Our Most Precious Resource: Groundwater Remediation and Environmental Justice in South Tucson, 1940--1999

According to the Environmental Protection Agency's National Priorities List, Arizona contains eight Superfund sites, each with groundwater contamination and a facility that uses (or used) toxic substances in daily operations. Designation as `Superfund' occurs when the EPA determines, through a complex process, that contamination at a site is so severe that it endangers public health or the environment. Placement on the National Priorities List happens when a site is eligible for long-term remedial action or clean-up. This categorization allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to act in one of three ways: clean up the site; induce responsible parties to clean up the site; or compel responsible parties to reimburse the EPA for government-led remediation efforts. In Arizona, most cases of groundwater pollution resulted from storage or disposal of liquid solvent wastes between 1940 and 1970.;This dissertation is concerned specifically with one site---the Tucson International Airport Area (TIAA) in South Tucson and the contamination of the surrounding aquifer. The TIAA is home to Hispanic, working-class families. The demographics of the area are important because environmental justice scholars and activists contend that businesses and governments tend to place facilities that produce toxic products, or even landfills that house toxic waste, among ethnic minorities. The industrial development and subsequent environmental degradation of the TIAA in Southern Arizona since 1945 had little to do with race, however. In this dissertation, I argue that while race was not the determining factor in the industry-induced environmental degradation of the site, environmental racism was clearly present during its remediation. The TIAA site history is not much different from that of any Superfund location in the United States. Some party dumped toxic waste and then either denied involvement or denied that it possessed the knowledge surrounding environmental and/or health consequences. What is different about the TIAA contamination, however, is the magnitude of the battle that residents of the area had to wage to get recognition of health problems and groundwater clean up. This matters because there are thousands of Superfund sites in the United States where groundwater contamination is the issue. It affects us all. Many people either live near a site or have seen taxpayer dollars go towards clean-up of one.;This dissertation analyzes the historic change that occurred in this region by considering the influence of the federal government on Western U.S. development, the history of hazardous waste disposal leading to Superfund, and the changing ways in which both industry and community have responded to environmental degradation over the past century. Further, environmental justice, environmental history, and Western history serve to provide contextualization for one common theme throughout each chapter: marginalization. The West is marginalized at the hands of the Federal Government and capital-driven industry, the environment is marginalized even as science shows evidence of significant degradation, and an entire community is marginalized when its concerns are repeatedly dismissed. This complex relationship between law, science, and justice provide the historic context for the primary assertion that environmental racism was indeed present during remediation efforts.