BNL a case of Modern Environmental Injustice. The campaign to make BNL more accountable to the community is very similar to the campaigns against environmental injustice. The goal of this section is to illustrate the connections between the BNL campaign and the e-justice campaigns to stop the industrial hog farming in the south. In 1990 Robert Bullard and Beverly Wright coined the term environmental justice. E-justice, as it was referred to, cites the zoning, handling and disposal of industrial waste being unfairly placed in communities of color, in particular African American or Latin American impoverished communities. Bullard and Wright’s work created a template for other activist researchers studying the distribution of negative consequences of industrialization. The model for analyzing a phenomenon as environmental injustice consisted of the targeting of poor communities of color, by ?big business? backed by the government, for the location of waste. This model was expanded to cover additional types of unwanted land uses where not only people of color, but also poor and working class whites were affected by this dumping of the byproducts of industrialization. Edwards and Ladd?s 1990 work is an example of such analysis. Instead of targeting the placement of trash facilities, Edwards and Ladd used the e-justice model to address the placement of hog farms in eastern North Carolina. The researchers studied the effects of hog farms on communities and the ?small farmers? who were displaced by the industrialized hog farming industry. They found that where people of color and low-income residents are perceived as powerless, those communities were disproportionately harmed by industrial pollution, and land displacement pressures on small farmers. Environmental Justice Research has concentrated extensive analytical attention on linkages between indicators of environmental hazards typically involving toxic storage and disposal facilities of air pollution emissions and the socioeconomic characteristics of urban, suburban communities and mineral extraction on Native American lands as well as the exposure of Latin American farm workers to pesticide poisoning. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the environmental equity impacts of the industrialization of agriculture and its treadmill of production on rural populations. Still a number of researchers have drawn conceptually significant parallels between social and environmental justice concerns on one hand and the plight of small farmers, sustainable agriculture, food security and community empowerment issues on the other [Ladd, 2000 #182]. Two grassroots organizations played key roles in mobilizing opposition to the swine industry in the Carolinas they were, the Alliance for Responsible Swine industry and Halifax Environmental Loss Prevention known as HELP. In 1982 HELP, a diverse group of radicals pledged to protect communities from environmental and economic threats posed by large-scale livestock operations. HELP linked the surge in corporate hog farms to the location of those farms in Black or Native American communities. Those facilities posed dangers to public health as well as driving small minority farmers out of business and damaging economic and cultural sustainability of traditional agrarian communities [Cecelski, 1992 #180]. A decade after the nation’s first landmark environmental racism protest in 1982 against the location of a PCB landfill in Warren County; HELP was vital in spearheading in the introduction of environmental justice concerns into the debate over swine impacts and linking them to farm loss. Early on the grassroots concern about swine industry expansion was framed using an environmental justice perspective which closely linked minority owned small farm loss to the location of large industrial hog farms however, this was eclipsed by the rupturing of seven hog waste lagoons that spilled over 40 million gallons of untreated swine feces into the streams and rivers of the coastal plain. North Carolina officials were forced to post health warnings and close 364,000 acres of fishing and recreational waters, costing the state thousands of dollars in lost revenues [Edwards, 2000 #183]. Attention shifted back to the environmental justice framework in October of 1998 when grassroots organizations introduced sponsored a statewide environmental justice conference to address the loss of small farms owned by people of color. When compared to small white owned farms black owned farms were more likely to be displaced by the hog industry. However Edwards and Ladd later found in another analysis of patterns of swine population concentration of North Carolina, that region income was the strongest predictor of swine concentration and with the percentage white residents and diminished local political capacity the next strongest predictors. They found that an increase local political capacity or higher voter registration leads to less extensive industrial hog farming. Which was in line with the political situation in North Carolina counties where the economic development trends, public policy trends, and macro processes tied to the state national and even global features of the political economy explained the transference of hog farming to these large industrial farms rather than the small farmers[Ladd, 2000 #182][Edwards, 2000 #183][Bullard, 1996 #178]. What this has illustrated is transforming of the model for an environmental justice campaign. It began by studying the placement of trash facilities in poor communities of color. The model was then expanded with the introduction of Edwards and Ladds analysis. Instead of just looking at race as the social indicator of environmental injustice, Edwards and Ladds work introduces class as another mediating factor. It suggests that race is still a major factor but with the closure of small farms owned by whites in North Carolina, class was introduced as another factor by which to introduce environmental injustice. I am suggesting that this frame be shifted again with the BNL situation. Instead of just looking at environmental injustice as a race or class based discrimination, Environmental injustice should be looked at as a power dynamic where one party has the power of the federal government behind it and they are working against the health and economic well being of a community fighting against it. In the BNL situation, the laboratory was a federal facility and the surrounding communities, who were economically dependant upon the laboratory, also suffered the environmental contamination from the by products of the scientific activity at the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]