The Campo Indian Landfill War: The Fight for Gold in California’s Garbage (review)

If you are interested in oral history, do not read this book. If, however, you are interested in a concise history of California Indian tribes, the anatomy of a modern landfill, the politics of “not in my back yard”, issues in which all parties wear both black and white hats, and a microscopic dissection of federal and state environmental regulatory processes you will find this book a fascinating read.

Author Dan McGovern is an example of the kind of federal bureaucrat who makes paying your taxes worthwhile. He was the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) regional administrator for Region 9, which encompasses California, in the 1990s, when the action described in this book took place. The evenhandedness and detail with which McGovern explores the competing environmental and economic arguments over a proposed landfill on the tiny Campo Indian Reservation in Southern California supports his assertion that the EPA staff are motivated to do good. “I am convinced that their only concern has been and will be doing the right thing,” he says in his acknowledgements. “But one of the lessons of this case is how excruciatingly difficult it can be to determine what is right” (xii–xiii). The careful reader certainly will be able to sympathize with McGovern and his bureaucratic colleagues.

The protagonists in McGovern’s tale are Mike Connolly, a member of the Campo tribe and chairman of its EPA, and Donna Tisdale, a white rancher whose land is quite literally in the reservation’s backyard and who organized her mostly white neighbors into a grassroots group named Backcountry against Dumps (BAD). McGovern says he has “come to admire both of them; they are as indefatigable and as effective a pair of advocates as I have ever met” (xxi). When you sift through the multilayered historical, environmental, political, bureaucratic, economic, Indian rights, and even international issues that complicate the story, it boils down to this: BAD argues that a landfill, regardless of modern construction techniques and environmental safeguards, poses an irreversible threat of polluting the underground water supply on which the area depends, while the Campos argue that as a sovereign entity, albeit one shunted to an isolated tract of economically undesirable land in the desert east of San Diego, the tribe has the right to determine its own economic future, even if the most promising economic development option is a landfill.

The exhaustive bibliography, which includes books, articles, court records, letters, federal documents, videotapes of meetings, press releases, public hearing transcripts, scholarly papers, and a master’s thesis, includes a list of forty-six interviews by the author, all of which he conducted in 1993 and 1994. It would be difficult to consider these oral histories. The interviews and their transcripts do not appear to be publicly available, and readers have no context in which to understand the circumstances of the interviews. Interestingly, McGovern reports seven interviews each with Connolly and Tisdale over the course of more than a year. While oral historians occasionally interview the same person multiple times, particularly for life history projects, one wonders if McGovern’s interviews might have been more like narrowly focused journalistic interviews rather than wide-ranging interviews oral historians typically aspire to conduct. Unfortunately, the text itself rarely allows us to hear the verbatim content of those interviews. For example, McGovern, who clearly identifies himself as one of the players in the saga by virtue of his EPA duties, says at one point that Connolly accused the federal officials not of conventional racial discrimination in their scrutiny of the proposed landfill. Rather, he accused them of paternalism, “of assuming that we had to protect the Campos from themselves. And, paternalism, the complacent conviction that we know what is best for others, Mike reminds us, inspired some of the worst sins that whites have committed against the Indians—robbing them of their culture, their religion, and even of...