Landfills Feed on Poverty.

This is the third in our weeklong series on "Poverty & the Environment in North Carolina."  This entry was excerpted from a longer article by Frank Warren, President of Greene Citizens for Responsible Growth in Greene County, NC.  Click here to read the full article.

Landfills feed on poverty – it is essential for their development.  They are drawn to areas of job loss and low income – as are all environmentally disastrous businesses or endeavors. 

In the late 1990’s Greene County residents formed an organization called Greene Citizens for Responsible Growth (GCRG) to prevent a Regional Municipal Solid Waste Landfill from coming to the county.  GCRG organized across lines of race and class in an effort to stop the dump and protect the environment. 

In a broad sense, the kind of poverty which attracts environmental disasters such as garbage dumps, prisons, chip mills and big-box stores is not just the poverty of ill-clad children, decrepit housing, single parents working to care for their offspring; but poverty of thought, poverty of education, and that poverty of perception which drives people to accumulate things they do not need, often with money they do not have.

Greene County is one of the poorest counties in the state.  Waste Management, billionaire garbage industry from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, smelled a push-over.  GCRG brought a lawsuit to stop the landfill.  An extended legal battle ensued ... and Waste Management lost the case.

The environmental struggle was far from over, however.  Before GCRG knew what was happening the same three Commissioners that had supported the landfill, “helped us” by locating a 1,000-bed maximum-security prison in a wetlands area.  The county already had two large prisons.  The third one, also, came in the name of economic development. 

Perhaps this is an example of another kind of poverty: the poverty of individual integrity.  What do you think?

Click here to read the full article.