Contemporary Justice Review, 2013Vol. 16, No. 4, 394–411, http

Contemporary Justice Review, 2013
Vol. 16, No. 4, 394–411,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10282580.2013.857094‘Becoming a
waste land where nothing can survive’: resisting state-corporate
environmental crime in a ‘forgotten’ place
Meghan G. McDowell*
Justice & Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ,
USA (Received 7 May 2012; accepted 15 October 2012)
Environmental justice advocates have made visible the practice
of dispropor tionately siting hazardous waste facilities in low -
income communities of color throughout the USA. Typically,
state-corporate actors decide where to place these
environmentally undesirable projects, with an eye toward the
bottom line rather than the health and safety of particular
community members. Through an analysis of secondary data and
archival materials, ranging from public hearings to court
documents and newspaper accounts, a case study of state-
corporate environmental crime and how one rural, historically
African American town in Arizona organized to resist the siting
of a fourth landﬁll in their community is explored. Theoretical
concepts advanced by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, such as ‘forgotten
places’, are put into conversation with the literature on state-
corporate crime. An examination of the relationship between
environmental inequality, state-corporate crime, and people’s
capacity for resistance is presented.
Keywords: environmental racism; state-corporate crime;
Arizona; forgotten places
In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission on Racial
Justice (UCCRJ) released its now famous report, Toxic Waste
and Race. The UCCRJ study con cluded that hazardous waste
sites are disproportionately located in low-income communities
of color. Then UCCRJ director Benjamin Chavis, coined the
term ‘environmental racism’ to describe this phenomenon. The
report not only sparked a nationwide social movement for

environmental justice, it also laid the foundation for an
emergent field of study that sought to examine patterns of
environmental inequality. Since UCCRJ’s initial report,
scholars have broadened Chavis’ definition of environmental
racism to ‘any policy, practice, or directive that differentially
affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended)
individuals, groups, or communities based on race’ (Bullard,
2000, p. 98).
The communities and people targeted by complex dynamics of
environmental racism have rich histories of resistance that have
been documented in the recent literature (Bullard, 2000; Lerner,
2005, 2010; Pellow, 2002). Mobile, Arizona is a historically
Black agricultural community located thirty-five miles
southwest of Phoenix. As Phoenix grew into the sixth largest
metropolitan area in the USA, Mobile, encompassing an area of
just six square miles with roughly 96 inhabitants, became a
‘dumping ground’ for the city’s waste. Presently, Mobile
residents live between three landfills, the now closed 118 acre
Sierra Estrella landfill, the 238
*Email: [email protected]
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
acre Rainbow Valley construction and debris landfill, and the
690 acre Butterfield Station landfill – the largest in the state –
operated by the Waste Management Cor poration (Leonard,
2002). The siting of several additional ‘undesirable projects’
have also been proposed for Mobile, including an oil refinery, a
women’s prison, and a massive hazardous waste incinerator
(Leonard, November, 2003, pp. B–8; see also Pitzl, 2003).
In his book, Garbage Wars, Pellow (2002) argues,
‘environmental racism unfolds in ways that are more complex,
more disturbing, and more unsettling than most written accounts
of environmental justice struggles reveal’ (p. 4). What happened
in Mobile is no exception.The path of least resistance: race,
class, and waste
Earth Day was first celebrated in the USA in April 1970. The
nascent environmen tal movement led to an increase in public

concern about hazardous waste facilities, treatment, and storage
(Mohai, 2005). The nationwide environmental movement
coupled with strong local opposition to the siting of hazardous
waste facilities (i.e. the NIMBY, ‘not in my backyard’
mentality) encouraged state actors and corporate administrators
to approach siting decisions by ‘following the path of least resis
tance’ (Mohai, 2005). In many cases, the path of least
resistance, having been cleared by decades of racial
discrimination, led directly into the backyards of low income
communities of color.
Twenty years after the UCCRJ report, Mohai and Saha (2007)
conducted a ‘national reassessment’ of scholarship on inequality
and the distribution of hazard ous waste. They argue that
explanations of this relationship can be organized under three
themes: economic factors, sociopolitical factors, and racial
factors (Mohai & Saha, 2007, p. 345). Studies that attribute
environmental inequality to economic factors make the case that
hazardous waste facilities are strategically sited in areas where
land values and productions costs are low (Mohai & Saha, 2007;
e.g. see Daniels & Friedman, 1999; Rhodes, 2002). In other
words, ostensibly neutral eco nomic calculations drive siting
decisions, rather than neighborhood demographics, such as race
and class. An additional explanation that emerges from this
body of literature is the claim that once a hazardous waste
facility is located in a given area, property values decline and
wealthier residents move away, citing ‘quality of life’ as a
factor in their move (Mohai & Saha, 2007).
Studies employing sociopolitical factors to explain patterns of
environmental inequality diverge sharply from these arguments.
Scholars in this camp point to the racial wealth gap, along w ith
additional sociopolitical factors, such as residential segregation
and economic disinvestment to not only dispute the claim that
eco nomic factors are ‘nonracial’, but also to offer further
evidence of the relationship between race, class, and
environmental inequality (Mohai & Saha, 2007; see also Allen,
2001; Carter, 2006). In effect, these factors drain political and

social capital from low-income communities of color making it
difﬁcult for residents to organize efforts to resist ‘unwanted
land uses’ (Mohai & Saha, 2007; e.g. Aliyu, Kasim, & Martin,
2011; Bullard, 2000; Norton et al., 2007; Pellow, 2002).
Mohai and Saha (p. 345) attribute patterns of environmental
inequality to ‘racial factors’ making the case that race is the
most signiﬁcant predictor where hazardous waste facilities will
be located. Because evidence of overt racial prejudice in siting
decisions is sparse, research examining whether and how race
plays a role in environmental inequality point to the following
factors to support their claims: (1) contemporary patterns of
racial inequality in a number of areas (i.e. housing, health care,
political representation, and so forth), (2) legacies of racial
oppression that have resulted in environmental inequities, and
(3) racism and white supremacy are systemic and embedded in
our institutions (Mohai & Saha, 2007, p. 364; see also Park &
Pellow, 2004; Pulido, 2000; Smith, 2005).
Indeed, many argue that contemporary manifestations of
environmental racism must be adequately historicized in order
to fully understand how certain communities become targeted as
dumping grounds for hazardous waste in the present (Mohai,
2005; Park & Pellow, 2004; Pellow, 2002; Pulido, 2000). For
example, in her book, Conquest, Smith (2005) explains that
efforts to justify the theft of Native lands were premised on
constructing Native people as unable to ‘properly control or
subdue nat ure’ and as ‘dirty, impure, and hence expendable’
(pp. 56–57). The point is that the ‘exploitation of people of
color and of natural resources have gone hand-in-hand
throughout [USA] history and [this] exploitation remains at the
foundation of racial domination in the USA today’ (Park &
Pellow, 2004, p. 405; emphasis in original).
Given this, historicizing the relationship between current
patterns of environ mental inequality and the living legacies of
settler colonialism, slavery, and geno cide is necessary, because
it opens up a space to ask urgent questions about power
relationships. Here, it becomes crucial to determine not only

who is disadvantaged by environmental inequality, but also who
privileges from the disproportionate sit ing of environmental
hazards in communities of color and/or poor, working class,
indigenous, and immigrant communities (Park & Pellow,
2011).1 Pulido (2000) argues that examining environmental
injustices through the lens of white privilege ‘allows us to see
how environmental racism has been produced – not only by
consciously targeting people of color – but by the larger [socio-
spatial-political] processes … in which whites have sought to
fully exploit the benefits of their whiteness’ (p. 33). Systemic
environmental inequities, therefore, emerge from and occur
within particular historic, economic, political, and social
arrangements of power, oppression, and privilege.
Mohai and Saha conclude their comprehensive reassessment of
literature exam ining the distribution of hazardous waste
facilities with the definitive remark: ‘we find that the magnitude
of racial disparities around hazardous waste facilities is much
greater than what previous national studies have reported. We
also find [that racial disparities] persist even when controlling
for economic and sociopolitical variables’ (p. 343; emphasis
added). In short, 20 years after the initial findings made by the
UCCRJ, the racial composition of neighborhoods remain the
strongest, but not sole, predictor where hazardous waste
facilities are located in the USA (Bullard, Mohai, Saha, &
Wright, 2007; Mohai & Saha, 2007).
Environmental justice advocates have exposed a range of harms
committed by state and corporate actors in the decades since the
movement began. The struggle to hold people accountable for
environmental harms – ranging from environmental racism to
oil spills – and to better understand the phenomenon more
generally, has become the work of environmental or ‘green’
criminologists.State-corporate environmental crime
The field of environmental or ‘green’ criminology has emerged
in recent years and is dedicated to the study of issues pertaining
to ‘environmental harms, environmental laws, [and/or]
environmental regulations’ (White, 2008, p. 8; see also Lynch,

1990). Those studying the relationship between state actors,
corporate actors, and crime focus on the
Political and economic processes that enable state and corporate
managers to pursue plans and policies – often in concert with
one another – that result in death, ill health, financial loss, and
increasingly in the globalized capitalist economy, cultural
destruc tion, all while being insulated from the full weight of
criminalization for these actions. (Kramer, Michalowski, &
Kauzlarich, 2002, p. 266)
State and/or corporate actors are often involved when
environmental crimes are committed; however, their actions are
rarely framed as state-corporate crimes (Bradshaw, 2012).
Reviewing robust literature on state-corporate crime is well
beyond the scope of this article, but some findings are important
to highlight here. First, the definition of state-corporate crime
includes acts that are illegal under established law, but also
recognizes those actions that are ‘socially injurious’, but not
illegal (Aulette & Michalowski, 1993; Kramer & Michalowski,
1990; Kramer et al., 2002). Second, state-corporate crimes can
be state-initiated or state-facilitated. State-initiated corpo rate
crime refers to instances when the state implicitly or overtly
directs corpora tions under state contracts to ‘engage in
organizational deviance’ (Kramer et al., 2002, p. 271). State-
facilitated corporate crime ‘occurs when government regulatory
institutions fail to restrain deviant business activities’ due to
shared interests ‘whose attainment would be hampered by
aggressive regulation’ (Kramer et al., 2002, p. 272).2 Third,
literature on state-corporate crime has contributed to a more
com plex understanding of state power by exposing the fact that
the ‘normalized exer cise of biopower [is] frequently deeply
injurious to particular segments of the society’ (Michalowski,
2010, p. 26; emphasis added).3
A growing body of work brings together these two fields
providing a compre hensive analytical framework for studying
state-corporate environmental crimes (Bradshaw, 2012; Clifford
& Edwards, 2011; Lynch, Burns & Stretesky, 2010; Simon,

2000; Stretesky & Lynch, 1998; White, 2008). This body of
work can be combined to assess whether state actors in Arizona
‘failed to restrain’ corporate actors from Southpoint
Environmental Services (SES) from engaging in ‘deviant
business practices’ in Mobile, practices that could be
characterized as state-corpo rate crime (Kramer et al., 2002, p.
272). As this review on environmental inequality demonstrates,
the ‘particular segments’ of society that Michalowski refers to,
those most likely to be deeply injured by state-corporate
environmental crime in the USA, are low-income communities
of color (Bullard, 2000; Bullard & Wright, 2009; Stretesky &
Lynch, 1998).Environmental inequality in the valley of the sun
Arizona is of course no stranger to systemic inequality.4 The
state’s early economic development was organized around the
‘Five C’s’: cotton, copper, cattle, citrus, and climate (tourism)
(Olson, 2011). All ﬁve commodities require a cheap and exploit
able labor force. During the Jim Crow era, Arizona’s white elite
often published advertisements in east coast newspapers
soliciting Black labor (Whitaker, 2000; see also, Crudup,
1998).5 With the promise of better working conditions and
relief from the persistent ‘racial, economic, and social
marginalization’ of the Jim Crow south, many Black people
made their way west (Whitaker, 2000, p. 199). Those who set
tled in Arizona found work in the agricultural and mining
industries (Crudup, 1998).6
However, in many respects, Arizona proved to be no different
than jurisdictions in the South. Whitaker (2000) explains that
the white elite in Phoenix, intending to keep Arizona a state
‘run by Anglos, for Anglos,’ vigorously maintained the racial
caste system put in place by Spanish colonizers hundreds before
(p. 198).7 Like its southern counterparts, state actors in
Arizona, alarmed by the rise in mostly male Chinese and Black
workers, and fearing inter-racial unions, passed anti-miscegena
tion laws in 1901, and by 1909 had passed laws legalizing
segregation (Whitaker, 2000). As a result of this discriminatory
legislation, by the early 1930s, African American, American

Indian, and Latino/residents of South Phoenix were clustered in
areas ‘deprived of water services, sanitation, and paved roads,
and living in shacks with noxious industry for neighbors’ (Ross,
2011, p. 121).8
These dynamics made South Phoenix into ‘among the most
striking case studies of environmental injustice to be found
among large American cities’ and have been the subject of a
handful of studies (Ross, 2011, p. 122).9 For example, Bolin et
al. (2005) demonstrate how land use plans, zoning decisions,
racially discriminatory housing and lending practices, racial
violence and intimidation, and political disen franchisement
contributed to the ‘sedimentation of racial inequality’ in
Phoenix (Oliver & Shapiro, 1995, quoted in Pulido, 2000, p.
16). Furthermore, despite the promise of jobs by state and
corporate officials, the presence of industrial and com mercial
facilities in South Phoenix (and corresponding increase in
exposure to envi ronmental harms) has not resulted in any
demonstrable economic benefits to the surrounding community
(Bolin et al., 2005, p. 166).
Later, Grineski et al. (2007) determined that poor communities
of color in Phoenix are subject to greater levels of air pollution
than white communities. They note that although all residents
are implicated in the creation of air pollution, patterns of
exposure impact poor communities of color at greater rates.
Unequal exposure pat terns were attributed to ‘the role of white
privilege in the historical and contemporary development of
industrial and transportation corridors in Phoenix’ (Grineski et
al., 2007, p. 535). In Phoenix then, much like the rest of the
USA, patterns of environ mental inequality can be mapped
along lines of race and class (see Hoye, 2003).‘A geography of
despair’: mobile, Arizona10
In 1991, Maricopa County published a ‘Mobile Land Use Plan’
that provided a sketch of Mobile’s history and then outlined
plans for the town’s future develop ment.11 According to this
report, Mobile was founded in the 1920s by forty Black
sharecroppers who fled racial violence in Mobile, Alabama.

Accounts of Mobile’s founding, published in newspapers at the
time, suggest that these sharecroppers were led by ‘a fraudulent
white missionary preacher [to the area that is now Mobile] with
the dream of making it the finest religious center’ in the entire
coun try (Whitaker, 2000, p. 200; see also Crudup, 1998).12
The idea of Mobile becom ing the premier religious center in
the USA never materialized. By 1941, a ‘Mobile townsite’ was
established. According to the Maricopa County report, Mobile
was ‘intended strictly [as] a Negro settlement. All adjoining
lands including the corporation now existing, whose purpose is
for irrigation development of some 20,000 acres of land,
belongs 100% to Negro citizens.’13
Despite harsh living conditions and scarce economic
opportunities, Mobile was one of the few places in Arizona
where African Americans could own land and, according to
many residents, for this reason, many elected to stick it out in
Mobile. Land ownership enabled a degree of self-determination
not experienced picking cotton in nearby Buckeye and
Maricopa, where workers often labored under what was in effect
a debt peonage system (Nilsen, 2004; see also Crudup, 1998).
Reflect ing on her parents’ decision to stay in Mobile and raise
a family there, one former resident explained, ‘[My family was]
trying to establish something of their own – everywhere else
they were renting or leasing space’ (Rushton, 2004, p. 7).
Located at the foot of the Sierra Estrella mountain range,
Mobile has never been a large town. Its African-American
population ranged from 100 to 400 residents at its peak in the
1960s (Nilsen, 2004). Due to a combination of harsh (if not
harshly ironic) environmental conditions – flooding and lack of
water – coupled with scarce economic opportunities, many
residents were eventually forced to relocate (Whitaker, 2000).
Newspaper accounts reported that in the 1980s, racial demo
graphics began to shift as an influx of white residents moved in
and many Black residents left Mobile in search of greater
economic opportunities (Nilsen, 2004). It was around this time,
that Mobile residents fought their first recorded battle against

state-corporate environmental crime.
In the mid-1980s, Arizona state officials solicited bids for a
massive hazardous waste facility to be built in Mobile. The
facility would manage mostly out-of-state hazardous waste
(primarily toxic PBC sludge) and house up to three hazardous
waste incinerators and possibly seven landfills. Two companies
submitted bids – Environmental Services Co. (ENSCO) and
BKK, Incorporated. A memorandum leaked in 1990, after
ENSCO had won the contract, revealed that state and ENSCO
representatives had engaged in back door negotiations and
‘other improprieties’ that undermined the ostensibly fair
bidding process (Stanton, 1990).
Despite this revelation, plans for the state-owned and ENSCO-
operated facility moved forward – roads and power lines were
built so ENSCO could begin con struction on the site. State
actors, clearly not anticipating any public resistance, began
building the facility ‘prior to completing the public hearing
process’ (Work on Waste, USA, 1991; emphasis added). During
a public hearing in May 1990, held in Mobile, some
environmentalists and community members protesting the
‘proposed’ facility, were met with police violence when
Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies attacked the protesters with
stun guns (Rubin, 1990; Work on Waste, USA, 1991). Reports
suggest that the deputies attacked the protesters without war
rant (Rubin, 1990; Work on Waste, USA, 1991).
The state never recovered from the image embarrassment that
arose from this incident. Activists co-opted the state’s violence
to their advantage and public out rage about the attack and the
revelation about the facility’s existence forced newly elected
Governor Fife Symington to shut down the operation in 1991
(Ross, 2011). Government officials paid ENSCO $44 million to
sever its contract with the state and cease construction on the
hazardous waste facility (Work on Waste, USA, 1991);
however, the victory over ENSCO and state officials was short-
lived. Just 13 years later, Mobile was once again targeted for a
state-corporate hazardous waste venture.Taking on SES

In 2002, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (MCBS)
approved a permit request by SES to construct a fourth landfill
near Mobile. This new facility, planned to be an 18-storey, 692
acre behemoth, would supplant Butterfield Station as the state’s
largest. According to Maricopa County officials and SES
representatives, Mobile was an ideal choice for a landfill
because of its ‘low population,’ its ‘isola tion from urban
residential impact,’ and its ‘proximity to Phoenix’ (MCBS
meeting minutes, October 2002). Moreover, county officials and
SES representatives argued that building another landfill was a
necessity, because (1) valley landfills were ‘reaching capacity’,
(2) a new landfill would ‘keep consumer costs down’, and (3)
the emergence of a new waste management company, SES,
would ‘increase competition’ – characterized as a plus for
everyone (Maricopa County Planning and Zoning Commission
meeting minutes, November 2002).
During the deliberation process, while MCBS was considering
SES’s proposal, residents took every opportunity to voice their
opposition to the project – sharing their concerns during
numerous hearings before both the Maricopa County Plan ning
and Zoning Commission and the MCBS. Residents also
organized anti-landfill petition drives, conducted newspaper
interviews, made calls, and wrote emails to various board
members to express their disapproval. Mobile community
members articulated three primary concerns: (1) environmental
and health hazards, (2) environmental racism, and (3) unethical
state-corporate collusion.14‘Don’t drink the water’: the
environmental and health hazards of landfills
Perhaps more than any other group of residents in the state,
Mobile community mem bers are intimately familiar with the
environmental and health hazards associated with landfills.
Landfills are used because they are cheap and relatively easy to
construct (Rushton, 2003); however, landfills are also associated
with an array of environmen tal and social impacts including
but not limited to: ground water contamination, harmful releases
of landfill gases, air pollution, vector born diseases, birth

defects, increased risk of cancer, increased traffic, noise,
aesthetic degradation (i.e. littering and smells), and land
devaluation (Hirshfeld, Vesilind, & Pas, 1992, p. 474).
Speaking before the MCBS in December 2002, several Mobile
residents expressed their concerns about the environmental
impact of the proposed landfill:
MCBS assured residents that the [previous] landfill would not
contaminate the ground water; however, after five short years
the operators [Waste Management] posted signs at our
Community Center that read: ‘Do not drink the water, doing so
can be hazard ous to your health. Bottled water has been
provided at the front entrance’.
To allow SES to operate [in the planned area] would put
residents of Mobile in between three landfills. The health hazard
this poses is unacceptable. ADEQ has not even done an
environmental impact study and yet a special use permit has
been approved … [T]here must be some standard for how much
waste can be put in one area to prevent the area from becoming
a wasteland where nothing can survive. [emphasis added]
Additional testimony by Mobile residents (during the December
2002 hearing in front of the MCBS) raised concerns over ‘toxic
smells and seepage,’ environmental damage, poisoned water
wells, ‘blowing garbage and dust,’ ‘toxic air quality from diesel
fumes,’ and chemical fumes emitted by the six methane burners
Waste Management operates ‘24 h a day, seven days a
week.’Race, class, and rurality: framing environmental
(in)justice
Residents also understood that the environmental hazards in
their community were a result of Mobile being targeted by
state-corporate actors as a site for a dispropor tionate number of
hazardous waste facilities. To articulate this claim, many
residents employed an intersectional environmental justice
frame of race, class, and rurality:
I personally feel our area has more than done its share. This
area they are proposing has historic value, a fact that needs to
be considered … I feel it’s extremely unfair to push another

landfill on a small, poor rural area, simply because they most
likely haven’t the means to fight back. We are a small rural
area, but there are enough of us to stand up and be heard! Please
hear our voices! [Email communication to MCBS]
Mobile was homesteaded in the early 1900s by children of
former slaves and has many historical sites. The fact that we are
a poor, small, minority community should not make us the site
to dump the county’s garbage. [Email communication to MCBS]
Both Maricopa County and the State of Arizona have
completely failed to account for the disparate impact the siting
of this facility will have on a historically African American
area. Indeed, African Americans continue to own a significant
percentage of land in the area of the proposed Southpoint
landfill. [Comment submitted to ADEQ, October 2004]
As a low-income, rural, and historically black community,
Mobile was vulnerable to exploitation by state-corporate
officials, who many felt considered residents as ‘powerless’ and
‘voiceless.’ A longtime Mobile resident explains:
Because we are a small community with a small population
where most of the resi dents are not very affluent or highly
educated, Southpoint and these other industries see us as having
the ideal demographics for their undesirable projects. [Comment
submitted to ADEQ, October 2004]
Another community member shared a similar concern:
Residents most adversely affected by granting yet another
industrial landfill waste site are predominately low -to-
moderately income [sic], minority and indigent individuals.
They do not have the economic means to buy their way out of
polluted neighbor hoods in the Southeast Valley and Mobile and
move to the more environmentally friendly, affluent, upscale
neighborhoods like Northeast Maricopa County. [Comment
submitted to ADEQ, October 2004]Willful lies: debunking
myths and exposing state-corporate crime in mobile
Further, testimony and public comments made by Mobile
community members made transparent the unethical, and at
times illegal, state-corporate collusion that too often results in

the siting of ‘undesirable projects’ in places like Mobile, rather
than more affluent urban white communities throughout the
valley. For example, one resident’s public comment to ADEQ in
2004, exposed how Maricopa County and SES officials had a
shared interest in seeing the landfill built:
Mr Jason Barney is one of the owners of SES, and his father is
Denny Barney, a member of the Maricopa County Planning
Commission. Karrin Taylor is the attorney for SES and her
brother Andrew Kunasek, is the Maricopa County Board
Supervisor of District 3. [meaning he had a vote on whether the
landfill permit should be issued]
Several residents raised the issue of ‘invested interests’ and
improper ethical conduct between MCBS and SES officials. The
Mobile Community Council for Progress mailed a flyer to
residents explaining the extent of state-corporate corruption:
Three out of five MCBS have ties to the Barney family [owners
of SES]. The Maricopa County Planning and Zoning
Commission willfully lied to the opponents of the garbage dump
and falsified affidavits certifying posting requirements for
public meetings.
Indeed, many residents felt that the approval process was
tainted by corruption and ‘misinformation.’ One individual
describes what happened at a public meeting regarding the
landfill held by SES in 2002: ‘There was no presentation and it
was an open forum run like a cocktail party. They compared the
690-acre site to a small [dump] in Gilbert.’ Another resident
echoed this concern stating that because the project was issued
a permit in only 90 days, there was no way for folks ‘to get a
full understanding of the impact from this potential third
garbage dump [on] our small rural community.’ One community
member charged MCBS with outright lies:
Our supervisor [Mary Rose Wilcox]15 has been quoted as
saying there was no opposi tion from the community and that
not many people had shown up at a meeting she held at the
Mobile School. I was at this meeting and no one spoke up in
favor of the dump. Many people were not notified of the

meeting and many of those that were could not attend at the
early hour of 6 pm when they were still working. [emphasis
added]
These testimonies indicate that Mobile’s community members
were able to identify and expose a series of incidents that make
a strong case for the occurrence of state facilitated corporate
crime between Maricopa County officials, SES employees, and
later employees from the Arizona Department of Environmental
Quality. To recall the definition given earlier, state-facilitated
corporate crimes occur when ‘govern ment regulatory
institutions fail to restrain deviant business activities’ due to
shared interests (Kramer, et al., 2002, p. 272). The desire to
support capitalist principles (i. e. competition) and support a
pro-business climate in the state, may have led state and local
government officials to ‘look the other way’ on issues of
environmental racism and health hazards already present in
Mobile that would have been exacer bated by SES’s proposal to
build a fourth landfill in the area.
Residents disputed two interrelated claims by MCBS and SES in
particular: first, was the claim made by state-corporate officials
that the SES landfill had to be built, because other landfills in
the area were ‘at capacity.’ Mobile residents gathered and
presented data that countered this point, demonstrating that
existing landfills in the area have a ‘combined capacity of 300
additional years’ (this does not include the capacity of the
landfills currently in operation in the Phoenix metropolitan
area), thereby debunking the capacity myth promoted by MCBS
and SES (H. Shanker, personal communication, 15 March,
2011).16
The second myth discredited by community members was the
claim that Mobile was an ‘ideal place’ to locate another landfill.
In fact, SES officials went so far as to argue that a fourth
landfill would have a ‘positive impact’ on the community by
providing an economic boost to the area. To reiterate, the
primary justifications for siting another landfill in the area,
according to officials, was Mobile’s low popula tion density,

existing infrastructure, and proximity to Phoenix. Don Besler,
then President of the Mobile School Board, offered a moving
response to these ‘justifi cations’ in a testimony before the
MCBS in December, 2002:
Southpoint says that no threatened wildlife species exist on the
property. I submit to
you that we, the residents of the Mobile area are the endangered
species … Ladies
and gentleman if this project goes forward we will continue to
have a low population with low development because as you
know these go hand in hand. The Mobile com munity is not just
a tract of land, a district or a development area. We are a
commu nity of people, retirees, businessmen, parents, and
children. We are not anti-progress, we encourage development
and we only want a safe environment in which to raise our
children…you have no doubt heard the saying, ‘not in our
backyard’ well in our case we have 3 landfills in our backyard.
Do not turn us into ‘the landfill capital of Arizona’. [emphasis
added]
Besler’s narrative highlights the gravity of the situation for
Mobile residents. From the position of residents’ lived
experience, the choice by state-corporate actors to site yet
another environmental hazard in their town, in effect, made
residents ‘endangered species.’ This theoretically rich analysis
offered by Besler evokes Gilmore’s (2007) definition of racism
as ‘the state-sanctioned and extralegal pro duction and
exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature
death’ (p. 28). To characterize Mobile residents as ‘endangered
species’ is to suggest the possibility of premature death as a
result of state-corporate environmental crimes.
Ultimately, despite receiving 42 letters of opposition, a petition
against the land fill with 12 signatures, three telephones calls in
opposition, and four letters of con cern, on 7 November, 2002,
the Maricopa County Planning and Zoning Commission
approved by a vote of 6–0 SES’s request to build an 18-storey
landfill on 690 acres adjacent to Mobile. One month later in

December 2002, MCBS voted 3–1 to approve a special use
permit request submitted by SES to rezone the land they owned
from a designation of ‘rural and open space’ to a designation of
‘indus trial use,’ effectively giving SES landfill the go ahead,
pending an environmental compliance review by ADEQ.Taking
it to the courts: challenging SES and ADEQ
Following this decision, in 2003, Mobile landowners and
residents formed the Mobile Community Council for Progress,
INC. (MCCP), a not-for-profit corpora tion, hired Tempe-based
attorney Howard Shanker to represent them, and filed two
lawsuits against the MCBS. The first suit charged MCBS with
procedural violations stemming from their vote to approval the
landfill. By law, MCBS needed a two thirds supermajority to
approve the zoning change request by SES and given that the
board did not meet this requirement, the suit asked the county to
nullify its decision and to pay attorney fees (Leonard, 2003).
The suit was ultimately dismissed in court, despite a strong case
(H. Shanker, personal communication, 15 March, 2011; see also
Rushton, 2004).
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) joined MCCP in their second suit charging
MCBS in federal court with civil rights violations, namely
environmental racism, for ‘approving zoning laws and land use
ordinances that have established the community as “the
preferred destination for a string of environmentally undesirable
projects”’ (Leonard, 2003, B–7). In an irony only befitting of
the complex and contradictory nature of environmental justice
struggles, this lawsuit also had another backer, Waste
Management (WM) the oper ator of the Butterfield Station
landfill in Mobile. In an effort to avoid the direct competition
that the new SES landfill would create, WM supported the
lawsuits by paying the legal fees associated with each case (H.
Shanker, personal communica tion, 15 March, 2011; see also
Rushton, 2004).
While the NAACP – MCCP lawsuit was pending, ADEQ
approved the ‘South point Solid Waste Facility Plan’ in October

of 2004. In their environmental impact report, ADEQ
determined the new landfill would ‘not create an adverse
disparate impact, violating the principles of environmental
justice’ (see Mobile Community
Council for Progress, INC., vs. Arizona Department of
Environmental Quality,
2006). The approval came with stipulations: SES was to
contribute 65,000 dollars a year to the community, conduct
daily ‘litter patrols,’ and ‘perform historical studies of the area’
(Leonard, 2004). ADEQ director Steven Owen was quoted as
saying that the department did have some concerns about siting
another landfill in Mobile, but ‘Under state law, there were no
grounds to deny this landfill’ (Leonard, 2004, pp. B–9). This
was the final hurdle for SES. With permits in hand, the company
could begin construction on the landfill.
ADEQ’s ruling defied logic. Researchers hired by lead attorney
Howard Shan ker, determined that Mobile is home to 45% of the
municipal solid waste landfill capacity for all of Maricopa
County (but only 0.0000325% of the population of Maricopa
County). With the addition of the SES landfill that number
would increase to 75%. Further, while African Americans
represent roughly 3% of the total population of Maricopa
County, within a one-mile radius of the proposed SES site in
Mobile that figure rises to 17%. In Mobile, class intersects with
race to compound marginalization: 19% of residents live below
the federal poverty line (Pijawka, Guhathakurta, & Ozkeresteci,
2005).
Pijawka et al. (2005) also performed a risk burden analysis,
measuring individ ual exposure to hazardous waste. They
concluded that if the SES landfill were built, the average risk
burden per person in Maricopa County (population three mil
lion), would be 68.4 tonnes. In Mobile, with a population of just
96 in 2000, the average risk burden would be a stunning
122,512 tonnes per person (Pijawka et al., 2005).17 In light of
these facts, MCCP filed yet another lawsuit to try and halt con
struction on the landfill, demanding that the courts review the

ADEQ decision. Attorney Shanker, on behalf of MCCP, argued,
‘ADEQ’s finding of ‘no disparate impact’ is not supported by
substantial evidence, was contrary to law, arbitrary and
capricious, and/or an abuse of discretion’ (Mobile Community
Council for Progress, INC., vs. Arizona Department of
Environmental Quality, 2006, p. 6). ADEQ is no stranger to
claims of negligence. The ‘notoriously lax’ organization has an
outra geously poor record of protecting Arizona residents from
environmental harms, leading some environmental activists to
rename it the ‘pollution protection pro gram’ (Ross, 2011, p.
137).18
Ultimately, the lawsuits were never settled. In 2008, Mobile
was incorporated into Goodyear and, according to attorney
Shanker shortly thereafter, SES sold its 692 acre plot of land to
residential developers – effectively nullifying the two pend ing
lawsuits. I could find no recorded accounts of Mobile
community members cel ebrating neither their victory, nor
anything to suggest that the coalition formed by residents to
promote and protect their interests – the Mobile Community
Council for Progress – persists to this day. However, this
pattern of ‘issue-oriented’ and ‘short term’ campaigns against
environmental harms that has taken place in Mobile is
consistent with national trends (Ross, 2011). Ross (2011)
explains:
Residents of low-income neighborhoods rarely have the
resources, or the time, to take on the task of correcting long-
standing, or structural, patterns of land use that burden their
communities. Campaigns against a highly visible, single-site
polluter are the norm, especially when the health impacts of that
site stand out against the backdrop of a history of
contamination. (p.123)
During a trip out to Mobile in March 2011, amidst a landscape
of hulking landfills and modest homesteads, I imagined the
battle against ENSCO, the tasering of com munity members by
Maricopa Sherriff’s deputies, and the post-work community
action forums that took place in the now shuttered Mobile

Community Center. I could not help but think that if one were
not privy to Mobile’s remarkable history, it would appear as a
most unremarkable place. However, this is not to suggest that
the mobilization of Mobile’s residents was not a success.State-
corporate environmental crime and resistance in a ‘forgotten
place’
The excavation of histories of white supremacy, colonialism,
and racial capitalism suggests that what happened in Mobile
was not conspiratorial, but systematic (Gilmore, 2007). Tracing
the social, political, and economic development of Arizona
illustrates that African Americans who migrated to Arizona
beginning in the late 1800s into the mid-1930s, occupied the
bottom rungs of the racial hierarchy, and while Arizona did
offer the opportunity for limited land ownership, the state never
supported the growth and prosperity of historically black
settlements, like Mobile. Put another way, contextualizing
contemporary manifestations of state-corporate environmental
crime enables us to ask different questions, such as, how do
histories of white supremacy, colonialism, and racial capitalism
continue to be visible in the present? How can we better
understand Mobile’s relationship to Phoenix as a ‘dumping
ground’? Certainly, Mobile’s relationship to Phoenix: the
movement of people migrating out to the Phoenix metropolitan
area (primarily for work) and the movement of trash and
hazardous waste in to the landﬁlls surrounding the commu nity;
the power wielded by state-corporate actors to make decisions
that dispropor tionately subject the people of Mobile to
environmental and health hazards, and the power of Mobile
residents to resist the siting of a fourth landﬁll in their
community.
Contemporary scholarship suggests that the prevalence of
hazardous waste facil ities in poor communities and
communities of color can be attributed to economic factors, or
sociopolitical factors, or racial factors (Mohai & Saha, 2007).
In Mobile, state-corporate actors often cited economic factors –
cheap unused land, existing infrastructure, and the potential for

jobs in an area where unemployment is high – as governing
their rationale for choosing Mobile as yet again the ‘ideal
location’ for a landﬁll. Conversely, most Mobile residents
argued that economic factors could not be divorced from
sociopolitical and racial factors. Mobile, they protested, was
targeted because it was a ‘poor, small, [historically] African
American’ and mod estly educated community. At public
hearings then, Mobile residents employed an intersectional
analysis to describe the persistent targeting of their community
for undesirable projects. This suggests that our analyses of
environmental inequality should be intersectional – examining
how each set of factors is interrelated and mutually reinforcing
– rather than vertical – privileging one set of factors over
another.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theorization of ‘forgotten places’
provides a useful framework for understanding the dynamics at
play in Mobile. According to Gilmore (2007), states are
increasingly becoming ‘antistate states’ insofar as they depend
‘on ideological and rhetorical dismissal of any agency or
capacity that “government” might use to guarantee social well -
being’ (p. 245). Nowhere could this logic be more evident than
in Arizona, where state legislators, fueled by a too often lethal
amalgamation of libertarianism, thinly veiled white supremacy,
and ‘corrupt cowboy capitalism’ (Olson, 2011), have passed
numerous discriminatory bills having exacerbated a range of
social and economic problems (Levy, 2011; Hensley, 2011).
The ‘antistate state’ also produces ‘forgotten places.’ A place
that has been ‘for gotten’ refers to both the quality of being
abandoned and ‘intensely occupied,’ and to:
Planned concentrations or sinks – of hazardous materials and
destructive practices that are in turn sources of [state-
sanctioned or extralegal] group-differentiated vulnerabili ties to
premature death. (Gilmore, 2008, p. 35; emphasis added)
Dynamics in Mobile clearly highlight this paradoxical notion of
simultaneous occu pation and abandonment by the ‘antistate
state’ (Gilmore, 2008). Mobile’s three landﬁlls, coupled with its

history of potential undesirable projects, is evidence of its
planned occupation by state-corporate interests whose sole
purpose is extracting profit. However, the ‘antistate state’ offers
little in return to Mobile residents. By offering little in terms of
infrastructure, social welfare programs, or even basic utili ties
for residents (i.e. people must use well water – a particularly
cruel fact given that one of the most serious side effects of
landfills is water contamination), state actors underscore their
abandonment of the community.
Theoretically, the conceptualization of forgotten places and
Gilmore’s reworking of racism as the state-sanctioned and/or
extra-legal production and exploitation of group differentiated
vulnerability to premature death, reframes the ‘how’ and ‘why’
of environmental inequality in generative ways. These
theoretical tools expose the biopolitical calculations (Ong,
2006) behind siting decisions and work to name the urgency of
environmental racism as a force that too often results in
premature death for particular groups – most often, but not
exclusively, low-income communities of color. Indeed, the
decision to site yet another landfill in Mobile, in the face of
over whelming evidence that the town’s residents had already
been disproportionately saddled with environmental hazards,
recalls Michalowski’s (2010) point that state corporate crime is
an exercise of biopower.
Situating state-corporate environmental crime as an exercise of
this racialized biopower, then presses us to consider how
environmental inequalities might be linked to the regulation and
management of populations more generally. And, importantly,
the ways these dynamics operate relationally. The testimonies
of resi dents make the operation of environmental privilege
visible: by attempting to sub ject the community in Mobile to
another environmental hazard, state-corporate officials were
preserving and privileging the opportunity for extended life for
outly ing Phoenix’s urban middle and upper-class residents.
This framework reworks the type of questions we can ask of
environmental crime and justice. Rather than debating whether

race or social class has a larger influence on siting decis ions, or
whether ‘neutral’ economic calculations drive these decisions,
instead we might ask how systematized environmental
inequality operates in biopolitical field that lets some live and
some (prematurely) die (Foucault, 2003; Gilmore, 2007).
Mobile residents affirm people’s capacity for resistance in the
face of state-sanc tioned premature death (Gilmore, 2007).
Community members were keenly aware of their standing as a
forgotten place. Through prepared statements, emails, news
paper interviews, and public testimonies they articulated their
interpretation of what has happening to them. Residents argued
that state-corporate actors were engaged in illegal and unethical
state-corporate collusion that subjected them to environmen tal
and health hazards, and environmental racism. Community
members were also able to identify that as a forgotten place,
Mobile has a particular social relationship to Phoenix. Residents
recognized that Mobile’s destruction (‘becoming a wasteland
where nothing can survive’) and their dehumanization (we are
an ‘endangered spe cies’) enables particular groups of people in
Phoenix to enjoy not only a greater quality of life, but also
potentially, a longer life.
State and corporate actors imagined Mobile to be the ‘path to
least resistance’, but the historical archive proves otherwise.
Contrary to the conclusions drawn earlier, Mobile’s story
suggests that despite a lack of political and social capital, low -
income communities can organize to resist unwanted land uses,
even if that resistance is temporary and event-specific. For
environmental justice advocates, what happened in Mobile
provokes perhaps more questions than it answers. For example,
how can event-specific mobilizations be turned into sustained
movements for environmental justice? How can the struggle for
environmental justice be linked between urban (i.e. South
Phoenix) and rural (i.e. Mobile) populations and places and
across movements (i.e. migrant justice and prison abolition)?
What possibilities does employing a state-corporate
environmental crime framework create? In other words, can this

framework move us toward accountability for environmental
crimes by directing our attention ‘toward the people and
institutions that create poverty and environmental destruction in
the ﬁrst place’: people with wealth and political power (Park &
Pellow, 2011, p. 63)?
Part of the response to these questions can be found by
examining how ‘ordin ary people who lack resources but who do
not necessarily lack “resourcefulness” develop the capacity to
combine themselves into extraordinary forces’ for social change
(Gilmore, 2008, p. 33). Indeed, state-corporate actors
persistently treat Mobile residents and their kin as disposable –
as merely by-products of a society organized around the logics
of racial capitalism and white supremacy; however, time and
again, community members form inter-racial coalitions and
organize to contest their relationship to the state as a ‘forgotten
place.’NotesPark and Pellow (2011) deﬁne environmental
privilege as ‘the exercise of economic, political, and cultural
power that some groups enjoy, which enables them exclusive
access to coveted environmental amenities such as forests,
parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite
neighborhoods’ (p. 4).See Aulette and Michalowski (1993),
Chambliss (1989), Clinard and Quinney (1973), Kauzlarich and
Kramer (1993).Following Gilmore (2007), what is important to
emphasize about the power of the state is its capacity to
organize ‘various factors of production, or enable them to be
disorga- nized or abandoned outright.’ This capacity is ‘based
in relationship that also change
ver time and sometimes become so persistently challenged
from above and below, by those whose opinions matter, that the
entire character of the state eventually changes as well’ (p.
28).For example, in the late nineteenth century, the USA
initiated a ‘war of conquest’ (the Mexican-American War,
1846–1848) in the area that became the southwest (Barrera,
p. 7). The American conquest of Mexico was motivated by
a number of economic interests ‘closely tied to the dynamic
expansion of [racial] capitalism’ (Barrera,p. 8; Gomez, 2007).

Southern and northern elites supported the war, because they
were looking to expand their slave empire westward (Gomez,
2007). Post-conquest, the white colonial elite also used all
means at their disposal to ‘fit’ the Pueblo Indians, Mexican
peoples, and Black slaves, who had been living in the area since
the ‘original colonization’ by Spain, into a racial caste system
(Gomez, 2007). These same ‘Anglo capitalists, speculators, and
financiers whose interests had strongly motivated the Mexican
American War’ also concentrated the land into their own hands
(Barrera,p. 23).For example: ‘Mr Farley wants 300 Negro cotton
pickers for Gilbert, Eloy, and Tuc- son, Arizona’ (Whitaker,
2000, p. 199).While beyond the scope of this paper, it is
important to note that African Americans have a longer
historical arc in Arizona than outlined in this article. The
Spanish colonizers brought Black slaves to what was then
Northern Mexico in the 1600s and white slave owners often
traveled with their slaves prior to USA colonization of the area
(Gomez, 2007).As Olson (2011) argues, in Arizona ‘corruption
was commonplace as [the white elite] manipulated the political
system for their benefit. A group of these capitalists, called the
Phoenix 40, controlled state politics until the 1970s, when the
political establish- ment opened up some. But even after their
rule, the state capitol has always been a place to lie, bribe, and
scam your way to what you want.’Ross goes on to note, ‘a 1999
analysis of Toxic Release Inventory Reports showed that
ne zip code in South Phoenix – 85040 – produced nearly
40% of all hazardous emissions in the city. It was the dirtiest
zip code in the nation’ (p. 122).For further studies of South
Phoenix see Bolin, Grineski, and Collins (2005), Grineski,
Bolin, and Boone (2007), Ross (2011), Sicotte (2003, 2008); for
further studies on environmental injustice in Arizona more
broadly see Lauderdale and Sefiha (2008).This heading is
borrowed from the title of Bolin, Grineski, & Boone’s (2005)
article
n environmental racism and South Phoenix.The history of
Mobile has proved harder to excavate. To date, I have not

located a comprehensive recorded history of the town. The
following account was pieced together from newspaper
accounts, documents from the Maricopa County Recorder’s
Office, and a few books that mention Mobile in passing.State
officials later retracted this version of Mobile’s founding,
arguing instead that their original report was mistaken and
Mobile was not in fact founded and named by Black
sharecroppers, some of whom migrated from Mobile, Alabama,
but rather, the area became known as ‘Mobile’ as earl y as 1879
when the Southern Pacific Railroad established its first
transcontinental route through the town and referred to the area
generally as ‘Mobile’ (see Nilsen, 2004).This information
comes from a document provided to me by Attorney Howard
Shanker.Several of the quotes from Mobile residents that appear
in this section have been culled from public testimonies in front
of the MCBS and by public hearings held by SES and ADEQ.
Some of the testimonies were given in person, while others were
submitted in writing and read aloud during the hearings. I was
generously given access to the transcripts from these hearings
by attorney Howard Shanker.Wilcox ended up being the only
‘No’ vote in the 3–1 decision in favor of SES’s request.Further
investigation revealed that over 44% of Maricopa County’s
current landfill capacity is in Mobile, while only 0.0000325% of
the entire population of Maricopa County resides in Mobile
(Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Responsive-
ness Summary, October 2004).Without the SES landfill those
figures drop to 52.27 per person in Maricopa County and 72,134
per person in Mobile – still an astonishing disparity.For a more
thorough discussion of ADEQ’s pattern of protecting the
interests of capitalists rather than upholding its mission to
protect public health and the environment, see Andrew Ross’
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