"LaFanette Soles-Woods’ home outside Pensacola, Florida, has been called one of America’s most environmentally unjust communities. It has more cancer cases than anyone can keep track of."
"PENSACOLA, Fla.—Late last summer, LaFanette Soles-Woods carefully made her way to the podium to address the Escambia County commissioners. Normally, she rode a mobility scooter because she so easily lost her breath. But she thought this occasion was vital enough to make an exception.
“I am asking you to table the renewal of these pits,” she said, “until we can get to the bottom of all of these problems that we have.”
For years she’d been a leader of the fight to clean up her home of Wedgewood, a small historically Black community a few miles away from the meeting in downtown Pensacola. The pits she spoke of were giant holes in the earth — ”borrow pits” — from which companies extracted clay and sand and then turned profitable again by making them landfills and accepting all sorts of waste and debris, some of it toxic."
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