The Environmental Protection Agency has delayed its approval of a proposed plastics plant in the predominantly black southern Louisiana town of Convent—its first ruling based on the recently developed theory of "environmental justice" or "environmental racism," a claim that polluting industries locate themselves in poor and minority areas because their residents are politically powerless to stop them. As EPA Administrator Carol Browner wrote in her decision obstructing plans for Shintech's $700 million facility, "It is essential that minority and low-income communities not be disproportionately subjected to environmental hazards."

But as it turns out, a majority of Convent's residents eagerly favor siting the Shintech plant in their town—73 percent, according to a poll by the local NAACP chapter. Henry Payne reports in the Wall Street Journal that the plant's opponents mostly hail from the town's wealthier middle class. (National black leaders Jesse Jackson and the Rev. Joseph Loury also oppose the plant.)

The plant's siting had already been approved by Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality, which is charged by the EPA to regulate state industry. It had also been approved specifically as a form of economic affirmative action, under which the state would grant Shintech tax breaks in return for hiring at least 35 percent of its work force from the surrounding population. In addition to the jobs, Shintech would also bring $5.6 million in school revenue.

Local Convent resident Roosevelt Teroud would jump at the chance at a stable job that pays $12 to $15 an hour. Currently, he does backbreaking seasonal work in the town's sugarcane fields for $6 an hour. Sugarcane production entails pesticide-laced agricultural runoffs that pollute the local water. That industry is also federally subsidized for it to be at all profitable.

[Ed.: In 1998 Shintech decided to move to another town that is 30 miles away and is mostly white. Greenpeace, which opposes all polyvinyl plastics production and joined in the environmental racism charge, is expected to challenge the new site as well, but on nonracial grounds.]

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