so-called edge cities—those new, ring-road business centers where many
suburbanites work. The suburbs shut down by day; the cities, by evening
and night. Woe, then, to visitors—such as hotel-bound conference-goers—
to most central cities. As conference business subsides after :..and
conferees are eager to walk, drink, and eat, the downtowns of not only Jack-
son but Dallas, Little Rock, Birmingham, and Atlanta are closing doors and
turning out lights. New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco are
the great exceptions among American cities, proving the rule.
Mostly, I conclude, cities and suburbs are clay in the varied and dread-
ful environmental impacts they have on themselves and on thinly popu-
lated countrysides. Consider, for instance, the use of urban sewer sludge
as fertilizer: Disposal of the enormous effluvia processed by the nation’s
sewage systems is a major sanitary issue. Application of sludge, usually in
dehydrated form, to crop fields seems an excellent disposition indeed, and
Edmund Ruffin, relentless champion of recycling, might have been joyful
at the realization of a frustrated dream. Ruffin knew not of the uptake of
heavy metals from soil to plant to animal, however. Beginning during the
late s, ecologists at Miami University in Ohio—led by Gary W. Barrett,
recently a star graduate student of Eugene Odum—found that sludge often
included heavy metals (lead, copper, cadmium, and zinc) from the blend-
ing of industrial with household wastes, and that the contaminants trav-
eled up the food chain from soil to plants to animals. The, however,
from through the s and s and into the twenty-first century,
encouraged so-called biosolids companies and farmers alike to accept the
safety of sludge, and by , percent of the more than . million tons of
sewer sludge was disposed of in agriculture. Farmers surrounding Augusta,
Georgia, spread sludge from the city’s sewer and helplessly watched their
dairy cattle die. Down in Dublin, Georgia, a man grew so ill building roads
with materials that included tainted hay in the slurry that he was forced
into months of disability leave. Lawsuits abounded.^33
Then there are airborne toxic effusions from blatantly scofflaw indus-
tries operating in poor, usually black-majority fringe sections of south-
ern cities far from Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor. In the Northside
of Jacksonville, Florida, the Millennium Specialty Chemicals plant is the
oldest continually operating manufacturer in the city. Its principal prod-
ucts, ironically, are scents: fragrant soaps, shampoos, gum, and toothpaste.
By-product wastes, however, are literally breathtaking. ‘‘Horrible’’ or ‘‘The
smell will just knock you down’’ is repeated by down-wind residents over
and over. Generations of complaints have yielded no relief. Northside folks