, and Tuc- son, Arizona’ (Whitaker, 2000, p. 199).
While beyond the scope of this paper, it is important to note that African Americans have a longer historical arc in Arizona than outlined in this article. The Spanish colo- nizers brought Black slaves to what was then Northern Mexico in the 1600s and white slave owners often traveled with their slaves prior to USA colonization of the area (Gomez, 2007).
As Olson (2011) argues, in Arizona ‘corruption was commonplace as [the white elite] manipulated the political system for their beneﬁt. A group of these capitalists, called the Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the political establish- ment opened up some. But even after their rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and scam your way to what you want.’
Ross goes on to note, ‘a 1999 analysis of Toxic Release Inventory Reports showed that
- ne zip code in South Phoenix – 85040 – produced nearly 40% of all hazardous emissions in the city. It was the dirtiest zip code in the nation’ (p. 122).
For further studies of South Phoenix see Bolin, Grineski, and Collins (2005), Grineski, Bolin, and Boone (2007), Ross (2011), Sicotte (2003, 2008); for further studies on environmental injustice in Arizona more broadly see Lauderdale and Seﬁha (2008).
This heading is borrowed from the title of Bolin, Grineski, & Boone’s (2005) article
- n environmental racism and South Phoenix.
The history of Mobile has proved harder to excavate. To date, I have not located a comprehensive recorded history of the town. The following account was pieced together from newspaper accounts, documents from the Maricopa County Recorder’s Ofﬁce, and a few books that mention Mobile in passing.
State ofﬁcials later retracted this version of Mobile’s founding, arguing instead that their original report was mistaken and Mobile was not in fact founded and named by Black sharecroppers, some of whom migrated from Mobile, Alabama, but rather, the area became known as ‘Mobile’ as early as 1879 when the Southern Paciﬁc Railroad established its ﬁrst transcontinental route through the town and referred to the area generally as ‘Mobile’ (see Nilsen, 2004).
This information comes from a document provided to me by Attorney Howard Shanker.
Several of the quotes from Mobile residents that appear in this section have been culled from public testimonies in front of the MCBS and by public hearings held by SES and ADEQ. Some of the testimonies were given in person, while others were submitted in writing and read aloud during the hearings. I was generously given access to the transcripts from these hearings by attorney Howard Shanker.
Wilcox ended up being the only ‘No’ vote in the 3–1 decision in favor of SES’s request.
Further investigation revealed that over 44% of Maricopa County’s current landﬁll capacity is in Mobile, while only 0.0000325% of the entire population of Maricopa County resides in Mobile (Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Responsive- ness Summary, October 2004).
Without the SES landﬁll those ﬁgures drop to 52.27 per person in Maricopa County and 72,134 per person in Mobile – still an astonishing disparity.
For a more thorough discussion of ADEQ’s pattern of protecting the interests of capi- talists rather than upholding its mission to protect public health and the environment, see Andrew Ross’ recent book Bird on Fire (2011).

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