EPA must protect public health, not corporate favor

In the contemporary political sphere, calls to reform the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) often come from politicians on the far right. For such right-wingers, reforming the EPA means draining the agency of funding, killing its efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and ensuring that the "job-killing" agency stays out of the way of corporate polluters. Such attacks are reactionary and promote the falsehood that Big Business is the cornerstone of environmental morality. Unfortunately, without any dictate from Congressional Republicans, the EPA is already well on its way to doing what industries demand. Let's be clear: the Environmental Protection Agency is not meant to serve the institutions that it is supposed to regulate. So yes, the EPA is in dire need of reform, but the agency must be reformed to uphold its mission of safeguarding the environment and human health, not to promote the agendas of industry.

Left alone, the agency will continue down a deteriorating path of corporate servitude and lackluster implementation of environmental laws.

Here's why: In my hometown of Asheville, N.C., CTS Corporation ran an electroplating facility from 1959 until 1986. The company, currently headquartered in Elkhart, Ind., used the degreasing chemical trichloroethylene (TCE) in its processes, and dumped the leftover solvent into the ground. According to the Centers for Disease Control, TCE is a human carcinogen and is known to damage the immune, endocrine and reproductive systems.

Though the EPA was well aware of the contamination at the site, the agency removed the site from its Superfund inventory, a list of sites known to be polluted by industrial contaminants in 1995. The agency continued to do nothing until 1999, when one woman's well tested at 7000 times the legal limit of TCE. Its inaction allowed dozens of people to fall prey to the adverse effects of TCE and even led to the development of a multi-million-dollar subdivision on CTS Corporation's contaminated property.

The enemy in this situation is, and has always been, CTS Corporation. But when a government agency fails to fulfill its most basic task of protecting human health, the mission of the affected community must become two-pronged: One, to battle the corporation that made this mess, and two, to ensure that the responsible government agency does its job.

It is a sad state of affairs when people who have suffered for years due to the pollution of their community are forced to fight the bureaucratic structure of the very agency that is supposed to be on their side.

Unfortunately, however, this is the reality at the CTS site. At its best, the EPA has defended the community's efforts against CTS Corporation and has provided municipal water to a few people whose wells have been contaminated. At its worst, however, the agency has actively promoted the agendas of polluters and attacked the very human beings who are being afflicted by the contamination.

Every day that the EPA does nothing, the contamination continues to spread, threatening not only people's wells but their health and safety as well.

Instead of extending municipal water to all residents within a mile of the CTS site, which the community had been promised for months, the EPA opted for water filtration systems. CTS Corporation itself will be overseeing the filters. Given that this corporation has demonstrated a fundamental adherence to the profit motive to the detriment of its community over the past several decades, can the community expect the polluter to be the guardian of their water? It is outrageous and demeaning to the community that the EPA would even consider letting the polluter assume full control over the resource most precious and vital to human life—and the means by which so many people in the community have gotten sick.

Instead of negotiating with the community, arranging a full-scale clean-up, and charging CTS the bill, the EPA has done the opposite: It has negotiated with CTS on the terms of a non-clean-up, and told the community, "Deal with it." Why would the Environmental Protection Agency, of all government entities, ever consider negotiating with the polluter? If anything, it shows that even the EPA has capitulated to market forces and is now obliged to do the bidding of corporate contaminators.

In 2010, the agency demanded that resident David Bradley file any TCE contamination he may have generated on his property, or else face a fine of $37,500 per day for every day he did not comply. Bradley's well, hundreds of feet from the CTS site, had tested positive for TCE the year prior. With the source of pollution staring the EPA in the face, it seems authoritarian and tyrannical that the agency would threaten an individual whose health has been endangered by a corporate polluter. Last time I checked, we don't live in a police state where the government can terrorize its citizens without due reason. But if the EPA is threatening victims without any rationality, then it has redefined its role as one of obedience to the every whim of polluting industries, a very frightening prospect indeed.

The case of CTS is an all too common one seen throughout the United States: A polluter dumps toxins into the ground, refuses to clean them up and abandons the site, leaving local citizens—often victims of the contamination—to figure out a way to handle the toxic mess in their backyards. In addition, the EPA is almost always loath to help, refuting its fundamental mission to safeguard human health and the environment.

Perhaps the problem is that the EPA has no ethical apparatus. It has allowed mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, permitted offshore drilling projects, authorized the use of poisonous pesticides and sat idly by as millions of Americans have become subjected to pollution; and it has all the while maintained that the public's health is being safeguarded and the environment is the agency's utmost priority.

In my community, the reason so much controversy has arisen towards the EPA is because we need the agency—we need them to protect us, and they are not fulfilling their most basic duty. My community should be fighting alongside the EPA. The EPA should be fighting for us, in a full-fledged assault against CTS Corporation. My community should not have to spend its time and resources tussling with an agency that is charged with our very protection.

This battle is not about attacking the Environmental Protection Agency itself. It is about attacking the system in which the EPA is entrenched.

The EPA has a fundamental directive to do what is right. We need the agency to stand up, get clean municipal water to residents, implement a full-scale cleanup, and kick CTS where it hurts by forcing them to pay for it all.

But more than that, we need reforms within the EPA itself. Until we rid the EPA of its obedience to polluters and institute broad changes to EPA policy, we can never expect the EPA to put human health and the environment first.

—Gabe Dunsmith '15 is Assistant Opinions Editor of The Miscellany News. He is a member of the Vassar Greens.