| In 1887, Robert Towne built a metals smelter in El Paso, Texas, less than a kilometer from Juarez, Mexico and Dona Ana County, New Mexico. For over a century, the facility produced metals and profits, and also pollution that affected workers and residents of the surrounding area. In response to declining copper prices, the El Paso Smelter closed in 1999 and environmental justice activism emerged to fight for permanent closure and to ensure equitable and complete heavy metals remediation in surrounding residential areas. In early 2009, the Smelter was permanently closed and to this day stakeholders in Paso del Norte continue to debate issues surrounding cleanup, worker compensation, and the attendant public participation opportunities. Previous research demonstrates that the effects of the Smelter's pollution are distributed unevenly across the geographic and social landscape. Starting with these established concerns of distributive environmental justice, this dissertation identifies additional conditions of local and regional procedural and productive environmental injustice. Focusing primarily on the facility's recent history, this work employs case study methods to interrogate the mechanisms through which these conditions of environmental injustice have persisted over time in Paso del Norte. Drawing from twenty semi-structured interviews, over 900 newspaper articles, archival materials and hundreds of public and private sector documents, this dissertation employs theoretical and methodological approaches from environmental justice, political ecology and environmental history to better understand the drivers and mechanisms of environmental injustice. Drivers of environmental injustice related to the Smelter include regulatory compartmentalization, as well as a regulatory emphasis on single, attributable point sources. The financial marginality of the metals sector limits opportunities for productive justice in Paso del Norte, as well as other sites implicated in metals processing. Scientific uncertainty about the extent of contamination from the facility and a technocratic framing of contamination concerns shifted the burden of proof to the region's residents and contributed to procedural injustice. This research contributes to the growing recognition that environmental justice scholarship needs to extend beyond spatial distribution of hazards explore multi-scalar political and economic factors that create and perpetuate injustice. |
