labor and civil rights marches continued, featuring by the late s war-
horses from the s such as Jesse Jackson and a second generation well
represented by Martin Luther King III. All the marchers well understood
human desperation and, not least, irony: that an American state, poor
Louisiana, had become literally the sump for the world’s toxic wastes, and
poor New Orleans, so long the South’s first city, was arguably the sump of
the downstream sump.
Then came the terrorist attacks of September . In the aftermath,
as the public and responsible officials investigated the security of seaports,
airports, and military installations, the army’s surgeon general’s office con-
ducted a study of the chemical alleys of the nation. An attack on a single
chemical plant, the study found, might result in the deaths and dire wound-
ings of perhaps a million and a half people. Early in the National Infra-
structure Protection Center warned that chemical plants were likely tar-
gets. The director of theidentified facilities where an attack—or an
accident—might jeopardize more than a million people, and no fewer than
, plants where catastrophe could harm more than a thousand people
each. The director decided that thecould use the Clean Air Act to force
chemical producers to increase security and to use less dangerous chemi-
cals. At the end of , however, the president overruled theand as-
signed the matter to the new Department of Homeland Security. There the
secretary reduced the threat presented by corporate chemistry by reducing
the army’s and the’s numbers of vulnerable plants and potential vic-
tims and by installing security cameras at plants in seven states. Florida, a
state widely considered threatened, was not included.^27
tThe evil twin ofandas late-twentieth-century scourge to pub-
lic health has been petroleum-based pesticides. Here, too, the South and
southerners were critical producers, users, and victims. Beginning with the
wartime development offor killing the mosquitoes and parasites that
were sickening our troops in the southern Pacific, a peacetime miracle was
beheld. Combined with petroleum-based herbicides (pesticides’ great part-
ner) and engineered grain seed, a Green Revolution could be made: super-
productive agriculture accomplished by chemistry and machines and re-
quiring little labor. It seemed a cause no less good than defeating the Axis,
and it was happening by the s.
Industrial-scale production and application of pesticides is actually
much older than the Green Revolution, especially in California and the