When David Baker returned home to Anniston, Alabama, in 1995 after 25 years as a union organizer in New York City, he fully intended to enjoy a life of semi-retirement, caring for his elderly mother and leisurely reconnecting with the community he loved. Yet as the old saying goes: If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. David soon found himself at the forefront of an all-consuming, historic grassroots movement that sought environmental justice from the Monsanto Corporation, which for decades had secretly dumped highly toxic PCBs into the poverty-stricken neighborhoods that surrounded the company’s West Anniston facility.
Faced with skyrocketing cancer rates and increasing evidence of Monsanto’s culpability, David and the fledgling organization he founded, Community Against Pollution (CAP), led a bruising, tenacious, years-long fight against the polluter. David brought people together, gave them a voice – and, finally, recruited a team of attorneys that included the late Johnnie Cochran to take Monsanto to court on behalf of more than 15,000 plaintiffs. The result: A $700 million-plus global settlement from Monsanto, which smashed the record for toxic tort litigation established in the famous Erin Brockovich case. The settlement not only made restitution to families impacted by pervasive PCB contamination – many of whom had lost loved ones to bizarre cancers and other exotic diseases – but cleared the way for a massive cleanup. The settlement also provided for a variety of education- and health-related services and studies with which David and CAP are closely involved.
David’s -versus-Goliath story made headlines around the world, and it has become the subject of a new book, “My City Was Gone: One American Town’s Toxic Secret, Its Angry Band of Locals and a $700 Million Day In Court,” written by Dennis Love and published by HarperCollins. The book details David’s hardscrabble childhood amid the poverty and racism of Anniston’s West Side and the mysterious death of his seventeen-year-old brother, Terry, from an enlarged heart, hardened arteries, and other maladies that doctors could not explain in someone so young. Terry’s death and the inexplicable deaths of so many others in Anniston fueled David’s drive a quarter-century later to hold Monsanto accountable for its actions. Many credit David’s powerful testimony before a U.S. Senate subcommittee with forcing the EPA to withdraw a cleanup consent decree, initially viewed as unacceptably favorable to the polluter. It marked only the second time that the EPA had withdrawn a consent decree after submission to a federal judge for approval.
David Baker’s efforts on behalf of those hard-pressed to speak for themselves against environmental dangers did not stop with this victory. When the Army built a billion-dollar incinerator of debatable environmental integrity at the Anniston Army Depot to destroy Cold War-era nerve-gas weapons stored, pressure from David and CAP resulted in the distribution of gas masks and other safety tools for residents near the facility. This marked the first time the U.S. government had ever provided gas masks to civilians in such an instance. CAP now has begun to assist outside communities like Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where longstanding industrial pollution and environmental racism have also emerged as banner issues. “We’ve found that people gained courage from what happened in Anniston,” David says. “We tell them that if people come together, they can accomplish great things.”
To learn more about David and his cause, and how you can make a difference, please visit:
www.communityagainstpollution.org
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