Spring, 1998
SVTC Mapping Project Exposes Toxics in the 'hood,
by Michael Stanley Jones
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition--which has fought high-tech pollution for more than 15 years--is now using the high-tech industries' own tools and technology to map the industrial pollution in Santa Clara County. In celebration of Earth Week, SVTC unveiled the first in a series of maps on its website at www.svtc.org/resource.htm.
The site contains maps and data from EPA and the Regional Water Quality Control Board about the 178 groundwater contamination sites in Santa Clara County, including the highest concentration of Superfund sites in the U.S. It also enables people to compare the polution sites with demographic information, including census data on race, economic status and children.
The environmental justice movement and the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition have long realized that toxic contamination disproportionately affects low-income communities and communities of color.
In SVTC's two-year old Environmental Justice Project-- Mapping Santa Clara County Toxic Inventories-- we've learned that finer tools are needed to reveal relationships between toxic contamination sites and the neighborhoods surrounding Silicon Valley's high technology beltway. The tool we now use is called GIS, short for Geographic Information System, a technology born of the wedding between computer carthography and database management.
GIS allows SVTC to capture toxics data generated by government agencies and compare it to information from the 1990 U.S. Census on race, income and other demographic characteristics of communities near high-tech industries. With help from our GIS wizards, Mike Meuser (of Clary-Meuser & Associates) and Francie Stanley-Jones, the results are immediately available for presentation as a map.
For last summer's South Bay Health and Environmental Justice Festival in Alviso, Francie created a GIS map of Superfund sites and invited people to find their homes or places of work on a County map. Some were surprised by the contamination they found in their neighborhoods. Discovering how close to home many of these sites are helped them to overcome our community's out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality.
More recently, Mike Meuser attached U.S. Census data to the groundwater contamination database and produced maps showing patterns of toxic sites. They revealed the clustering of low-income, mainly rental households, and of certain communities of color and children in neighborhoods in close proximity to the valley's toxic industrial belt (along Highway 101). The visual impression is astounding. Mike's maps are suggestive of where we might look for further evidence of environmental injustice in Santa Clara County. Mike also developed the new Environmental Defense Fund maps (www.scorecard.org).
Soon, the Mapping Toxic Inventories project will allow people use the Internet to find their neighborhood, and overlay it with a map of Superfund and other groundwater contamination sites. Additional layers of environmental data will be added to give residents a more complete picture of the chemical world we have created and hope to change.
Michael Stanley-Jones is an SVTC mapping consultant.
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