AMY GOODMAN: And you’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman.

Well, as you know, tomorrow is the California primary, also the primaries in Washington state and Nevada. We’re going to continue our focus on California today. We turn to the battle against toxics. This growing movement around the country doesn’t get much attention from the mainstream media, maybe because many of the polluting corporations environmentalists are targeting are also major advertisers in the newspapers and TV networks in this country.

Two weekends ago, there was a conference of more than 500 environmentalists in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on dioxin, a byproduct of incineration or any industrial process that uses chlorine. Three of the activists that were there were Leslie Byster, program director for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose, California, Henry Clark, head of the West County Toxics Coalition in Richmond, California, and Bradley Angel, Southwest toxic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace in San Francisco. They join us now.

Leslie Byster, what are the toxics you’re focusing on?

LESLIE BYSTER: We’re looking a lot at the chlorine-based chemicals, organochlorines and the chemicals that have the capacity to mimic naturally occurring hormones in the body, because of the fact that they cross generations, that they pass from mother to child, either in utero or through breast milk, or the fact that these — lot of these chemicals are cancer-causing. And because they contain chlorine, when they’re combusted or treated in various ways, dioxin is released.

AMY GOODMAN: And in your work, where do you see these chlorine chemicals?

LESLIE BYSTER: A lot of the chlorinated compounds are used a lot in the electronics industry as solvents. And so, we’re trying to look at phasing out the organochlorines and finding safe alternatives, safe alternatives for the workers who are exposed to the chemicals.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, for people outside California, we hear Silicon Valley a lot, but I don’t think a lot of people really know what it is. What is the magnitude of the industry there?

LESLIE BYSTER: Silicon Valley is the birthplace of the electronics industry. In Silicon Valley, people have — well, not in Silicon Valley anymore, but there’s this image that the electronics industry is a clean industry. You do not have the black, billowing smokestacks coming out. But it’s a very toxic industry. It’s a chemical-handling industry because of the amount of chemicals used to make a computer. Sometimes some computers take up to 500 chemicals to manufacture a computer. And the magnitude in trying to find out how many of the — what are the chemicals that are being used and the toxicity of the chemicals is sometimes very difficult to ascertain.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people work in Silicon Valley?

LESLIE BYSTER: I am not sure, but I know the electronics industry hires a proportionate number of young, immigrant, child-bearing-age women, and a lot of the chemicals they’re exposed to have a reproductive toxicity. Some of the chemicals have been connected to miscarriages. And so we’re really trying to focus on a lot of the chemicals that the workers in the plant are exposed to, because they’re on the frontline. They’re the ones who are exposed to the chemicals first. And the chemicals that happen in the environment come from the plants. They’re not naturally occurring. They come from the semiconductor plants.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you had any successes?

LESLIE BYSTER: There’s been a — there was a campaign back in 1989 to phase out CFCs. It was found that IBM was the largest user of CFC chemicals. And through campaigns and building community support and action, IBM did phase out CFCs and are now using a soap and water alternative. So, there are safe alternatives out there, and the industry has the capacity to change, and we just need to encourage them to do that.

AMY GOODMAN: CFC is chlorofluorocarbons?

LESLIE BYSTER: Chlorofluorocarbons. Chlorofluorocarbons.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do they do?

LESLIE BYSTER: They’re an ozone-depleting chemical. And that’s another concern, that the ozone hole keeps growing. And we’re trying to find alternatives to CFCs and a lot of the other chemicals that are used by the electronics industry.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Clark, you’re head of the West County Toxics Coalition in Richmond, which is in the Bay Area, a little north of San Jose. What about the toxics that you’re targeting? What is your group doing?

HENRY CLARK: The West County Toxics Coalition, based in Richmond, California, has been carrying on a campaign against the Chevron Corporation, located in Richmond since 1986. Chevron is the major operation among 20 other industrial operations in the city of Richmond. Chevron operates the oil refinery in Richmond and the Chevron Ortho Chemical Company, the pesticide division, where Chevron operates a hazardous waste incinerator that has been operating under an interim permit since 1967. This incinerator is spewing deadly methylene chloride and dioxins into our community, a predominantly Afro-American community, with about a hundred Southeast Asian families of a recent location in that community. There’s high rates of cancer in the North Richmond community. There’s a high incident of childhood asthma and a 33% higher than state average lung cancer rate.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what are you doing about it?

HENRY CLARK: Well, the West County Toxics Coalition, first of all, has been organizing residents in the surrounding area, going door to door in the affected communities, educating residents about the chemical exposure, getting them to become part of the organization, because we need an organization in order to fight back. That’s the only way that we’re going to bring about any change, in being organized. So, we work to hold Chevron and other companies accountable to reduce the risk from chemical hazards. And we work to prevent any other polluting companies from locating in this environment. We feel that we are already saturated with chemical-handling polluting industry already. This is the situation where we call environmental racism or environmental injustices. We conducted a study titled “Richmond at Risk” with one of our allied organizations, Community for a Better Environment, and that study indicated that of the 20 largest industrial operations located in the city of Richmond, they’re located in communities of color, where 70 to 75% of the population is Afro-American, and 20 to 25% of the population live below the poverty line. This is what is called environmental racism.

In regard to the incinerator there, which is a deadly concern to us, we view that as living under a toxic gas cloud, living in a toxic gas chamber. This incinerator is spewing deadly dioxins into our community, which causes breast cancer, hormonal disorders. And I find it very appalling that Chevron has been able to operate this incinerator on a temporary permit since 1967. The company gives lip service to waste reduction and toxic use reduction, yet the company is proceeding to ask the state of California, the Department of Toxic Substance Control, to grant them a permit that would allow them to double the waste that they are burning. These type of contradictions cannot be accepted, especially in light of the recent research on the detrimental health effects from dioxins and the organochlorines. We need to work with the community and hold the state and Chevron accountable to reducing the waste that’s being incinerated in our community, hold Chevron accountable to exploring alternative means of disposing of the waste and the incinerator, and eventually phase that incinerator out. That’s the only just thing to do.

AMY GOODMAN: Is it difficult to organize in a community, especially when you’re talking about a poor community, where people are mostly concerned with just getting by, with getting food on the table? How do you organize around environmental issues?

HENRY CLARK: Well, it’s very difficult to do, because there are so many problems in our community, as you indicated. There’s unemployment. There’s toxic chemical exposure. There’s crime. The daily struggle to just survive and live is difficult enough, let alone talking about lead contamination or the incinerator and dioxins, which many people don’t quite understand yet. But the reality of the situation is that all the problems are actually connected and related. And that’s the message that West County Toxics Coalition carries to our residents. It basically stems from a situation of lack of power over the decisions that affect our life here in a situation where you have a predominantly low-income community. City Hall does not listen to our interests, because people do not have the money to contribute to the politicians’ campaign. We don’t have the influence to effect any type of change down at City Hall. So, what we do have is our numbers, though, and that’s why the West County Toxics Coalition proceeds to organize our residents, so that we can hold the politicians accountable. We can hold the companies accountable. We can begin to build a grassroots movement to show some people power to effect some change in our lives.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Clark is head of the West County Toxics Coalition in Richmond, California, Leslie Byster with Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose. And we’ll be joined by the coordinator of Greenpeace in San Francisco after this.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now!, Pacifica Radio’s national daily grassroots election show. I’m Amy Goodman. We continue our discussion about the fight against toxics in California. Our guests, Leslie Byster, program director of Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose; Henry Clark, head of the West County Toxics Coalition in Richmond, California; and we now go to Bradley Angel, Southwest toxic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace in San Francisco. Bradley, who are you targeting?

BRADLEY ANGEL: Well, right now the Greenpeace campaign in the Southwest U.S. is working in dozens of communities, and again, predominantly — not exclusively, but predominantly — communities of color, low-income communities of color, because that’s where we see the disproportionate impact of dirty industry. That’s where we see the most dangerous chemicals being incinerated, being dumped, or companies trying to open up dangerous new facilities in communities that they feel are politically powerless.

One of the places we are working right now is in Richmond with the West County Toxics Coalition fighting the proposed expansion, doubling of the amount of waste that Chevron Chemical Company wants to spew into our environment, that they want to burn.

We’re also working, for example, in the African American — predominantly African American neighborhood in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point. Like Richmond, in San Francisco, virtually all the dirty industry is dumped in the Black community. And I’ve worked there for many years, for about eight or nine years now, and I knew from that work that there was a lot of health problems, that there were respiratory problems, a lot of cancer. A lot of it was anecdotal, though. And this past summer, the county health department finally came out with a study that documented what we had feared all along, that African American women under 50 in the toxic, contaminated area of San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood had twice — at least twice — the rate of breast cancer as women not living in that part of the city.

And what’s astounding about that, of course — I mean, it’s alarming just to see that discrepancy anyway, and we don’t want to see anybody with breast cancer, Black or white or anybody else. But what’s really startling and should be a wake-up call for people across this country, not just in San Francisco, is the fact that San Francisco was already reported to have one of the highest rates of breast cancer in the world, prior to the coming out of this study. So, if you add a study that documents that African American women have twice that already alarming rate, you have a public health emergency. In that community, they’re fighting off a power plant that would be the third power plant in that impacted community, on top of the hundreds of other toxic sites. And what we’ve been doing is —

AMY GOODMAN: A nuclear power plant?

BRADLEY ANGEL: No, this would be a, quote-unquote, “natural gas” power plant, which the companies say, “Oh, it’s much cleaner than coal,” and which, in one sense, may be true, but the fact is that they’re not shutting down the old plants. And the fact is that these allegedly clean plants are not clean. They would still spew out enormous amounts of particulates, as well as cancer-causing chemicals, into the environment, and an environment of a community that is being devastated, literally, by breast cancer.

So, we’ve been — and Greenpeace has been supporting these community struggles, like in Bayview-Hunters Point, like in Richmond, working with folks in the Silicon Valley, but all across California and elsewhere. And one of the things that we’ve been doing is linking those communities up, bringing the people of Bayview-Hunters Point together with the people of Richmond. One of the very exciting things that we’ve been doing, that I think is so important, is linking those communities up with breast cancer advocacy organizations, breast cancer survivors, starting to do more work linking up with workers in these toxic industries and building new alliances.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get to your challenge to Breast Cancer Awareness Month in just a second. But, Leslie Byster of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, you, too, are involved with attacking this high rate of cancer in the Bay Area. How are you organizing?

LESLIE BYSTER: Well, we’ve set up — through community outreach, set up a campaign that we’re calling the “One Too Many” campaign, that we’ve brought together a broad range of people in the Silicon Valley, community residents, a couple of workers, people who work in the healthcare profession, breast cancer survivors, looking at no matter how many cancers you have, if it’s one in 10, one in a hundred, one in eight, no matter what the denominator is, one cancer is one too many, especially when you realize that back in 1964, the World Health Organization said that 80% of the cancers are related to environmentally induced, caused events. And if 80% of these cancers are environmentally reduced, that means that we have a chance and the opportunity to reduce that, that it’s caused by these man-made or person-made chemicals that are going out into the environment, and we have to stop this. It’s like — I think of it as the old Union of Concerned Scientists that had the five minutes to midnight clock, and the clock keeps getting closer and closer to midnight. And if we don’t pull that minute hand back, we’re speaking of our own destruction, of our own deaths. And it’s time. It’s time for action now. And that’s what the One Too Many campaign is about. That’s what this conference is about.

And it’s also taking on a much broader national movement that I was fortunate to be at a founding conference in May in Albuquerque of the National Coalition for Health and Environmental Justice, which is bringing together groups of women and people who had worked together in their own communities before, but this is coalescing into a national movement. We’ve got women from the National Coalition — the National Black Women’s Health Coalition, Greenpeace, the Indigenous Environmental Network, the Toxics Coalition. There’s 21 member groups of the National Coalition for Health and Environmental Justice. And it’s looking at — we have to be talking about our health. We’re talking about our health, our environment and our children, our families. We have to be protecting our health, because we can’t rely on the corporations and the government to do it for us. We have to take the action now to make that happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of the corporations, Bradley Angel, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, what do you do about it?

BRADLEY ANGEL: Well, some people may know, but actually most people don’t know. Every October is a highly publicized month called Breast Cancer Awareness Month. And people know that some people wear ribbons to commemorate those who died, and sometimes there’s vigils. But what people don’t know, in general, is that those events are sponsored by the very same corporations, some of the same corporations, like Zeneca Corporation, that produces cancer-causing chemicals.

AMY GOODMAN: Like what corporation?

BRADLEY ANGEL: Zeneca Corporation is one of those. But we see events like walks for women in cancer that are — last year in San Francisco, that was sponsored by Chevron, you know, the same company that manufactures and emits cancer-causing chemicals into the environment. And the Toxic Links Coalition, of which Greenpeace is a part, and Silicon Valley and West County are also a part of, and many others, has taken as a major task to expose the fact that you have these cancer-causing industries promoting, quote-unquote, “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.” We’ve renamed it, and we call it Cancer Industry Awareness Month. So we do a lot of education around it to let people know about the toxic links involved.

But we’ve also done something, the next step, which is action. So, for two years in a row now, there’s been marches in downtown San Francisco called cancer industry awareness — cancer industry tours of downtown San Francisco to show that it’s — we want more than breast cancer awareness. This is really cancer industry, the corporations that are dumping cancer-causing chemicals into our bodies, in our air and our water and our food, the government complicity and the cancer establishment that’s doing nothing about it. And we’re taking them on, and we’re challenging them and exposing them and saying, “You are no longer going to get away with the poisoning of our communities.”

AMY GOODMAN: So, where do you go?

BRADLEY ANGEL: Well, for example, the last two years in a row, the event started at Chevron in downtown San Francisco, where people from the community, breast cancer survivors and others, talked about what Chevron does, what they make, what they emit into the environment of the Bay Area and elsewhere. We went to Bechtel Corporation, which is very tied into nuclear power. We went to the offices of San Francisco Energy Corporation, which is the company that hopes to build the new power plant in Bayview-Hunters Point, where people from that community with breast cancer talked about the new studies, that talked about that one more cancer in that community is one too many, as Leslie says. We went to the offices of American Cancer Society, which, by and large, has been promoting the industry line of, well, we need more research and more industry-promoted cures, and breast cancer survivors there challenged American Cancer Society to work and take action for prevention and not to continue apologizing for the cancer industry. So, those are the types of things we’ve done.

We challenged the U.S. EPA to take the side of the people and the environment and actually start doing its job — you know, Environmental Protection Agency, not Polluter Protection Agency. So, these are the types of things we’ve done, is a kind of a roving march through downtown San Francisco. We also stopped at Time magazine, because Time magazine has not fulfilled its promise to stop using chlorine in the bleaching process for the paper that they use in their magazine. Several years ago, Time said, once chlorine-free processes are available in the United States of high quality, they would start printing their Time magazine on chlorine-free paper. Well, guess what: It’s available, but they haven’t followed through their promise. So, this past October, breast cancer survivors, during the toxic tour, delivered thousands of postcards to Time demanding they keep their promise.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, chlorine used in the paper-making process produces the byproduct of dioxin, and this is what you’re concerned with.

BRADLEY ANGEL: That’s right. And, you know, a couple of years ago, the U.S. EPA, under pressure from the chlorine and chemical industry, embarked on a study, that they hoped to show that groups like Greenpeace and West County Toxics Coalition and Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, that we were exaggerating the threat from dioxin. And they actually thought that this study by a hundred or so scientists would prove that it was much less of a threat. Well, guess what: The U.S. EPA, in their draft reassessment, came out and said, “Oops, it’s much worse than we ever thought. And yes, it causes cancer. Dioxin causes cancer. But that’s the least of your worries.”

And what they’re starting to find out is what our worst fears are, is that dioxin causes not only cancer, but birth defects, reproductive, developmental, immunological disorders that are so fundamental to the future of the human race. And this study backfired on the industry. This study backfired on the EPA, that was seeking to cover up, we believe, the very serious danger of this. And that’s why, coming back to our communities, we see this work going on in Silicon Valley that Leslie is involved in, the work in Richmond that Henry and his group are involved in. And we’re making those links back in the communities, impacts on communities and workers.

LESLIE BYSTER: Well, the other thing that the EPA said is that that meant we’re carrying a body burden of dioxin in us already, and that many of the problems that we’re seeing might be related to that. If you think of your body as a little beaker, and you keep adding drops at a time, it’s going to spill over. And that spillover is where we’re seeing the reproductive problems. And that spillover level is different for every different individual. And that’s what we’re looking at, is that the reproductive and the other problems are happening at much, much lower levels than the cancer level, and that’s why we’re really looking at dioxin. We’re very concerned about the body burden, and that we’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to stop the way that our bodies are ingesting it. And it’s very hard, because 90% of our dioxin intake comes from food. It means it’s airborne, so you’ve got to stop it — you’ve got to stop dioxin at its source. You’ve got to stop dioxin from being produced. And that’s ultimate pollution
prevention.

AMY GOODMAN: Henry Clark with the West County Toxics Coalition in Richmond, what about electoral politics? How do you interface with that? Do you have any hope for elected politicians? Are they bought off by the very corporations you’re protesting?

HENRY CLARK: Yes. Well, by and large, we think that the politicians are in the hands of the corporations. We have seen that in Richmond. Richmond has been known to be a company town controlled by Chevron. Chevron Corporation contributes over 25% of the city of Richmond’s tax base. Chevron is the largest employer in the city of Richmond. Chevron is the largest employer in Contra Costa County.

However, there are some opportunities. For instance, the present mayor of Richmond, Mayor Rosemary Corbin, is a environmental person, considered the environmental mayor of Richmond. I’ve worked with the mayor as a member of the Contra Costa County Hazardous Materials Commission. So, there is opportunity.

What we have found out from our interaction with regulatory agencies and politicians, we found that the corporations had the major influence, which have inspired many of our members to run for elected office. We’ve had members to run for the mayor of Richmond, to run for the Richmond City Council. And it has also inspired myself to get more actively involved in the political process.

In fact, in the community of North Richmond, which is on the frontline of the toxic assault in the area that’s surrounded and saturated by the petrochemical industry, North Richmond is predominantly an unincorporated area, means that most of the community of 2,400 people come under the jurisdiction of the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors. A smaller part of North Richmond is governed by the city of Richmond. Well, West County Toxics Coalition, working with the community, took advantage of some opportunities in the law to set up a North Richmond Municipal Advisory Council. What this means is that the community elects their own representatives from the community that governs the community in conjunction with the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors. We were appointed the first year of office by the Board of Supervisors. However, for the last two-and-a-half years, we have become the first elected officials from the North Richmond community. So, technically, I’m an elected official from the community, which is very inspiring to me, in that I was born and raised in North Richmond.

And in fact, the development in the Bay Area is happening in the North Richmond community. North Richmond is the last frontier of large acres of industrial land. And if we did not have this council in place, we fear that the polluting industry would have just swamped in our area and overwhelmed us. But now, since we have the North Richmond Municipal Advisory Council in place, any company that wants to locate in our community has to come before the North Richmond Municipal Advisory Council, and we have to give the approval for that company to locate there; otherwise, there’s a strong chance that it may not end up being sited in our community. So, this is a community empowerment, and this came up — this have come about as a result of seeing the need for more grassroots community people to get involved in the political process and to have some leverage in our interest to counteract that corporate stranglehold down at City Hall.

AMY GOODMAN: And that is Henry Clark, head of the West County Toxics Coalition in Richmond, California. He’s been joined by Bradley Angel, Southwest toxic campaign coordinator for Greenpeace in San Francisco, and Leslie Byster, program director for the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition in San Jose, California. I want to thank you all for joining us and let our listeners know that they all attended the third conference, the third annual conference on dioxin. It was called “Time for Action.” And if you want information on any of these groups in California or around the country, you can call the clearinghouse, the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, at 703-237-2249. That’s 703-237-2249. And if you’d like a tape of today’s program, you can call our Pacifica Archives at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230. Democracy Now! is produced by Julie Drizin. It was engineered by Bernard White. Our director in New York, Errol Maitland. I’m Amy Goodman for Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! And remember, keep listening. Tell your friends about Democracy Now!, to urge other radio stations around the country to run it. And let us know you’re listening by writing to us on email at democracy@pacifica.org. That’s democracy@pacifica.org. Thanks for listening.