[Dissertation] Permitting pollution: The production of science, policy, and the State in Environmental Regulatory Policy on Industrial Pollution in the United States
By Shannon Clark
American University
May 27, 2025
Industrial pollution is permitted, managed, regulated, and enforced by a vast network of environmental regulatory professionals that span from government offices to industrial facilities to academic research labs. Despite evidence of permit violations, illegal pollution, and damage to community and environmental health, however, state regulatory action does not always take place to protect impacted communities. Using archival and ethnographic methods, I examine the mechanisms behind regulatory decisions and the reasons for disparate action (or inaction) on different cases of industrial pollution. Using the cases of Dupont’s Fayetteville Works Facility’s emissions of PFAS in North Carolina and DuPont’s Pontchartrain Works Facility’s emissions of chloroprene in Louisiana, I explore the questions: What are the political, economic, and social structures that influence the actions of regulatory agencies? What is the community behind environmental regulation, their professional norms and office culture that informs regulatory activities? How are communities listened to, ignored, or silenced?
Environmental regulations and the permits required for industrial activities that produce potential toxic pollutants are strongly rooted in science, with rules based on scientific findings of safe thresholds of exposure, and protocols for collecting and analyzing scientific data on pollution, all legally enshrined and enforced by state and federal regulatory agencies. As such, chemical corporations who produced the majority, if not the only, research on the chemicals being evaluated or regulated as toxic pollutants were instrumental in the formation and implementation of environmental regulations.
Historical and contemporary relationships between the state, academia, and industry shape environmental regulatory policy as well as the environmental regulation professional community. These relationships create a sense of professional obligation to one another, something chemical companies frequently cite when a state regulatory agency takes legal action. The impact of this camaraderie is to place regulators in a position of closer association to polluting industry than it does with the frontline communities that state agencies are tasked with protecting.
The function of regulatory action, I argue, is a means of suppressing social unrest to maintain the status quo of capitalist production and class relations as well as a means of securing the consent of the governed. In looking at the different responses of the states of North Carolina and Louisiana to community concerns and unrest over industrial pollution, we can see these oscillations not just as temporal but as specific to local (or state instead of federal) geographic and political-economic contexts. Understanding the mechanisms and purposes behind regulatory action can inform strategies of community resistance to industrial pollution. While community organizing focused on legal remedies and appeals to the state for intervention on their behalf can yield results, relying on the political whims of top-down governance will not consistently and reliably provide relief to hurting communities. A broad political-economic reorientation is needed, in which policies are community-centered and created from the bottom-up.
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