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His cover story of February 17 (“The Cost of Living”) is no exception. Based on Henderson’s own account, Don Coursey’s study of race and hazardous waste siting may well have potentially serious methodological problems. There is nothing particularly political about this claim, nor need it emerge from the “effect” of the study on anyone’s “agenda,” as Henderson worries. Coursey’s sample, as Henderson describes it, was comprised of 30 cases from a larger sample of EPA Superfund sites already reduced by what Henderson acknowledges to be the Agency’s own inept record-keeping. As Greenpeace’s Charlie Cray rightfully points out, there is nothing about the EPA’s procedures that would rule out, at face value, the possibility that the very selection of Superfund sites is itself biased. This is a perfectly reasonable objection to Coursey’s design, and whether or not it is a genuine problem would need to be established independently and before any conclusions from an EPA-defined sample can be generalized to the theoretical population of all hazardous waste sites. Indeed, unless one is willing to believe that greedy corporate moguls are actively conspiring to poison minorities in spite of an efficient and benevolent government (and there doesn’t seem to be anyone credibly suggesting this), it would be patently self-defeating to hypothesize a racial and class bias in the storage of hazardous waste and simply assume that the same political and economic incentives that would facilitate it would be somehow dormant in the cleanup process which defines the parameters of Coursey’s sample.
Neither Coursey nor Henderson elects to address the research already done in other parts of the country that has established a disproportionate risk of hazardous exposure in minority communities (most notably sociologist Robert Bullard’s work in the South, summarized in his Dumping in Dixie). While I’m certain Coursey would attribute this to the modesty of his research aims, his study is sufficiently “provocative” to be employed in the same way as most research featured by conservative, market-oriented think tanks (I am, admittedly, only assuming this of FREE). The general strategy is to select some area of public policy research to “debunk,” pronounce it the domain of thoroughly entrenched liberals and leftists, and model an “unbiased” and “scientifically sound” approach that invariably defeats the “conventional wisdom” and offers evidence for one’s own conservative ideals, taking, at best, a glancing blow at the volumes of research already done. This is the sort of duplicity that fills the pages of the Public Interest every three months.
