Ladies And Gentlemen,The Bronx Is Choking!
One in four children in Hunts Point has asthma—an epidemic GABRIELE STEINHAUSER blames on environmental racism.
At first Tanya Fields thought it was just a regular cold.
For three days in November of 2004, her 5-month-old daughter, Trist-Ann, had been wheezing and coughing. It seemed like she was choking. Eventually the coughing fits became so bad that the little girl was vomiting; she couldn’t hold anything down. When her doctor failed to get Trist-Ann to breathe more easily, he told the young mother to take her to the emergency room. By the time they reached St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, Trist-Ann had fluid in her lungs. The diagnosis: pneumonia.
The doctors told Fields that her daughter could have drowned from the inside. The next four days and five nights, she did not leave her Trist-Ann’s side at the hospital, while her other daughter Taylor, who was two years old at the time, stayed with her parents in Harlem. It was the first of many trips to the emergency room for Fields, a 27-year-old office worker.
A few months later, Trist-Ann was back in the hospital, again with pneumonia.
At the age of 1, she was diagnosed with asthma.
In other parts of New York City, such a diagnosis might have been a surprise, but not where Tanya Fields and her two children live. In their neighborhood of Hunts Point, a small peninsula on the southeastern tip of the Bronx, one in four elementary-school children suffers from asthma.
Three decades after President Jimmy Carter’s famous walk past the abandoned buildings on Charlotte Street, a new epidemic has taken hold of the South Bronx. Public schools have their own asthma clinics, nebulizers ready to help students breathe when they start gasping for air in class. And while urban planners and public health specialists are still struggling to find the cause for the community’s disturbingly high asthma rates, for parents like Tanya Fields there is no question that it’s the air they breathe that makes their children wheeze.
Every week, according to citizens’ groups that monitor the site, up to 60,000 trucks take a turn off Bruckner Expressway and cut through the neighborhood’s small residential section (its current population is 47,000) to reach Hunts Point’s industrial sector, an area that plays a crucial role in New York City’s metabolism. On the peninsula’s 690 acres sit the world’s biggest food market, at least four private waste-transfer stations, a wastewater treatment plant and the New York Organic Fertilizer Company: a plant that turns half of New York City’s sludge (the solid material that is extracted from wastewater before it flows back into the city’s waterways) into fertilizer pellets.
Sometimes, residents say, they can smell the odors emerging from the plant at a distance of almost two miles.
Hunts Point represents an often-ignored dilemma of urban life: Where large numbers of people live together, they produce waste—waste that needs to be collected, transported, reused, recycled or disposed of. All too often that happens in poor communities of color—that is, communities like Hunts Point, where, in 1999, 97 percent of residents were Hispanic or African American and the median household income was $17,612 (less than half that of New York City as a whole). In September 2005, the Associated Press, in an analysis of data from the Environmental Protection Agency, found that African-Americans were 79 percent more likely to live in a neighborhood where industrial pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health risk. In many places, Hispanic and Asian minorities also suffered disproportionate impacts.
For activists around the country, this unequal distribution of waste-processing facilities has a name: environmental racism.
It was to achieve a measure of environmental justice that the New York City Planning Commission passed the so-called Fair Share Criteria in 1991, which stipulated that the benefits and burdens of municipal facilities should be allocated equally across neighborhoods. Three years later, in February 1994, President Bill Clinton issued an executive order demanding that all federal agencies make environmental justice part of their mission.
And yet, 13 years later, at a time celebrities drive hybrid cars and talk of global warming and sustainability has won Oscars and Nobel Prizes, the struggle for environmental justice is far from over. Instead it continues, largely unnoticed, in places like Hunts Point, where the stage is much less glamorous. Here, the scene is set by a city that wastes, a neighborhood where people tend to mind their own business and a system of asymmetric political powers, where the theory of laws and regulations sometimes remains at a great remove from everyday practice.
It was in the summer of 2003, a few months after she had moved into her small, one-bedroom apartment on Fox Street, that Tanya Fields first noticed the smell. Heavy and inescapable, like a mix of chicken manure and rotting meat, it hung in the air, seeping through the cracks between window and air conditioner, forcing her and her little daughter to sit inside on hot summer days.
Her neighbors knew nothing about the odor’s origins. “The community had internalized the smell,” Fields recalled. “When it happened they covered their noses and their mouths and waited for it to pass.” What they did know was that the pungent smells gave them headaches and made them feel nauseous. On particularly bad days, the odor could even trigger asthma attacks.
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