Remediating a Toxic Town: Power, Place, and Justice in Anniston, Alabama

176 Pages·2017·4.38 MB·English

UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff TTeennnneesssseeee,, KKnnooxxvviillllee
TTRRAACCEE:: TTeennnneesssseeee RReesseeaarrcchh aanndd CCrreeaattiivvee
EExxcchhaannggee
Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School
12-2016
RReemmeeddiiaattiinngg aa TTooxxiicc TToowwnn:: PPoowweerr,, PPllaaccee,, aanndd JJuussttiiccee iinn AAnnnniissttoonn,,
AAllaabbaammaa
Melanie Ann Barron
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss
Part of the Human Geography Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Place and
Environment Commons, and the Race and Ethnicity Commons
RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn
Barron, Melanie Ann, "Remediating a Toxic Town: Power, Place, and Justice in Anniston, Alabama. " PhD
diss., University of Tennessee, 2016.
https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4083
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee
Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized
administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact
[email protected].
To the Graduate Council:
I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Melanie Ann Barron entitled "Remediating a
Toxic Town: Power, Place, and Justice in Anniston, Alabama." I have examined the final
electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in
Geography.
Solange Munoz, Major Professor
We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance:
Derek Alderman, Ron Kalafsky, Michelle Brown, Sherry Cable
Accepted for the Council:
Carolyn R. Hodges
Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School
(Original signatures are on file with official student records.)
Remediating a Toxic Town:
Power, Place, and Justice in Anniston, Alabama

A Dissertation Presented for the
Doctor of Philosophy
Degree
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Melanie Ann Barron
December 2016
Copyright © 2016 by Melanie Barron.
All rights reserved.

ii
DEDICATION

For my parents, who gave more than they could to help me complete this journey.
Thank you for your selflessness.

For Ben, for keeping my chin up.

iii
ACKNOWLEGMENTS

I owe a debt of gratitude to the Department of Geography, for being a supportive
place to explore and develop these ideas. Thank you for being a nurturing place to
learn and grow.

Many thanks to Dr. Josh Inwood for his invaluable mentorship throughout my PhD
program.

iv
ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines a struggle for Environmental Justice over the long
term to understand the impacts of current state-led strategies for achieving
Environmental Justice. Recent geographic scholarship in Environmental Justice
literatures suggests that state-centric strategies come with problems scholars have yet
to fully comprehend. This dissertation, based on fieldwork and archival research in
Anniston, Alabama, supports this claim with three main findings: 1) Corporations
produce scaled identities to advantageously empower themselves and weather shifts in
their profitability, while ordinary people are limited in their capacity to respond in kind
to such unequal power arrangements. 2) Current legal solutions for Environmental
Justice are not meeting the demands expressed by Environmental Justice movement
actors, and in themselves demonstrate a resistance to solutions that would more fairly
address a collective body of victims due to the normative economizing of
neoliberalism. 3) The process of remediation is confined to limiting risks from the
physical environment, even while the city itself continues to struggle. This can cause a
source of pain and frustration for residents who remain in impacted areas, who wish to
see a more holistic solution to resolving environmental injustice, including remediating
a sense of place.
v
PREFACE

Readers may find it helpful to refer to maps of Anniston while reading this dissertation.
Online maps are available at www.ReconstructAnniston.net as part of a planned
expansion of this research. Refer any questions about the website to the author’s
permanent email address: [email protected].

vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Introduction .................................................................................................... 1
Geographic Context ................................................................................................................. 7
Historical Context ..................................................................................................................... 8
Dissertation Context ............................................................................................................... 13
Chapter 2 Literature review ............................................................................................ 16
Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 17
Risk, Scale, and Tensions with Justice .................................................................................... 20
Legal Geography & Environmental Justice ............................................................................ 24
Justice and Legal beings: Claims, Grievances and Corporate Personhood ........................... 26
Litigation & Justice ................................................................................................................. 31
Memory, Power, Place, and Justice ........................................................................................ 35
Chapter 3 Corporate Scalar Transformations and the Production of Environmental
Inequalities in Anniston, Alabama .................................................................................. 42
Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 43
Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 44
Risk Society, Neoliberalism, and Scale ................................................................................... 47
Case Study: Corporate Scalar Transformations and A Struggle for Environmental Justice ... 51
Monsanto’s Early Corporate Identity .................................................................................. 51
Trouble in Chemical Paradise ............................................................................................. 59
Shedding Chemical Roots .................................................................................................. 62
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 66
Chapter 4 Anniston’s Neoliberal Environmental Policy in PracticE ............................... 68
Abstract .................................................................................................................................. 69
Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 69
Methods ................................................................................................................................. 72
A Litigious Landscape ............................................................................................................ 75
Superfund Alternative: A Policy Choice driven by Neoliberal Expertise ................................ 80
Settlement and Distribution ................................................................................................... 88
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 100
Chapter 5 Remediating a Sense of Place: Memory and environmental Justice in
Anniston, Alabama ....................................................................................................... 106
Abstract ................................................................................................................................ 107
Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 107
Literature Review .................................................................................................................. 114
Methods ............................................................................................................................... 119
vii
Remediation and Forgetting in Anniston ............................................................................. 121
Reconstructing the Invisible Through Memory ..................................................................... 127
Conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 137
Chapter 6 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 140
References .................................................................................................................... 147
Vita ............................................................................................................................... 164

viii