Jim Schermbeck Interview, Part 3 of 3

DT: The last tape, you're talking some about the settlement that CASE reached with Texas Utilities, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and how it left many of the other participants in the campaign against Comanche Peak out in the cold, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the schism that happened in that case and maybe in other places in the environmental movement or in progressive causes in general?

JS: Yeah, I don't think schisms and factionalism is unique to the environmental movement. It's present wherever you have more than one or two people organizing against something even if it's a garden club or a cooking club or a faculty at a college or any kind of group has factions in it. And that's because we're all people and some people get along better with pe, some people than others do.

Mavis and I knew, and still know, that we're kindred spirits, I mean, we can, we can say things with glances or smirks or, you know, tones of words that say volumes that other people just don't have that, we don't have that relationship with.

And whenever you try to organize a mass movement, you bring in people of all kinds. People that you agree with, people that you don't agree with. People that you would never be caught dead with socializing outside of that particular movement. People that are lifelong friends of yours once, you know, you find them in that movement.

It's because its all people, there are goal, ways going to be factions. That's why its better to have like-minded people if you're, for instance, if you're doing this kind of civil disobedience, everybody should know, this is what you're doing and everybody is of a like mind about it and you at least have that in common.

But, still there are factions, I mean, it's it's just inevitable. And what amplifies that is the fact that its all volunteer, you know, nobody's getting paid to show up at these meetings, nobody's getting paid to protest, despite what other people may think about our missing checks from Moscow all those years.

You know, that was the big joke, where's my cut? Nobody's getting paid, and so to get people off, off of the couch, out in front of the TV, to show up at these things, is a big, its a big deal. It's it's much harder than it used to be, I think.

There's so many more distractions for folks, its so much easier not to pay attention to these things, its so much easier to be overwhelmed by events. CN, CNN is on 24 hours a day now, you get overwhelmed just watching the news, much less participating in a movement.

So I think it's, it's always a problem that, we were not unique in that. I, I think the most painful one was, was when the coalition, the Armadillo Coalition decided not to do civil disobedience because that was, that was my first big group that I had ever formed and it was like walking away from a child, like I said.

But it's just inevitable, and I think the way that I've tried to deal with it in later organizing is just to realize that there are some people that I do not like, but that I need to work with on behalf of a bigger cause and that I overlook what I dislike about them in order to achieve the bigger end.

That's easier said, from my end, than, as opposed to somebody saying it about me. Some people just can't stand me, hard as it is to believe. And if, you know, as arrogant and presumptuous as I am now, you, you can multiply that by a hundred-fold when you put it with young, you know, 18 years of age, or whatever I was when I started out.

So I, I just think it is inevitable and the way to get around it is to realize that everybody has a little bit, part of the truth and, just like Gandhi says, and you get together in order to share those truths and find out, you know, which ones are valid, which ones aren't.

You test those truths and you come out of the process with a larger knowledge of things, with a bigger truth. But factionalism is always the curse of these, it's it's just, it's built in. It's it's because were human beings and everybody has a different personality and you can bet there's factions within the Bush administration.

You know, like we were just talking about, that the whole fact that al-Qaeda does business with Hussein is ridiculous because theyre all different factions, they hate each other. Anybody who, I'm sure, deals with international politics must come to know the nuances that are involved, you know, some of them are political, some of them are just petty.

You know, this guy dated my wife for twelve years before I married her or something, you know. And it's just all kinds of silly things like that that'll always be there. You just kind of have to maneuver around them or don't allow the, the, the tensions to get out of, to, to lead you too far astray from what youre there to do.

So I, I dont know, it's real, it's a real problem sometimes, sometimes you have to just intervene and say, look, we're asking you to leave the group because you're too much, because you're running people off or whatever. You know, it's very hard to do that but sometimes you have to. It's just, it's an ongoing problem because were human.

DT: Let me ask you something else that sort of is a follow-up to that. Many times there are groups that split apart and then sometimes there are individuals that split off from the group because they are just burned out. They've had too much of the frictions with other people or with other groups or frustration with the cause.

You mentioned that after this settlement that CASE engineered, that you walked around like a zombie and I'm curious about what burnout feels like, why people go through it and how they come out of it?

JS: I don't know. There have been a couple of stages where Ive just walked a, tried to walk away from doing this work.

One was when I enrolled in UNT to go to film school. I just wanted to get out and do something completely different and wanted to do something that was not dependent on other people, that was more dependent on me and how I performed rather than the authorities or some abstract corporation or other people that I was like minded with at all.

I wanted to do something for me and, and just get away from all this. So that was one way that I handled it, I just walked away. And even when I walked away, I didn't completely walk away, right?

It was, there's always something that, that happens that you kind of get ensnarled by. But that was an attempt. And, and I would say I wasn't burned out after, I mean, I was still gung-ho up until the day I read that newspaper headline.

So it wasn't burnout, it was, it was massive meltdown instead. But I know what you're talking about. I think you have to pace yourself. And sometimes that's a synonym for being lazy, I think, but sometimes it's not.

You have to pace yourself and you have to know that things are not going to be solved in a year or two. When I first got involved in, in this, when I was 19 years old, 18, 19, I thought we really were going to stop Comanche Peak within a couple years. I really thought that because of the mood of the times andand everything that was going on and the possibilities, the potential that was there.

I really thought that and when I first got involved with TXI stuff, I said, hey, this is so bad, its not going to be very long before we stop this. And, you know, 13 years later, its still going on, so I, I dont know what to tell you about that.

I think some, I think its all in your attitude about life in general, though, whether you're an optimist or pessimist. Whether you're, what you're like as a kid. Whether, how, you know, there are people that you see right away that you know are going to burn out.

They come in and they have all these ideas, what we really should be doing is this, this, this, this, this. Of course, its all things that you've done the last three years but they don't know that. And you can just see where they're going to just be a shooting star, they're going to expend all this energy and then when things don't get solved within six months to a year, they're out of there.

And you have to take a long-range view. I think being a student of history maybe has helped me, I dont know, just seeing, although, my God, these fights of mine have gone on longer than the Civil War and Vietnam War combined, so I, you know, I don't know.

They give you some perspective. I'm, I'm reading, I'm really reading a lot about Abraham Lincoln now, who I find really fascinating. I've never read a lot about him before and I came across something last night that was really applicable to me these days, which is, he's talking to a friend about getting rest and the friend is concerned he's not getting enough sleep at night and so on.

And Lincoln says something to the effect that, what, what you say is rest is, is the outside. The, the tired in me is inside and it cannot be reached. And thats the way I kind of feel these days. The tired in me is inside and its a place thats always tired these days.

But still, you have to keep doing something because if you don't do something, nothing will get done. I mean, that, it's almost an arrogance that you have to have, but in places like Texas, maybe its a necessary arrogance, I, I dont know if that makes sense.

You have to believe that if you aren't there doing this thing at this particular time, there's not going to be anybody else doing it and the whole cause will be lost and set back years, whereas if you're just a continuing strain of something, if you could just keep the, the links on the chain growing, that maybe that'll lead to progress and the long run.

And you have to count, you have to, you have to squeeze out victories that ethat aren't even victories sometimes, you have to declare them victories, even if they aren't. And you have to have fun, you have to have fun doing this.

If you don't have fun doing this, you are out like a light. That's why, even early on, I mean, we, Mavis knows how to have fun at an action. She knows how to laugh, she has a dark, we all have a gallows sense of humor, I think that's also what I appreciate about Lincoln.

You know, alway, she always had a sense of humor, no matter how dark. And that's what you have to have, I think. You have to see the humor in it, and you have to realize that the small victories are victories nevertheless, and you don't know what they got you but maybe they'll get you something on that you're not, youre not even aware of yet.

I can't tell you how many times weve done something and the ripple effects have been, you know, have come back years later to something. A guy that was on that walk that I was talking about, that walk from the uranium mines, as a consequence of that, he met somebody that was building earth-sheltered houses in Denton and decided to go out and build himself an earth-sheltered house and change his whole life around.

So, I think it's, it's looking at it as a journey, not the end result, after a while, you have to look at it as getting something out of the trip and not the destination. The destination may arrive sooner or later, you, you, that's kind of out of your hands. But the trip, youre more or less in control of, and youre part of it and you can have fun, or not, on that trip.

You can make an impact or try to on that trip or not. And that's where you get most of your satisfaction. I mean, the, the, the life changing things that have happened to me have happened because of the journey, not because we won at Comanche Peak, or TXIs not burning hazardous waste anymore, the things that have changed my life have been as a result of trying to do those things.

But they haven't gotten done yet. So I don't know how you, I, I think it's, it's deeply psychological question, I, I dont know how to answer that. I think you're just born with an attitude about things. I'm a, I'm a dreadful optimist.

As cynical as I am, I do th, I do think there is a progression, and maybe that's a result of being too much a history reader, I see a progression of things. I see a progression of things in this state where it won't always be, you know, Anglo dominated.

Another twenty, thirty years most of the people in this state are going to be black and brown, its going to be a whole different set of circumstances and politics then. And just the attitude that I, you know, just all the things that came out of the anti-nuke movement.

God, just this whole view of technology, this whole, God, the health food stuff, just, you know, just everything that was in its infancy now seems to have blossomed in parallel as time goes on. Things that we were concerned about then, as hippies, I guess thats part of a larger thing and not just necessarily the nukes movement.

But I think the nuke movement teached, taught a lot of people and, and, and did some good teaching to folks who are still involved. I mean, Kim Bashthe person I founded Armadillo Coalition worth is, with, is still doing organizing around Central American issues.

Lon Burnham is a state representative for Fort Worth. Im still, you know, minimally involved in doing Downwinder stuff here, so I don't know. I think it's a crazy, you, you have to be crazy, probably, is, is the short answer. You have to be completely fucking insane to keep doing this over and over again without getting any result. Right?

That's the classic definition of insanity, when you expect to have a different result each time of the same process, so I dont know. I, I th, I think that's an unanswerable. I think that takes a army of Harvard psychologists to figure out.

DT: You mentioned Downwinders. Downwinders at Risk, and I guess the related group was Life Alliance and their effort to stop, or restrict the burning of hazardous waste at the cement kiln at Midlothian and elsewhere. Can you talk about that, which I guess was the second chapter of your big adult environmental effort?

JS: Right. Yeah. In '88, that headline happened and I was out of the anti-nuke business and tried to do film stuff for the next year. Did some work in an animation lab when they were still, when they were still doing these, animation with a huge room size camera and you were having to fractionalize seconds and so on.

And just the most incredibly boring stuff I've ever done, some of it. Some of its fascinating. I did, oh, I don't know, I've worked, I mean, I actually have led two different lives since around 1981 or so. One foot in the organizing community, one foot in the film and video community, so that I was a script reader for a while for a thing called Film Dallas.

I did an internship at a news station, I did this animation studio work. And then one day, quite by accident, somebody that I had known from my anti-nuke days said, hey, did you see this ad in the paper, in the classifieds, because they knew I was looking for work.

And I said, no, what is it. It, and it was for canvassers, and I was not interested in being a canvasser because I knew all about that and that's a, just a very shitty job that, God bless the people who do it, but it's a, it's not a very, I don't know, it's just a very tough job.

And there was this ad for a group called Texans United that wanted more canvassers. And I wasn't interested in that job but I thought I'd call them up and see if they needed an organizer. So I did, I called them up and they gave me a name of a guy in Houston named Rick Abraham.

And I talked to him and they said, well, we are thinking about hiring an organizer up there, why don't we come and talk to you. So they did, and everything I had done in the anti-nuclear movement had prepared me for this job.

And, and, and we talked a lot about the bust, but you know, during that same time I worked with legislators, I worked with city council people, I did a lot of things besides just spending time getting arrested in that movement.

You know, every, theatrical stuff, I did a puppet show, I did, you know, just the spectrum of political things you can do to try to right a wrong, I did. And getting arrested was the most sensationalized part of that, but it wasit accounted for like this percentage of time as opposed to this, you know, 11-year span that went on.

DT: What was the puppet show, if you dont mind me asking?

JS: Oh, it was just this puppet show, actually, we saw it at this conference up in Louisville, we all, this was like the heyday of the anti-nuclear movement and we all were, it was just such a tremendous spirit and this was the first national conference that we had gone to and people from all over the country was, were there, all our peers.

And these guys from Kansas came and did this great puppet show about, I can't even remember now what the script was about but it was just hilarious, we thought at the time.

And it was just a whole new way to outreach people so we took it home and we did it down here in Texas in front of dinners and things that we would have and so forth.

So, I did that and I wrote press releases and we did press hits and, you know, I, I would wear a suit and tie and do the, the whole legislative bit as well and all of that. I did all of that. So when I came in to interview for this organizing job, I knew the mechanics of it.

I didn't know the toxics part of it because I'd been dealing with nuke stuff, I didnt know, you know, the particular, you know, lead from styrene, from blah, blah, blah except incidentally.

That was, the technical part I didn't know but the mec, mechanical part, how you do this job, I knew. And as, and there wasn't anybody else in Dallas-Fort Worth that had that kind of experience that needed a job then, at least.

Because it is rare to find people like that in this part of the country. So I got the job. And I was the north Texas organizer for Texans United and that ended up covering everything from the Oklahoma border down to Waco and everything from the Louisiana border out to about Wichita Falls.

And that's a lot of territory and immediately I was thrust into a lot of different fights. One of the first fights was against an incinerator in Oak Cliff called Dixico.

Won that fight and as a result of that fight, won another fight about zoning for waste, hazardous waste incinerators in Dallas. Pretty much, Dallas has zoned out any kind of incinerator from ever happening in Dallas city limits again.

Would not have happened had we not won that fight in, in, and pursued that into the city government in Dallas there. Crowley, went over to Crowley, Texas, homeowners were having methane come up through their bathroom plumbing and affect the quality of their indoor air as well as being right next door to this place that used to do aluminum smelting and that was now abandoned.

Well, you go over and do the research and you look at the paperwork and you read between the lines, they were doing more than aluminum smelting there, they were handling lead and arsenic and cadmium. And its just a, another amazing insight into how regulators works and how government works.

This place in Crowley was right in the middle, right in the middle of a neighborhood and it was flat on top. If you, if you approached it from street level, it looked like just this abandoned facility with some abandoned buildings there and was flat. And there was no piles of anything or there wasn't anything smoking or barrels out or anything else.

Well, if you were the neighborhood kid, though, and you were looking at it from the perspective of the creek down below and you followed that creek back to the border of this place, you would then be looking up at this huge pile of tailings, of this residue that all this flat stuff was built on top of.

Nobody from the state or federal government had ever looked at it from that perspective before. They were always looking at the flat part and finding no problem. They had not ever gone around to the creek side of it and looked back up at this huge thing that was supporting all of the levelness on top there.

Well, it turns out that there was a lot of contamination at this site and nobody knew about it until we started organizing around it. And this, Crowley was kind of my, I guess, test of, of fire as far as the National Toxics campaign is concerned, that was kind of my first test.

They wanted you to be able to parachute into a neighborhood and organize it and change something on the ground by yourself. So I said, OK, I'll, I'll give it a try. The guy, by the way, who headed National Toxics campaign, John O'Connor, was the person who basically organized the whole country to get the Superfunds legislation in the first place.

Based out of Boston, just an amazing guy, who recently died about, I think, last Christmas, died at the age of 47 or some, just really tragic. But, just an amazing guy who, who, also very young started out doing this work and organized this National Toxics campaign that I was now being employed by.

So they said, here's your test, go out and, and turn this thing around. So we did. We went out and took this group of about six families who had just wanted to get out of their houses and turned it into a whole citywide thing that got eventually state Superfund status for that site.

And now its on the list and supposedly being cleaned up. And that was, that involved going door to door, being a canvasser, that involved press hits, that involved going down to the council and doing a little bit of guerilla theatre there.

It involved inviting columnists down to take a tour with these women and write about it from a womens point of view and so on and so forth. But that's something that actually there is a beginning, middle, and end of.

We actually had a problem, we found out about the problem and we did something about the problem and now its a state Superfund site. We also got involved with the west dally, the, we quickly got involved with the west Dallas situation, which was, there had been a lead smelter in, again, right in the middle of the neighborhood there in west Dallas.

And instead of being a suburban neighborhood, this is a primarily black and Hispanic neighborhood, one of the poorest sections, if not the poorest section of Dallas. And there had been a lead smelter there for decades and decades.

And it was really eye opening for me, it was theit was like an environmental apartheid and, and in that, everybody knew what was going on but nobody did anything about it much.

And there was a whole population of that community that was egregiously harmed by that lead smelter. I mean, people who lost their minds, literally, because of lead poisoning, people who lost their livers, all kinds of physiological effects from lead poisoning because this thing was literally spewing out pollution.

It, they had a smokestack, but it was also at ground level all over the neighborhood. And they had closed down the smelter and they thought they had had a clean-up in 1980, but people were still finding lead in their people were still having effects and they were still finding problems.

And there was a suspicion on the part of some folks in the neighborhood that the problem was not taken care of, that the contamination was still there and there was, contamination was still in the community there. Despite closing down thethe plant, having a lawsuit even that paid out kids money.

And sure enough, they were right. We, I cannot, you know, this one guy, Luis Sepulveda, who was the leader of something called the West Dallas Coalition for Environmental Justice. If it had not been for him and his determination, this, this whole scandal would not ever have gone, have come to light.

Now I was there assisting him but it was his, his just stubbornness that made this happen. The black, the, a lot of the black community there, especially the, the churches, the clergy in the black community all had real estate ties there and they did not want to see anybody talking about contamination in an area they were trying to develop.

They were all into economic development schemes and bringing new money into the area and they did not want to see anybody talking about lead contamination because that was going to scare away the money.

The Dallas City Council people that represented that area were tied into those guys and so did not also want to see, I mean, thethe community had no one looking out for them in terms of this issue other than this one guy who was a railroad worker, never went to college and had to retire on disability.

That's Luis Sepulveda in 1991 or so, 1990. And he was sure there was still a problem there because his folks lived down the street and they were still having problems and he was convinced it was all tied in to the lead smelter.

So we started, we started organizing west Dallas and it was very hard at first because no one wanted to believe there was still a problem there. All the authorities thought that they had taken care of it and they didn't want to hear it either.

They were just like the black clergy, they didnt want to hear anything about lead contamination from that smelter. But the great thing about being a member of the National Toxics campaign was that we had our own lab, we had our own environmental lab, so we could go out there, collect dust under the right circumstances and protocol and so forth, and have it sent back and see whether there was any lead in it or not.

Well, it turns out there was lots of lead in these peoples attic dust and floor dust and so on. And so that brought new attention to it. And then we had a, a black reverend who was not bought out yet, Reverend Connolly come up to me and show me a picture and say, hey, you know what this is.

And it was just a Polaroid of some black stuff out in a field in west Dallas, and he said it was in west Dallas. I said, what is this? He said, well, it's the, it's the, it's the tailings that they buried out all over here, its all over west Dal, there's, there's tons of it all over the community here, they never cleaned this up.

And I was, I was, I'm always skeptical, I'm al, I had to be very sk, because I was getting calls in, in this position of people, you know, the equivalent, I guess, of like cat in the tree calls. You know, oh, this company's doing this to me or oh, this companys doing that to me. I always had to kind of judge where my energy was going into to.

And I was always skeptical of peoples claims of this but, but he was very sure of this and by God if he wasnt right. It turns out that these guys had buried this stuff all over west Dallas, I mean, acres and acres and acres of it.

Plus the fact that there was still a lot of lead dust coming from somewhere because the plant was still sitting there, the smelter was still sitting there, they hadn't torn it down.

So because of Lu, Luis and his stubbornness, they actually organized the first multi-racial coalition in that area because its very faction, factionalized between black and brown there. You know, everybody thinks its, its just between Anglos and blacks or Anglos and Hispanics.

That's not true at all and just the problem of faction lines that we were talking about. It's true in those communities as well and there was a real power struggle going on between in, new coming Hispanics and people that had been there for a while, around what was called Cement City, for a while, because of a plant out there, and black folks.

And he put together the first multiracial coalition in that area that that area had ever seen and they were frightened by that. The powers that be, on both sides, were frightened by that. But he was right. He turned out to be right.

And we demonstrated, we picketed, we went down to EPA, I remember there was this one region wide demonstration against Region 6 EPA, which is like Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas.

And Rick Abraham, my boss, came up for that with some people from Houston who had a gripe against the EPA, this is during the Bush years, and, the first Bush years.

And we literally invaded the EPA offices here, they tried to lock us out and shut down all the elevators. We found a back way, took the stairs all the way up to the, what was it, the ninth or eleventh floor, where the administrator was.

Gathered outside of his office, sang America the Beautiful, you just have never seen anything like black and brown and white people singing America the Beautiful outside of a, a regional EPA office in this, you know, completely mundane setting, but it was just the most amazing thing.

Greenpeace people were there, turning the fountains downstairs green with toxic stuff so that the fire department was showing up. It was pseudo, it was, it was dye that they use in sewer leak stuff, it was not toxic at all but it looked toxic as hell.

And so the fire department was called out and showed up, it was just a grand scene. It was just a great day. But through actions like that, Luis got his message out.

And it turns out that, in fact, that place was contaminated as hell.

And now its a federal Superfund site again. They've dismantled the smelter, they're going to eventually be able to use that property again for something else entirely. We want it to be for a medical facility to serve people there in West Dallas whove been harmed by the smelter and stuff.

I don't know whether that's going to take place or not. Luis is now a justice of the peace, and a power that be himself in that community.

And he was right, I mean, it was, it was him and a, a small group of people and me starting out saying, there's a problem here. Keep, and we kept telling people there was a problem here and nobody would believe us and finally, there was a problem here and everybody believed us.

And it was a big scandal again, for the second time. But that was also a story that had a beginning, middle and end. They actually had a happy ending to that story, at least right now, when things are getting cleaned up.

So that was a big, another big fight and finally, the, the, the legacy thats lasting up to now is the fight against burning hazardous wastes in cement plants at TXI.

DT: You were just introducing the whole dilemma and controversy over TXI.

JS: Yeah. In my job at Texans United, I was kind, it was kind of an ongoing triage. Problems were coming in, people had a plant they were concerned about or had a landfill they were concerned about or an environmental problem.

And since we had a canvas, we actually were able to go out on any given day and give out 250, 300, 500 leaflets to people at home about Texans United and what it was and to try to give us money. That's what it was, the canvas was all about, was a money raising operation.

But it was also able to distribute literature. And I tried to make it as educational as I could with the money part, without interfering with the money raising part.

So there were a tremendous amount of people every day learning about who we were and if you had an environmental problem, well then, they had a phone number right in front of them and I got the call.

So there were all kinds of, of small and big things coming into the office that I had to weigh and judge about whether it was worthwhile. What, what precedents would be set? Is this a widespread problem? Is this something that I can affect larger social change with?

You know, that, those kinds of questions. And certainly that was true with West Dallas, there was just no question about that once you, once you got there and saw the layout and everything.

And it was also true with this situation in Midlothian, which I am still involved with now, 13 years later. I started in '89, I guess, Christmas of '89, Im still involved.

First of all, Midlothian is unique in that it has three cement plants, and has had for, since the mid-60s, or I guess, two since the mid-60s and three since the early '80s. Its one of only two places in the United States that has that kinds of concentration of cement manufacturing.

In fact, there's a, a sign in town that says Midlothian, Cement Capital of Texas. Well, when the economy was going bad in the mid-80s, one of these cement companies decided to start making money, not only by making cement but by accepting hazardous waste to be burned in the cement making kilns, the furnaces that they make the stuff in as a fuel.

So that instead of having to buy as much coal or whatever, they could actually get people to pay them money for burning waste oils, petrochemical waste of all kinds, plastics, just any kind of hazardous waste that you wanted to carry and get rid of, these were the guys to go see.

And because they were not officially hazardous waste incinerators, they did not have to have official hazardous waste incinerator equipment like scrubbers or anything like that.

They could just build them, they could just burn the stuff in the same kilns that they use to make cement without any additional pollution control devices on them.

One of these plants, North Texas, decided to start doing this in 1986 and the reaction of the other cement company in town at the time, TXI, was, oh, thats a terrible idea.

There's going to be lead in the residue and there's going to be air pollution and all kinds of other bad things are going to happen as a result of this.

But because of economic pressures, a year later, in 1987, TXI was burning hazardous waste in their kilns. Circa 1960 kilns.

And this was rumored to be going on, but I did not know anything about this until December when they actually had, when there was a, a, a notice in the paper, they actually had to put in the Midlothian paper that listed all the things they, they wanted to burn.

It was a state requirement, I think a state permit that they had to do this for. And that's when people figured out that they were actually doing this. People in Midlothian did not know they were burning hazardous waste, they just heard that they were recycling out at these places.

And to this day, TXI calls it recycling or resource management. They don't call it burning hazardous waste. They wouldn't, they wouldn't be so gauche. But that's what's going on.

And people there in, in, around Christmastime of '89 began to get concerned about this, once they saw the ad, once they realized what was going on. There was a group that was formed shortly after this meeting that took place down because of the concern called CAUSE Citizens Aware and United for a Safe Environment.

They got answers like, from North Texas, for instance, oh, you're, you're eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich everyday will expose you to more toxins than the air pollution from our kilns. And, of course, to me this was very familiar rhetoric.

This is something akin to what the nuclear power industry was saying to us ten years before, so this was like the same script, different players. Different plant but, but same strategy. Downplay the significance of the harm and accuse everybody of being sensational about it.

Well, this group formed and I was never, I had never organized anywhere I wasn't invited. So I showed up and I looked around and I asked them if they wanted some help and they said yes.

So we started organizing around these plants and this issue. And we started having forums and a big forum happened the night the first Gulf War started taking place. I remember it vividly, going down to this forum while they had just starting bombing Iraq the first time.

And went down to Austin, this is when Ann Richards got elected, went down to Austin, set up a tent city outside of TNRCC, what was then Texas Water Commission Headquarters where we actually had a fake graveyard set up and some tents and a whole booth thing and we stayed down there for a week and went over to the governors mansion and surrounded it and sang Ann songs about how bad it was to live downwind of these guys and so forth.

And started trying to work with the legislature to, to change this before redistricting happened, they actually had a fairly sympathetic legislator who tried to do something in the legislature, I believe in '89, '90, '91 didn't get it done. So we started trying to make this a more popular issue in trying to organize beyond Midlothian city limits and take the fight more downwind.

And we were fighting them on particular permits that came up or issues that came up, fines and so on. Going down to Austin a lot and so forth. And the CAUSE group was a very weird, it was a very conservative group. It wasn't weird, but it was very conservative for the most part, made up of Midlothian locals and I did something that they did not like.

We had gotten along famously and that's where I met Sue Pope. She was one of the people that was in CAUSE to begin with and we had traveled down to New Braunfels together for a meeting down there.

And we had actually gotten the state to set up this commission to study the issue. Kirk Watson, who was, is now running in this year of 2002 for state attorney general, was then head of the Air Control board.

Turns out Kirk and I knew each other from high school. I didnt remember him, but he knew me from debate. And the first time we met, he said, I know you, you kicked my butt in debate.

And that just, you know, you always remembers the one, remember the people you lose to. You never remember winning, you just remember the people you lose to.

So he and I knew each other, we got along famously, we set up the, he was very nice, he set up this commission, thought all our problems were solved, had good recommendations out of this commission to make the same standards for incinerators and kilns that were burning hazardous waste applicable. And if that were to happen, theyd be out of business because they couldn't afford to upgrade their kilns to hazardous waste incinerator standards. Well, at exactly that same time, those recommendations went over to a, a newly condensed state agency, they collapsed the Air Control board in with the Water Commission and made the TNRCC.

Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission and instead of putting Kirk Watson in charge of that commission, they put another guy, John Hall, in charge of it, who was not as favorable to us and our recommendations.

And so if we had had Kirk in office another year longer, we might have been able to solve this thing in 1993, 1994, but we didnt. And it's been a story like that ever since.

We've missed the brass ring here and there by a matter of months or certain political circumstances or whatever. John Hall was head of the Water Commission, tried to get away with passing some very weak stuff and calling it reform.

We called him on it. It was just a very messy and bloody affair down there in Austin and that's why we ended up having the tent city down there and so forth was to try to shame them into doing something more while there were still people like Ann Richards in office.

Well, I sent out a mailing once for a newsletter, I think it was for a newsletter that came out of our office, but it, on the back, it had a story about Kirk Watson and the Air Control board.

And I didn't have a graphic to go with it. I didn't have a picture of Kirk Watson and I didnt have a state of Texas graphic or anything like that, so I just clipped a Air Control board symbol, emblem, off of something of theirs and put it on that as an attending graphic.

And the people in CAUSE had a very strange reaction to this, they thought I was trying to pass this newsletter off as an official Air Control board graphic. And I said, no, I, it was just the only thing around and blah, blah, blah, blah, and they were convinced I was trying to do this and, and fool people and there was a split in the group.

And we had done a lot of things together. We had not only gone down to Austin and stuff, we'd had our first balloon release there, right across from the plant and stuff and it was verythat was very hard to take, but they were very adamant about this.

And so, Sue Pope and I decided that we, we've got to express our opposition to this somehow, we're not going to let these folks drive us away from this issue. So we said, why dont we get more people downwind.

The, the, the company's, Midlothian's a company town. It was obvious that the city council there, none of the local county commissioners are going to do anything about this because of the tax money that's coming in because of these three plants.

It's 60% of the tax base. So why don't we move the fight downwind, where there's not as, the financial part is not as involved and theres no incentive by local communities to be involvedto be in league with the plants that way, but their still getting the pollution.

Maybe even more so, because if you live on the right side of Midlothian, you don't get any pollution at all from these plants because you're upwind from it. It's actually the people downwind in Cedar Hill and Duncanville, DeSoto, Dallas, Arlington, Grand Prix, that are actually receiving the bulk of this air pollution.

So that's what we did. We decided to do that and thats how Downwinders at Risk was born. We started meeting in the Cedar Hill library. We gathered steam, we had a big permit fight coming up with TXI because they were going to have to apply for a federal permit to burn hazardous waste even though they'd been doing it since 1987.

They had to officially apply for a permit to do it here in the '90s. And, so we were gearing up to do that. And we knew it was going to be a very expensive fight. And I was, I was put in a position that Juanita Ellis was put in years before me of taking on the regulatory structure and trying to win through that.

And odds are not very good in Texas for winning through hearing process before the state and they're even less so in front of the legislature, but those were our avenues for change.

So we decided to participate and try to, along the way, win the fight in the court of public opinion and maybe cut the thing short before we even got to a hearing process.

We were somewhat successful. We got, we had awe gained momentum, we gained membership, we got the PTA, local PTAs involved. We got young moms who were PTA moms and passed resolutions against waste burning that went all the way up to the state PTA convention and TXI was there fighting us every step of the way.

And it was a big, huge battle at the state PTA convention and they finally passed this resolution against it and we won that. We battled them in each of the cities that we had targeted to try to get money from for this fight.

We went to each city and said, if you throw in $25,000 apiece, we can fund a lawyer and experts and so on that we need for this fight. We won in a couple of, we won in Duncanville and DeSoto, they beat us in Cedar Hill, but not by much.

And each one of those communities was, in itself, a campaign and a fight and a huge hullabaloo each time because it was literally take, starting from scratch, educating a city council about what was going on and then convincing them to spend money on it, which is never easy, but we did it a couple of times and we actually went to hearing.

I became a pseudo lawyer with Stuart Henry, just an old son-of-a-bitch from way back and we put on a good show and thought we had won and then the judgment came down that we hadnt. And they gave TXI the permit and that was in '99.

And, oh I, we did lots of guerilla theatre, actions at shareholders meetings and things like that. We, well, anyway, we, we had a lot of fun and again, it was like the board that we had accumulated for this group, for Downwinders, was like a big family, was like an extended family.

And it was just a very good, it was, it was the most pleasant experience I'd had organizing since Comanche Peak Life Force days because of the people involved, because of the spirit, because the momentum that we thought we had. It was just, I thought it was just all there again.

But we lost that permit fight and just as we had lost that permit fight, just as that was coming up and we were getting over that, came this whole regurgitation of, of what's the smog issue in Dallas-Fort Worth area. Of the idea that Dallas-Fort Worth was not meeting federal ozone standards, smog standards.

Well, this is true and one of the reasons is because these cement plants produce a lot of smog pollutants that go right up into Dallas-Fort Worth. So we could have, I guess, packed up our bags and gone home after this very demoralizing and exhausting, it was just exhausting to do this permit fight.

And you can't imagine the amount of money that TXI spent against us, in terms of armies of lawyers and everything else. It was just exhausting, and, but we climbed back out and we got involved in this, in what was called the SIPP process, State Implementation Plant Process for smog in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and made that process address these cement plants.

They would not have done so had it not been for these people showing up on a regular basis and harassing the state and, and north Texas council governments into looking at these cement plants as a probpart of the problem.

Certainly not, I, I mean, cars are a problem, everything in this area is a problem in terms of, of smog pollution, but these plants in particular were the largest industrial sources for that type of pollution. And they were not going to even consider these guys when the process started.

At the end of that process, we got a recommendation out of this committee to reduce smog emissions from these plants by 50%. Pretty good, starting from scratch. It went down to Austin, it got reduced immediately to 30%.

So that's the difference inbetween local and state policy right there. That was the only recommendation coming out of the local committee that the state did not adopt, having to do with these cement plants.

The state has a real blind spot, or weak spot, I guess would be a better way to put it when it comes to these plants and the influence that they're able to buy in Austin. There have been some changes as a result of that plan.

They're not always good, but there have been some. And now, in 2002, were about to start up on another cycle of SIPP meetings that I'm, that happen every first Friday or so of the month it seems like, and I'm going back for those and again, we're trying to put the cement plants in the spotlight and not let them forget about them and try to seek at least a 50% cut, if not more, in their emissions.

There's a lot of scandal, long stories about how the state ignored best available control technology that was already out there. In the TXI hearing, for example, the state should have known, and they probably did know, that a plant just like TXI, up in Michigan, had actually installed scrubbers for the first time ever.

And that could've been used in our case, but the state didn't reveal that information during the hearing and it was up to us to do that at the last minute. It came in too late and was not deemed as part of the process.

So there's a whole example out there of a plant that's has better pollution control equipment, but is not being applied to this TXI situation because the state doesn't want it to. Same thing happened with this SIPP process.

It was up to us to go out and research what the best available control technology was for these types of plants, and it turns out that the state totally ignored a group of like 15 or 18 cement plants in Europe that are operating at 80% efficiency when it comes to these types of pollutants.

Whole different type of process that they just ignored last time out, it was up for, it was up to us to go out and research it ourselves. It's always up to the citizens to go out and do the research and be the watchdog.

This whole idea that people have of the government or the EPA being a watchdog or the NRC being a watchdog, that's all crap. If the citizens aren't there, looking over their shoulders, reading things that they are not reading, putting things together that they aren't putting together or dont want to put together, reading between the lines.

If they arent there forcing the issue, no watchdogging gets done, its always up to the citizens.

DT: Why is that?

JS: Because of the influence that industry has in government. It's, when you're talking about TXI and state government, its one in the same entity.

They may be officially, you know, diagramed in different places, but its like TXIs a fourth branch of government, you know, practically.

It's, or any industry like that, Dow, or TU Electric, or Brown and Root, these are people that, look, they h, they can hire, what did TXI have last legislative session?

They had probably 8 or 9 lobbyists that they can hire full time to do nothing but visit with these guys, take them out to dinner, whatever they want to do.

We have groups of citizens that can come down every so often from, you know, Dallas-Fort Worth and spend a day with these guys trying to explain what it, problem it is. There's just no contest.

Again, it's, it's a corporation who is a, which is able to spend all of its resources, 24/7, on defeating you. And here you have a ragtag group of citizens that are not getting paid to do this, that dont have the resources, are not getting any money to go out and, you know, being able to hire lawyers or experts or anything like that.

And its a mismatch from the beginning. It's a miracle to me that anything progressive gets done. Every once in a while, something does happen, but it's especially hard in Texas. Its just, it is the belly of the beast.

I think when you do have something nice, when you do have a victory down here, it kind of resonates louder and longer than it might if it were in New York or California or someplace, but it's, it's very, very difficult to do this kind of work here.

It always has been, everybodyll tell you that, and it still is.

DT: Well, considering how difficult it is, when you look into the future, what do you foresee as far as the environmental challenges or the opportunities that may be involved?

JS: Actually, I'm really scared nowadays because ofbecause of the fact that we seem to be messing up, that werethat technology is still outpacing our ability to handle it.

If you look at genetics, if you look at biotechnology, there are all things, all kinds of things being planned now that people have no idea of.

If you, if you look at the plans of the people who gave you the Internet, the Defense think tanks, Defense Department think tanks and some of the private think tanks, you know, they're saying in 30 or 40 years, well be grouped into, what is it, two groups of human beings, the naturals and the enhanced.

And the enhanced will be the ones that have enough money to afford to be able to get, not just facelifts and things, but middle enhance, enhancements, athletic enhancements.

There's a whole line of reasoning that we want to be able to be post-human. To be able to not be dependent on bodies anymore, but to have our minds, literally like a Star Trek episode, you know, encased in some plastic and rolled around places.

And its getting to the point where all this is beginning to sound like Richard Nixon announcing 2000 nuclear power plants across the country in 20 years. It sounds incredible and unbelievable, but it also sounds very scary.

And they really want to do this kind of stuff. So I, I, I dont know, I, I can't, I suppose I'm more optimistic in that there seems to be more awareness about some things. Certainly, you know, things in terms of the environment seem to be more consciously addressed these days, and it seems to be an issue more than it used to be.

And certainly, with air quality in the Dallas-Fort Worth area its a issue, a, a huge issue because its gotten so bad. And because people are getting sick, especially in the summertime, at the height of the smog season.

So those things are encouraging in that you have a wider constituency to address those things, but other things are happening that make you think that youre going to have to go through this whole thing again on a second, you know, time around.

Even with nukes, you know, this administration, this Bush administration, is promoting nuclear energy, again as an answer to our energy problems instead of advocating conservation and getting the hell out of Saudi Arabia and oil there.

Talking about nukes and being dependent on foreign uranium and all this kind of stuff and it makes me think I'm going to have to be out there doing this crap all over again when I'm, you know, 85 years old and in a wheelchair.

I'm going to be out picketing some Comanche Peak or like plant or whatever their, plant they're planning to build. It's very discouraging in that respect.

DT: (inaudible) trying to recruit new generations. What would you say to young people coming along as advice from the mountain?

JS: I, I don't know, I'm probably the worst person to give advice because I'm such a hopeless, optimistic person in one sense and, and I just, I don't know. I don't know what advice I would, I would say pick your battles carefully.

You only have so much ammunition, so much energy to give and you have to be really careful about how you expend that. You have to really have a sense of humor.

I think the fact that I was always interested in film and video gave me a kind of third eye, a directors eye, to step back and look at all of this and see where, to tell whether I was going over the cliff or not.

I think you need that if youre going to stay in it for very long. I dont know. I think you have to pace yourself, I think you have to find people that you can do with this. You have to find, you can't do it on your own.

You have to find some kind of companionship. You have to have very tolerant partners. And if you can, get your funding before you start.

DT: One last thing. You say you've got this, you're fortunate to have this third eye. Maybe you can use it to describe a place that gives you respite and serenity after these long fights.

JS: You know, its interesting, because Glen Rose used to be that place for me.

I actually spent a year living in Glen Rose, in that dilapidated wooden cabin that I described earlier on that piece of property.

Actually lived in Glen Rose for a year andand we had a, a kind of place down on the river there where we would have lodges, where, you know, we'd, it'd be a cold river, it'd be about this time of year, and you'd get, you'd heat up some rocks and you'd have a, a little steam lodge down there by the river.

And that, that place used to give me quite a bit of comfort. Now I can't even go within a hundred miles of there without seeing those, seeing those domes.

I can't even get near it. And it used to be that, we lived, when we lived in Dallas-Fort Worth, you know, we lived in a place called Justin that was outside of the metro mess, on 2000 acres.

It was great, we rented a, a ranch house. And that used to overlook a creek, we used to go out to a place called the point, and that used to be that place.

But now? I don't know. I'm kind of stuck here because we dont have any land. We're, we're in a situation where Robin and I are living without any land around us and that feels kind of strange.

So, I don't know. It's, it probably would be, it would probably be somewhere around Fort Worth because I still feel like Fort Worth is my home. But in terms of a particular place, I dont know.

I've tried to find those places, wherever they are, on the journey. You know, theretheres like this one place in, in Yosemite that I remember finding that was just beautiful.

And a, just a little mountain stream, it was a great day, really sunny, and the leaves were all the right colors and Ill just rememforever remember that moment in time. And so I try to find those places wherever they are.

You know, and out here, I guess, its with the canyons. With the canyons. Because the rest of this is pretty flat, but every once in awhile out here, and where we live in Slaton, is, is near a canyon, where the last of the southern herd of buffalo used to roam.

And so you can't go into that canyon without thinking about what happened to those guys and that's not, I guess, a very comforting message but the landscape is different and its pretty spectacular. So those kinds of places, I, I dont think there's one place anymore that gives me that sense.

And I will tell you, too, that's it's, it's not just places but it's people. It's, it's people like Mavis, those kinds of things. I don't know.

It, it's hard to think about it right now because were just so landlocked where we are, in, in a square in a small town. And we dont have an, even hardly a backyard and it just feels really strange.

So, I dont know. I, I'm hoping we can get back to Wise County, where we do have a home and feel a little bit more at home there.

It's actually on, in the Trinity River valley and if you get up on the hill high enough, you can actually see the river and the valley. And I think that's the view that I miss the most right now.

DT: Thank you.

JS: Sure. My pleasure.

[End of Reel 2234] [End of Interview with Jim Schermbeck]