I give permission for public access to my thesis and for any copying to be done at the discretion of the archives librarian and/or the College librarian. ________________ ____________ Signature Date Waste Traffic(ing): An anthropological analysis of one situated event in the environmental justice discourse. Caroline Houston Bauer 2009 Advisor: Debbora Battaglia Major: Anthropology Minor: Philosophy _______________________________________________________________ Abstract: This narrative examines the repercussions of the proposal to build a solid waste facility in an environmental justice community. It documents one solid waste transfer station’s permitting process required by Massachusetts General Laws, Codes of Regulations, and policies and the affiliated government agencies. All of these offices and laws incorporate vehicles for “meaningful community involvement,” stressing its importance in all three steps of the process. Each chapter documents the incorporation of one impacted “environmental justice” community’s “meaningful involvement” as the “proposed project” (solid waste transfer station) goes through the 3-step procedure for determining if the “site” is “suitable” for a solid waste facility, recording the events in chronological order as described by the laws, agencies, public record, local media, ethnographic data and observations. Acknowledgements This research would not have been possible without the help of the Holyoke Board of Health, the employees of Nuestras Raíces and Holyoke Food and Fitness Policy Council, Liz Budd, Alan Bloomgarden, Andrew Lass, Monique Roleofs and Susan Martin. I would like to thank my advisor, Debbora Battaglia. Professor Battaglia provided me with unwavering support and invaluable consolation throughout completing this thesis. Her guidance and confidence in my work, thoughts and beliefs set me on the path toward becoming an anthropologist in my sophomore year and helped me realize that, now, there is no looking back. I would also like to thank the members of my defense committee, Joshua Roth and Giovanna Di Chiro. Since Anthropology 105, Professor Roth has been an essential part to my time at Mount Holyoke. The guidance of Professor Di Chiro through my internship at Nuestras Raices helped me obtain the knowledge essential for successfully completing this project. And of course, I would like to thank my amazing parents. I would also like to note that much of the theoretical basis for this thesis came from Zygumnd Bauman’s 2001 book Community, a text assigned by Professor Battaglia in my sophomore year. Bauman conceptualizes the meaning of community in the contemporary city as a “paradise lost.” His invocation of Henning Bech in the afterward sums up what I see as his book’s salience for the communities of Holyoke: “The cities in which most of us live nowadays are ‘large, dense and permanent clusters of heterogeneous human beings in circulation’, places in which one is bound to mill in an ‘ever-changing large crowd of varied strangers moving among one another’, we tend to become surfaces to each other- for the simple reason that this is the only thing a person can notice in the urban space of lots of strangers’. What we see ‘on the surface’ is the sole available measure by which to evaluate a stranger. What we see may promise pleasure, but it may also portend danger; when it is but surfaces that meet (and always ‘in passing’), there is little change of negotiating and finding out which is which…we all need to gain control over the conditions under which we struggle with the challenges of life- but for most of us such control can be gained only collectively.”1 1 Bauman, Zygmund. 2001 Community. Cambridge: Polity Press. 147-8. Table of Contents Preface 1 Chapter I: Social Histories 6 Chapter II: Community Divides & Political Representation 29 Chapter III: Legal Process 52 Chapter IV: Concretizing the Schism 74 Chapter V: Aftermath & Conclusions 146 Works Cited 155 Appendix 1: Newspaper Articles Appendix 2: Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection public comment letters Appendix 3: Public comment night DVD PREFACE The ethnographic fieldwork that provided the basis of my knowledge for this project began when I was working as an intern for Nuestras Raíces in the summer of 2008. At the end of the summer, the director of the Community Based Learning program at Mount Holyoke, Alan Bloomgarden, hired me as a community fellow. Essentially, this meant that Mount Holyoke funded me to continue working part-time for Nuestras Raíces. I was a participant in the efforts of the organization, yet I was also very much an outsider. I say this because I was one of many white, non-Spanish speaking students hosted by Latino/a community-based organization in the past. All interns like myself leave after the summer or semester and thus do not contribute to the long-term goals of Nuestras Raíces. Moreover, although I actually did live in Holyoke for a good portion of my employment I was always introduced as a Mount Holyoke student and thus I always felt outside of the community of Nuestras Raíces and Holyoke in general, since local people labeled and perceived me this way. Importantly, the social history of Holyoke is a large part of why I chose to become involved in the city. I saw the event of the waste transfer station as situated in the history of inequality in addition to being recognizable as an environmental justice event. I saw it in this light because of the knowledge that circulates concerning Holyoke’s history at Mount Holyoke. When I first came to Mount Holyoke, I knew nothing about the city of Holyoke. Within the first few weeks of becoming a student, I heard many stories about the city’s history and contemporary issues from classmates, 1 professors and friends who grew up in the area. The localized Mount Holyoke discourses circulated knowledge about the waste transfer station through the lens of environmental justice; the issue was presented to me as having the potential of perpetuating the history of injustice on the low income, Latino/a population of Holyoke. My participant observation fieldwork, beginning in July 2008, was born out of how I emotionally related to environmental justice discourse and the stories about Holyoke’s history. Borrowing the words of María Lugones, I was brought into this event by joining in coalition with people I saw to be “standing outside or away from power narrowly conceived” (Lugones 2006: 75). Lugones defines those who feel outside of power as inhabiting a limen, “which is at the edge of hardened structures, a place where transgression of the reigning order is possible” (75). One can inhabit a limen by means of “historized identities, a combination of the construction of home places and of struggling in infrapolitical spaces” (Lugones 2006: 77). One can exist in coalition with those inhabiting a limen by a communicative gesture that does not “presuppose that the liminal site is empty of all power” (78). In order to make the communicative gesture, one must become a scavenger of collective memories in order to cement relational identities. Lugones opines that not enough theorists or activists examine the communicative barriers to joining in coalition. As such, this thesis seeks to narrate how the waste transfer station exposed the existence of multiple experiential knowledges in Holyoke and the communicative barriers between the two. 2 While working with Nuestras Raíces, I met the people who ethnographically grounded the stories I had heard about Holyoke’s history, from the point of view of their realities. When my project turned toward the public debate surrounding a plan for a waste transfer facility to be located in Holyoke’s present area, I was also brought into the public hearings by being affiliated with the organization since its employees were a large part of the resistance movement. On the first night of the hearings, I signed myself up to participate in the hearings as a member of Holyoke Organized to Protect the Environment (HOPE), a grassroots coalition based on the shared concerns that the transfer station would negatively impact the public health, safety and the environment of Holyoke: 3 Figure 1: Holyoke Organized to Protect the Environment registration sheet for intervener status at the Board of Health Site Assignment Public Hearings. I am exposing this fact to show that my work with Nuestras Raíces and HOPE was essential to positioning me in this work. However, when I began observing the hearings, I stopped participating in their efforts of resistance to the transfer station. I did so for two reasons. The first was in order to become a more detached observer, and thereby a more effective resistance actor and the second was because I saw that the issue of the waste transfer station was not going to be resolved by the public hearings alone. That is, the extreme 4 opposition to the transfer station was based in deeper issues than the introduction of trash and truck traffic into a low-income Latino/a neighborhood. Rather, these people were opposing the denial that racism and classism are a reality of life in contemporary Holyoke. Moreover, the laws behind the process restricted communication in the public hearings to scientific experts. As such, I saw that the conflict could not be resolved by a legal decision. In fact, it wasn’t. After the Board of Health issued their decision to move forward with the project in February 2009, HOPE filed to appeal their decision, and the appeal process continues as I am writing. I am in alliance with the members of HOPE, Springdale for a Better Community, and all other people who resisted the transfer station on grounds that it can be perceived as an oppressive act. Moreover, the transfer station very well could be the “tipping point” for the health and the quality of life for Springdale residents.