6 Chapter 5: “Storytelling for Environmental Justice Advocacy” by Mariam Dames
6 Chapter 5: “Storytelling for Environmental Justice Advocacy” by Mariam Dames
In 1978, employees of the Ward Transformer Company deliberately and illegally dumped over 30,000 gallons of PCB chemicals along the roadside of numerous North Carolina counties. State government officials in North Carolina and the EPA then faced the challenge of deciding what to do with the chemicals—or rather, where to put them. They chose Warren County, NC, a majority-minority and low-income area, despite Warren County not meeting EPA criteria for the landfill siting.[1] With the support of Civil Rights leaders, the citizens of Warren County came together to protest the siting and make known their belief that racial and economic factors drove the siting. Although the protests and their amplification of the connection between race and environmental decision-making led Warren County to be known as the “birthplace” of the environmental justice movement, state officials ultimately constructed the landfill and deposited the chemicals there in 1982.
The above story introduces a truncated version of the events of Warren County. In fact, this story is barely the beginning of a single version of the numerous stories told by various stakeholders involved in the Warren County environmental injustice. In her work with Warren County residents, Pezzullo (2001) found that residents had a nuanced relationship with this dominant “birthplace” narrative. Through further exploration, Pezzullo (2001) found that residents told many other narratives in their continued fight to have the chemical landfill shut down and its toxins removed. In cases of environmental injustice, stories or narratives told by those negatively impacted have the power to become powerful tools of advocacy, breathing presence into the otherwise exclusionary narratives of the dominant group(s). This chapter explores how history and public memory go on to impact the types of narratives arising from various environmental justice case studies and how marginalized communities utilize storytelling and other narrative-based methods to give voice and power back to those facing environmental injustices.
white plastic bottle on brown soil. Markus Spiske. https://unsplash.com/photos/white-plastic-bottle-on-brown-soil-gv49ce17_NY. Free to use under the Unsplash License.
History and Public Memory
History and public memory are distinct yet interconnected concepts that influence how narratives are constructed and shared. History is proposed as an “objective” telling of past events influenced by widely accepted ideas and beliefs. Often determined by those in power and further solidified through dominant discourses, history is considered “settled.” Further, history may be perceived as “neutral;” however, because those in power determine it, it may often be deliberately shaped to serve particular interests. In contrast, public memory is subjective, fluid, and collective—it is a product of individual and community experience. Thus, pub