Source: Indian Country Refuses to Be Corporate America’s Dumping Ground | The New Republic
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a single, massive victory to one of the thousands of communities and tribal nations currently struggling with the toxic waste left behind by profitable corporations. The court denied to hear the case FMC Corp. v. Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.FMC Corporation, as a result, is stuck with the lower court’s ruling, which is that the company owes the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes a multimillion sum for polluting tribal lands and skipping town.
Both American governments and corporations share a long history of seizing Native lands, extracting natural resources, and abandoning the poisonous dumps that result. While the Shoshone-Bannock case might be particularly preposterous, it’s one of many cases in which a tribal nation has had to spend decades battling in court to get justice simply to maintain their lands and water. It’s also one of many cases both on and off tribal land in which corporations have turned a profit by leaving disempowered communities, as well as the federal government, with messes almost impossible to clean up.
FMC Corporation is a chemical manufacturing company based in Philadelphia that operates globally. For over half a century, from 1949 to 2002, FMC operated a phosphate mine and fertilizer plant in Pocatello, Idaho. In that time, the plant produced 22 million tons of phosphorus sludge—which is toxic if absorbed, ingested, or inhaled and explodes upon exposure to air—that was then stored on the Fort Hall Reservation, the present home of the tribal nation. According to the Idaho State Journal, one of the disposal methods that FMC employed involved burying 21 tanker rail cars with phosphorous sludge, an alternative to the more expensive cleaning process. FMC opted to bury the phosphorous tankers because the company concluded that cleaning them would be “dangerous to employees,” per Indian Country Today.
Leave a Reply