Patterns of Pollution: A Legal Geography of America's Toxic History and the Road to Remediation at the Tar Creek Superfund Site

Abstract

Toxic sites across the United States have been sacrificed for progress and prosperity somewhere else. Far and wide, the communities that inhabit sacrifice zones and experience slow violence–or harm that happens over long periods–have little influence on regulatory structures that determine the remediation of their homes and homelands. This research answers two questions: how do the legal and regulatory structures of remediation perpetuate injustice and how effective is community activism at influencing these systems? Using legal geography and environmental justice frameworks, this research broadly analyzes the history and governance of toxicity in the United States, as well as coupling these findings with analysis of a community archive at the Tar Creek Superfund site in northeastern Oklahoma using reflexive thematic analysis. I argue that the lack of focus, as well as the lack of enforced procedures, on environmental justice within legal and regulatory frameworks reproduces injustice without acknowledging what community perspectives of justice are. Additionally, I assert that community activism is the primary driver of justice at polluted sites and that community involvement in the remediation process is necessary to move toward justice.