Robin Cannon read the environmental impact statement for the proposed $170 million dollar incinerator that would burn non-stop in her mostly low income, African American and Hispanic neighborhood, and didn’t like what she read. She called her sister and said, “Sheila, they’re trying to kill us.”
Robin, Sheila Cannon, and their friend Charlotte Bullock began meeting every Saturday at the public library in South Central Los Angeles to learn more about the LANCER – an incinerator that would run seven days a week, 24 hours a day, burning 1,600 tons of garbage daily, producing electricity for 40,000 homes.
What they learned was pretty frightening. Potential health hazards included lung irritations, skin rashes, lesions, and tumors. They found out Sweden had already banned such incinerators because of their public health and safety concerns.
Sheila, a private duty nurse, was pretty sure the toxic ash, spewing constantly from the 250 foot smokestack just two blocks from her home, wouldn’t be good for her children with asthma. She didn’t think the expected 10% increase in air pollution would be good for any of her neighbors, nor would the mercury, arsenic, and dioxin (the chemical in agent orange) that would drift into yards on the ash, nor the constant stream of trucks rushing down neighborhood streets to and from the plant.
When the women went to a city council meeting to ask questions and voice objections, the council ignored them. “They thought we were nothing,” Sheila remembered. “Part of the determination and drive to keep going came from how badly we were treated.”
That determination drove them to think beyond the box and create something that in the nineteen-eighties was rare in the environmental movement – a coalition run by women of color reaching well beyond their mostly poor neighborhood to include residents with more political clout in white, middle and upper class neighborhoods. With no previous organizational experience, they founded Concerned Citizens of South Central Los Angeles and approached other neighborhood groups in Santa Monica, West L.A. and the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys with a pretty good argument – “If you help us stop this one, there will be no LANCER 2 in your neighborhood.”
Every chance they got CCSCLA studied up on the project, raised awareness about its negative impacts, and vocalized opposition at public meetings. “For two years I lived and breathed LANCER,” Sheila said
With widespread support from a trailblazing coalition, CCSCLA forced the city of Los Angeles to kill the project, along with two other incinerators proposed for low-income minority neighborhoods.
CCSCLA didn’t stop with that success. They moved on to develop a 40-unit low-income housing project in South Central L.A. that includes a mandatory recycling program and an after-school nanny program that matches senior citizens with kids who need tutoring. “We didn’t want to be out there just saying ‘no’ to the incinerator,” explains Robin, “We also studied the alternatives.”