Fruit of the Orchard

Contents

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pp. vii-

Acknowledgments

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pp. ix-x

My heartfelt gratitude goes to all the people who helped make this book possible through their encouragement, time, and support. My most sincere thank-you goes to Phyllis Glazer for asking me to photograph Jeremy. That photography ,,,

Introduction

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pp. 1-5

In 1962, Rachel Carson vividly portrayed a hypothetical town in which “some evil spell had settled on the community.”¹ Carson feared this town could one day become a reality, unless strong legislation dealt expeditiously with the runaway use of toxic chemicals by industry. Nearly four decades later, her hypothetical town emerged in rural East Texas—in a town called Winona....

A Tear in the Lens

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pp. 7-10

The great educator Robert Coles was once showing the work of a number of Farm Security Administration photographers—those lean and rich documents of America in the 1930s—to some young students. One student in particular, Lawrence Jefferson, was drawn to the work of Marion Post Wolcott—one of the less well-known but perhaps the most ethically committed of all these federal photographers. Coles was curious to know why and Jefferson...

Fruit of the Orchard

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pp. 11-18

Winona is a rural Texas community of 500 people living downwind of a toxic-waste injection-well facility built in 1982. Photographs of these residents reveal the tragic results many believe are associated with toxic emissions and contaminants from the American Ecology Environmental Services toxic-waste facility (formerly known as Gibraltar). The community was originally told that Gibraltar would install a salt-water injection-well facility and plant...

Plates

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pp. 19-121

Preventing Future Winonas

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pp. 123-126

Concerns about environmental justice and environmental racism are usually focused on large population centers, and more specifically on the poor urban neighborhoods in which the majority of the residents are minorities, usually black or Hispanic. The Environmental Protection Agency is currently looking into ways to deal with these environmental justice issues, focusing on the identification of problem areas. In these surveys, industrialized sites...

Toxicological Myths

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pp. 127-130

In the never-ending battle to clean up our environment and make our world safer for humanity, individuals and organizations that profit from polluting the environment have developed a series of scenarios to obfuscate the human effects of exposure to toxic substances. The underlying assumption of toxic waste facilities, and frequently state and federal agencies, is that they know more about the technical aspects of toxicology than the victims of chemical...