Environmental Justice – Skip the Outrage in Aspen
Asbestos mining (Credit, Brasil2)
In the middle of the aughts, I took an environmental journalism class with a well-known Denver writer who covered the topic.
“I’m over it with people calling me about the latest environmental outrage – in Aspen,” she said. “You want to pique my interest with an idea? Send me stories about the next Libby, Mont.”
Libby, Mont.? None of us in the room had ever heard of it. Yet despite its invisibility in most press, it was one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history. This writer had also pointed out environmental justice, or in this case, injustice, where people wring their hands over environmental events in white-bread enclaves like Aspen but few know anything about what happens in marginalized, spun-off communities like Libby in this case with its rural, agricultural and working-class white population.
Forty miles from Canada in the northwest corner of Montana, the town of Libby was once part of the hunting and fishing grounds of the Kootenai Tribe. By the early 20th century, the small town paid obeisance to the Zonolite Co., which operated a vermiculite mine and processing plant there from the 1920s to 1963, when W.R. Grace and Company (Grace) took over mining operations until 1990s. Because of the amount of asbestos Zonolite workers and Libby residents were exposed to over the decades of mining, the EPA in 2009 finally declared Libby, Mont., a “public health emergency”. Over 400 people in this small mountain town died due to asbestos toxicity, with over 3,000 receiving closely related diagnoses like mesothelioma.
Kootenai Falls, near Libby, Mont.
The Zonolite/Grace mine was rich in tremolite-actinolite, a dangerous naturally occurring form of asbestos. Both companies knew that the mining operations were creating “abnormal chests” in employees, but when asked about the “dust disease” because so many townspeople were obviously sick and dying, company officials always said that the mine contained tremolite “only,” counting on miners’ geological ignorance.
The carcinogen was seeded into everything – in the air Libby residents breathed, in the contaminated groundwater they drank, over 1 million cubic yards of earth poisoned by dust and mine waste, including land with schools, playgrounds and athletic tracks paved with it. The mined vermiculite was also a topnotch home insulator as it expanded to stop heat escape in attics. Bing Crosby was even a pitchman for Zonolite attic insulation, hawking the stuff nationally, and the Libby mine alone produced 80 percent of the companies’ supply.
Not only were the good people of Libby impacted, Zonolite Co. and Grace broadcast millions of pounds of the asbestos-tainted ore across North America through at least 60 vermiculite processing plants, sickening an unknown number of plant workers. In 1999, the Seattle Post Intelligencer broke the story that regulators and the two companies knew the ore was dangerous with W.R. Grace even giving workers annual physicals, X-rays and breathing-function tests. Yet the company never shared the test implications with employees.
“’It was so thick that you couldn’t see your hands at times,’” recalled one North Little Rock plant manager about the processing plant dust. “All of them, Zonolite and Grace, just said there was nothing in that dust that can hurt you. There’s a lot of people dead today who would still be alive if we were told the truth about that ore.”
In 1973, W.R. Grace stopped marketing its asbestos-laden products, one Dallas processing plant superintendent and treasurer recalled. “We thought we had a good thing until they said it was not,” he said. “It broke all of our hearts because it cut profits.”