UC Berkeley

This research project is a study of Kettleman City, California, home to the largest Class I toxic waste dump in the western United States, owned and operated by the public corporation Waste Management Inc. (WMI). The story of Kettleman City is a cautionary tale of hubris that warns of the consequences of the complete disregard for the natural environment and the tolerance for corporation's profit-generating schemes that harm human health and the ecosystem. Divided into three parts, the project expands scholarship on the anthropology of disaster, the study of corporations in the United States within a framework of environmental justice, and the controlling processes underlying the dominant paradigms.

The first part of the dissertation examines government and corporate neglect and acquiescence to the incremental degradation and devastation of California's environment since the mid-nineteenth century involving the displacement and extermination of Native Americans and the Tulare Lake Basin, the killing and contamination of migratory birds in the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge, and the corruption and power of the agricultural industry. This history lays the groundwork for WMI selecting Kettleman City as the site for the largest toxic waste dump west of the Mississippi. Since the 1990s, the town's largely Latino population has been fighting against the dump and for the environmental safety of its residents, and many credit them for launching the environment justice movement in the western United States. Using ethnographic and archival methods, I examine the history of Kettleman City and the opposition of its residents to the waste facility and the recent discovery of elevated rates of birth defects and infant deaths since 2007.

In the second part of this study I examine how our corporatized, industrial society has made landfills and other environmental injustices permanent fixtures in our society and how, as consumers, we have become conditioned to disregard waste as anything but normal. This research complicates the categorization of what constitutes a "disaster" and finds that not only are landfills certain to cause serious future catastrophes, but that unlike other disasters that are abrupt and uncontrollable, landfill disasters are avoidable "ticking time bombs." We accept them because of ideological convictions supported by science, technology, and government oversight that evidently accepts accidents, spills, and site contaminations as natural, inevitable or necessary byproducts. I document the long list of serious violations at the WMI facility in Kettleman City and the subsequent fines levied by regulators and out-of-court settlement deals. In short, I argue that our history and culture has created a society with a high tolerance for corporate environmental degradation for the perceived benefit of economic progress.

In the final part of this study I unveil the socio-historical, political, and economic processes responsible for a culture of wastefulness. In the nineteenth century, Americans were aware of what they used and purchased. Americans valued thrift, and since recycling was very common, people produced little waste. The Industrial Revolution led to the rise of corporations by the twentieth century and to a growing advertising industry that promoted hyper-consumption. This, in turn, created demand for the waste hauling and disposal industry. I document how WMI, a multibillion dollar transnational corporation, by the 1980s and 1990s had grown into a powerful institution, and now maintains a monopoly over the American waste industry and beyond. I explore the history of WMI and examine how the company has successfully influenced political, economic, and cultural spheres of American society to build and sustain its empire. WMI's success lies in its power to influence public perceptions of waste and waste services: a power that has gone unquestioned for far too long.