Structures of Environmental Inequality: Property and Vulnerability

Introduction

From the earliest days of the postrevolutionary United States, there has been a tension between two ideals of the body politic, one, a republic notion of commonwealth, that was rapidly surpassed by the other, an elite and liberal market rationality based on competitive and possessive individualism. ¹ Liberal capitalist logics, embodied by property-owning white men, emerged as the substance of citizenship and the major locus of rights in the legal structure by the end of the nineteenth century. ² The historical consequences of this institutionalization can be expressed in feminist materialist terms as the discursive materiality of property, meaning that property and citizenship (in the sense of rights-bearing individualism) are materially and ideologically coproduced in the U.S. political culture. ³ The discursive materiality of property, or the way property regimes coproduce privilege and vulnerability, is related to how particular places and people are valued or become valueless. ⁴

The dominant paradigm of knowledge production in the Western modernist tradition relies on abstract categories and often invokes a property-like “bright line” between types of knowledge. ⁵ This “colonial agnosia,” a resistance to seeing patterns, contexts, and connections is reflected in U.S. environmental politics. ⁶ This article explores the critical potential of a materialist contextual analysis of environmental inequalities through the lens of property. Centering the ideological and material effects of U.S. legal property regimes on the construction of individuals as rights-bearing citizens may reveal how overlapping layers of legal, cultural, and material structures are implicated in environmental politics. This analysis may shed light on both how environmental injustices are structurally produced and how these political structures may be transformed in the future.

Despite the reality of legal pluralism, or differing indigenous and colonial property regimes, the U.S. constitution conceived of political and economic rights as primarily stemming from property ownership, in particular the rights to manage, control, and alienate real property. ⁷ The legal institution of property embodied in these clusters of rights augments the individual's agency through the ability to enlist the state in maintaining these rights.

As an example, the practice of allotment, in which Native American lands were divided and assigned as private property to individual men in indigenous communities, was a practice of assimilation to gendered individualism and private property. ⁸ This practice attempted to replace indigenous relationships to community, place, and land with acquisitive individualism. This relationship now shapes environmental policy making and environmental activism by filtering environmental harm through the lens of property.

The preservationist “wilderness idea” mapped a system of exploitability and value onto North America in which sites of industrialization were cognitively separated from sites with a perceived inherent value. ⁹ These distintions are evident in the cases under consideration. In the late nineteenth century, burgeoning industrial exploitation in the form of the emergent coal, oil, and gas industries in West Virginia, and the timber and meat packing industries of the Midwest, contrasted with the ranchlands charactistic of the San Fernando Valley. ¹⁰ In the mid-twentieth century, growing concern with the effects of chemicals focused the U.S. environmental movement on the connections between environmental health and human well-being. ¹¹ However, the most immediate victims of pollution were workers or poor residents of industrial areas, and these vulnerable communities have often been rendered invisible in debates over environmental protection.

This reflects the dialectic of biopolitics and necropolitics. The hyperexploitation of poor people of color serves as a “racial subsidy” for white American property accumulation. ¹² The biopolitics of neoliberalism, in which subjects are interpellated into a regime of self-surveillance, self-improvement, and healthism, operates when the subject has value. ¹³ This value is the term by which national membership is claimed. By contrast, those excluded from the nation are seen as excessive or wasteful. These dispossessed people are subjected to a necropolitics in which their health and reproduction become an externality. ¹⁴

Thus, environmentalism can become an inverted quarantine: the protection of private spaces from outside contamination through ecopurchasing. ¹⁵ Private property shapes the individual's relationship not only to a piece of land that he or she is said to “own” but also to other beings and processes that are reduced or minimized in the concept of private property. This enhanced agency is reflected in social hierarchies, including race, class, gender, place, and age, which empower and disempower people in the face of environmental risk.

As the cases under consideration here reveal, rights not linked to property ownership are often imagined as decoupled from environmental issues. This reflects the contradiction mentioned previously, between a notion of a res publica, where freedom means “freedom from dependency,” and a liberal definition of freedom from interference. ¹⁶ Thus, the political and economic domination of a poor community by a polluting industry is not commonly understood as impinging on the civil rights of the inhabitants; in the 20 years since the introduction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Civil Rights Office, only one civil rights case has been successfully prosecuted under that policy. ¹⁷ However, property owners are understood as having a special interest in protecting the value of their property, and indeed, when their property holds a lot of value, they often have the power to say “NIMBY,” ¹⁸ and relegate environmentally harmful practices elsewhere. Drawing on current media accounts and analyses, public documents, and previous research, this article will explore how property is involved in environmental vulnerability in three places: the southern West Virginia coalfields, Flint, Michigan, and Porter Ranch, California.

Discussion

In the southern West Virginia coalfields, ¹⁹ property looms large in discussions of the environmental politics of coal. In 2008, one white resident recounted that her family had owned large amounts of property in the region after the dispossession of the Native Americans represented in many place names. “My ancestors are traced back to 1610. They owned all of Logan. …we've got the geneology that says our family owned all of that.” ²⁰ Historical fact and familial resentment merge in the often repeated stories of expropriation by the land agents who bought land or mineral rights from unsuspecting mountaineers, ensuring the region's future as a sacrifice zone.

Another story is how the coal camps that lined the narrow mountain hollows became individual property through the course of the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, coal companies found it necessary to import and house the requisite labor. The sparse local population did not suffice for the heavy demands of early coal mining, so immigrants from Southern Europe and the Southern United States were welcomed into the coal camps. Booming, diverse, and racially segregated communities made the coalfields the most populous region in West Virginia. When mines were worked out, it was no longer in the company's interest to own the property, and they would announce, before moving to shut down the mine, that they were “getting out of the real estate business.” ²¹

Coal camp houses were sold off in “postage stamp lots” too small for a septic tank and too rural for public services. ²² Unlike the ideal property of Jeffersonian democracy, this marginal property does not enhance its owner's agency and capacity, instead it disempowers. Abandoned by the company and absent local services, the former coal camps became spaces of poverty and stigma. With little access to hygiene and infrastructure, these former coal camp houses are left with the quintessential hillbilly plumbing—pipes that empty into the river.

This particular form of rural poverty is characterized by high rates of homeownership in the absence of a market or demand. Valueless, it cannot be sold, only abandoned. No one is buying, and no one is moving to the area. For instance, the population of McDowell County decreased by over 10% between 2010 and 2016. ²³ The former billion dollar coalfield now has a noneconomy; high rates of disability and drug addiction reveal the desolation of these abandoned sacrifice zones. ²⁴ However, nearby communities appear more fortunate, because mining is still ongoing there, especially mountaintop removal (MTR).

MTR is a mining technique that intensifies the impact of coal mining on the landscape and community. Coal seams are accessed previously, by using massive amounts of explosives to dislodge the rocks and soil above the seam. Enormous equipment removes the coal, and the topography is left permanently flattened. Area homes suffer damages due to the blasting and dust from the mine. At this point, the company will offer to buy people's homes, clearing their property for use by the mine. With home prices much lower than the national average, even relatively well-off homeowners are left with little after such a sale. However, worse off are those who demand to stay, resist the company's offer, and end up with property that may become both unliveable and valueless. ²⁵

Despite many differences between the situation in Flint, Michigan, and the coalfields of West Virginia, they both operate as sacrifice zones. In 1819, the area known as Flint was divided into allotments meant for the Native American descendents of fur trader Jacob Smith. Nonetheless, it ended up in the hands of his white descendants. Flint's historic Stockton Center at Spring Grove, built in 1879, is located on “Plot Eight” of the “Reservation on Flint River,” which was awarded to Smith's white daughter Maria Reed Smith and her husband Colonel Thomas Stockton. ²⁶ This historic hospital, now a museum, represents the transformation of the area from an indigenous territory, to individual white property, and now to deindustrialized sacrifice zone. Starting with logging in the 1830s, the Flint River became integral to the industrial development of the area. It has been a sink for automobile factories, paper companies, meatpacking plants, fertilizers used on farms upstream, and legal and illegal landfills for over a century. Until recently, it had been considered far too polluted to be used as a source for the city's water. ²⁷

Flint was a destination in the early twentieth century for African Americans leaving the south to look for industrial employment. General Motors was the primary employer in Flint, and the company created segregated housing for its white workers, while leaving black migrants to make do in poorly served neighborhoods. Company housing developed along existing sewer lines, and initially had more access to public services than either the black neighborhoods or the unincorporated, largely white, rural communities surrounding the city. ²⁸

The Flint case makes clear the role of public goods in the construction of private property. General Motors' success led to rapid growth in the postwar era, which resulted in the development of segregated suburbs around the city. Although the infrastructure for these communities was provided by the city of Flint, these white-only suburbs sought separate incorporation to protect their tax base. This white possessiveness endows real estate with a mystical value ideologically severed from its social origins. Like other postindustrial urban centers, Flint was left with high poverty rates after the decline of the auto industry. ²⁹ White flight, discriminatory housing policies, and forgotten infrastructural interdependencies led to the isolation of Flint among a sea of wealthier white suburbs.

The historical structural situation of the city, isolated and increasingly impoverished, surrounded by hostile suburbs, precipitated events. The municipal fragmentation of cities and suburbs in Michigan led many cities into financial crisis. The state's response to these crises was punitive, exacerbating the situation. Then these cities, all of which are majority African American, were subjected to undemocratic rule by city managers. ³⁰ It was Flint's city manager who decided in 2014 that sourcing the public water system from the Flint River, without accounting for the corrosion control treatments such a source requires given the condition of the infrastructure (which included many old lead pipes), was a reasonable cost-saving measure for the city.

In the disaster that followed, frightened parents reported children breaking out in rashes, and lead poisoning cases skyrocketed. No corrective measures were taken until a study by Dr. Hannah-Attisha showed the degree of lead exposure in children and a Virginia Tech team tested the water and demonstrated its violation of EPA regulations. ³¹ Years later, some Flint residents do not have clean water and still rely on purchasing bottled water. Because city water is still not trusted, some Flint residents resent their record-breaking water bills, especially in light of the phase out of state subsidies. ³² Worst of all, the children may be impacted for life by their exposure to harmful amounts of lead that can lead to developmental problems and other lifelong consequences.

The potentially life-altering lead exposures suffered by children are compounded by the weight of marginal property. As one resident put it, “People feel absolutely trapped. We feel like prisoners in our own homes. We're being poisoned by the very homes we live in.” ³³ Another resident said “I couldn't rent out my house now if I wanted to. Who would want to move to Flint?” ³⁴ With prices at an average of $14,000, Flint has the highest vacancy rate in the country, at 1 in 14 houses. In the worst-hit neighborhoods of the city center, the vacancy rate is 1 in 5. Many of these require too much renovation to attract buyers, and lenders need assurance of a safe water supply. ³⁵

The present-day neighborhood of Porter Ranch, California, was part of a 120,000 acre secularized mission sold to Eulogio de Celis in 1846 by the Alta California government. The sale included responsibility for the indigenous inhabitants, many of whom he nevertheless evicted. In 1875, the property was facing foreclosure and was sold to members of the Porter family, who traced their ancestry to the Mayflower. It was once a bucolic scene of celebrity ranches and film locations. ³⁶ Even after its development in the 1960s, the neighborhood was known for “hiking trails and spectacular scenic views … reminiscent of … more rural days that are long gone.” ³⁷

In 2015, Porter Ranch experienced the worst gas leak in U.S. history. Symptoms were apparently caused by additives that give natural gas its unpleasant smell, tertiary butyl mercaptan and tetrahydrothiophene, and benzene was identified as a possible carcinogene in the gas. Families complained about an odor of rotten eggs, headaches, and nosebleeds. Although the cause of the months-long leak is still unknown, the Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) is planning to reopen the facility. ³⁸

Although there was no mandatory evacuation, many residents wanted their families out. SoCalGas furnished alternative housing for almost 5000 residents at a cost of “up to $250 a day or about $7,500 per month.” The company worked with the Los Angeles Police Department to provide additional police protection for the vacated homes. ³⁹ One resident commented, “It's frightening. You have a home that you used to love. People move to Porter Ranch for the views, the camaraderie, and the community. Now we're seeing it destroyed.” ⁴⁰ The anxiety felt by Porter Ranch residents echoes that of the residents of Flint. “I feel like I'm trapped. I'm stuck in a poisonous house.” ⁴¹ However, most people have returned to the neighborhood. Notably, the gas company furnished cleaning services for those whose property was impacted by the disaster. ⁴²

A major victim of the disaster is the aggregate property value of the community. After the gas leak, sales declined by 20% and the median price only rose by 5.7%. As one resident put it, “We just want to keep our value at the end of the day.” ⁴³ In 2015, the average home price in Porter Ranch was over $600,000. ⁴⁴ In comparable neighborhoods, not affected by the leak, housing prices appreciated by 30% in the same period, perhaps benefiting from the misfortune of Porter Ranch. ⁴⁵ In short, the Aliso Canyon gas storage facility, largely unrecognized before the leak, threatened the status of the “pristine, quasi-rural paradise.” ⁴⁶

Conclusions

Residential segregation is fundamental to the continued existence of polluting industry. The spatial separation of populations with high financial, political, and social capital from toxic industrialization has been necessary for its continued acceptance by those who benefit most, while those who bear the costs are relatively powerless and silenced. ⁴⁷ These spatial separations are translated into different ways of perceiving and compensating for harm. During the disaster in Porter Ranch, government agencies and SoCalGas worked to protect not only people's health but also their property, their children's education, and their lifestyles, reflecting a biopolitical investment in the community. Flint residents' complaints about the water were ignored, while government offices quietly replaced the tap water with bottled water for their employees. ⁴⁸ Similarly, the residents of the southern West Virginia Coalfields experience a noneconomy after the extraction of coal. As the bearers of the costs of industrialization, these sacrifice zones experience a necropolitics of neglect.

There is a sense that the residents of Porter Ranch were shortchanged by the turn of events. The victims of the Flint water crisis, however, abandoned by industry, simply had another problem added to their already complicated predicament of being socially, economically, and politically isolated. There is little talk of loss of value in the coverage of Flint. Instead, there is a story of progressively worsening victimization. Finally, the coalfields are out of sight and mind for most of the United States, and only rarely do onlookers perceive the ongoing environmental and economic disaster left behind by coal.

Neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility assign blame to individuals and by extension communities that are unable to mobilize the resources necessary to relocate, to vote with their feet, or to protect their children by finding the healthiest place to live. In the contrasts between these sites, there is a micro bio- and necropolitics expressed in the intimate daily acts of families going without plumbing or using bottled water to wash with in one context, while in another, teams of house cleaners and police work to protect vacated property. Yet there is also a confluence in the drift of environmental risk across property lines. The Porter Ranch disaster brought the environmental crisis home by bringing it into one of the most idealized spaces of U.S. property and prosperity. This crossing of lines creates the conditions of possibility for an emergent environmental politics of res publica, beyond the scope of acquisitive individualism.

In Garrett Hardin's fable of the tragedy of the commons, the property owner stands for humanity, leading to an acultural and amoral vision of human nature. ⁴⁹ Hardin's fable was meant to demonstrate that private property protects the environment, but history seems to have made a different point. The division of land into private property is generative of wealth for some, but the corresponding commodification and disposability of places have been devastating for marginalized communities. However, the worsening environmental crisis may be putting into question the efficacy of property as a form of agency and environmental protection. In short, the situation in Porter Ranch increasingly echoes that of the coalfields and Flint, as the necropolitics of capital comes home to roost.