Libby, Montana Rhetorical Analysis, Continued

To further confuse the message of Libby, Montana, interviews reveal the pain behind the beauty. One worker in the Zonolite mine, for example, suffered health problems because the Zonolite Company and, after 1963, W.R. Grace, Incorporated, developed vermiculite into products that were found near his farm. To introduce the source of the vermiculite, the film provides shots of the mine from above. The film explains that vermiculite was procured through strip-mining that began as early as 1919 and used for insulation and fertilizer, products managed and distributed by the Scotts Lawn Care Company. What the film reveals, however, is that workers in the mine were dying of cancer at astronomical rates, a horrific truth local W. R. Grace manager Earl D. Lovick knew but dismissed for profit.

Here one of the victims of vermiculite poisoning, Les Skramstad, a long-time Zonolite employee, explains his own health concerns. Les was reluctant to talk with the filmmakers because his neighbors had labeled him a radical for suggesting W.R. Grace and Zonolite had contributed to his disease.	Les and his family share happier days in a family photo taken while Les worked for Zonolite.
Libby, Montana includes multiple shots of the trial determining Zonolite’s culpability in the massive cancer deaths in the region. From 1963 forward, the company was owned by W.R. Grace, and local manager, Earl Lovick, served as the star witness in the case. Lovick died of asbestos-related cancer in 1999.	Like Blue Vinyl, Libby, Montana shows actual documented evidence of corporate knowledge of the dangers of asbestos exposure. This piece highlights the toxicity of vermiculite. Within two years of acquiring the mine, Grace's internal memos show the company discussing the mine dust's extreme toxicity — information never given to employees.
Another victim, Bob Wilkins, recounts his own experiences as a Zonolite employee. Because the dust from the mine clogged their breathing apparatus, many employees removed them in order to continue working and keep their jobs. No one at Zonolite informed them of the dangers of vermiculite exposure and inhalation.	This letter displayed in Libby, Montana, serves as clear evidence that W.R. Grace and Zonolite were culpable in the rash of asbestos-related cancers spreading through Libby and the surrounding area.

On top of this flagrant act of subterfuge, the mine waste was also uncontrolled because of downsizing of the EPA and its affiliates during the Reagan administration (1981-1988), and W. R. Grace, Incorporated embezzled $4 billion and declared bankruptcy, so the US government would have to pay for the cleanup.[3] [open endnotes in new window]

Because of this complex context, the film asserts that Libby needs a Superfund designation from the EPA in order to finance the cleanup, a claim then EPA chief Christy Whitman supports in spite of Montana’s governor (Judy Murtz) ability to veto the National Priorities List (NPL) Superfund funds. In 2002, a guarantee for clean up but not for health or insulation removal was approved. The Public Health Emergency was excluded because of federal funding cuts. The rest of the film documents the reasons for the Superfund designation and its results. The filmmakers first emphasize and describe workers whose health was destroyed because of vermiculite: Bob Wilkins, who worked from 1969-1990, a worker now in North Dakota with almost no lungs left and another miner who gets x-rays every year with no report, for example. These workers and others contract asbestosis and other forms of cancer.

The film also demonstrates that there is proof that the company knew of these consequences since 1948.  Corporate heads knew by 1956 that there was asbestos in the dust, but the workers did not know that tremolite, in the dust, was asbestos. The company had even documented the percent of workers dying on a graph that only corporate heads would see. According to this graph, ninety two percent of employees die by the time they have worked for the company for twenty years. And the cancers were not confined to miners and workers in the plant. Workers’ whole families contracted cancer. As of May 2002, according to the film, the EPA study reveals 246 asbestos deaths and 1200 diagnoses of asbestos poisoning.  Because of these deaths and illnesses, the EPA designates the town as a Superfund site and attempts to clean up the tremolite asbestos in the mine, plants, and surrounding homes with help from its emergency coordinator Paul Peronard.  In Libby, as in any town where asbestos insulates a home or fertilizes a garden, a home becomes a hazard rather than a shelter.

Libby, Montana Rhetorical Analysis, Continued

 Libby' Montana's attempt to take a balanced approach to the issues of asbestos poisoning and cleanup also dilutes the film’s rhetoric. By including conflicting perspectives like those of townspeople suspicious of the EPA, as well as bureaucrats concerned about the economic downsides of a Superfund designation, the filmmakers’ own sympathies with those affected by asbestos become less clear.

The historical strategy Carr and Hawes-Davis implement with their subject may also limit the power of the film’s rhetoric because it lacks the personal appeal of Blue Vinyl and shifts its strategy from argument to exposition, slowing down its momentum and, perhaps, causing audiences to lose interest in the mystery being revealed (perhaps too sluggishly). For us, however, the historical approach doesn’t go far enough to reveal the history of resource exploitation in place in the West since at least the General Mining Act of 1872 which declared that

“all valuable mineral deposits in lands belonging to the United States, both surveyed and unsurveyed, are hereby declared to be free and open to exploration and purchase.”  

Instead, the film takes an historical approach in its narrative that begins with the transition from logging to mining in the mid-20th Century, drawing on an environmental nostalgia for a once pristine region and highlighting the town’s surrounding forests, lakes, and mountains.

Libby, Montana’s welcoming sign illustrates the town’s ties to a frontier past of forests and wildlife, an ironic touch in what has become a cancer alley.	Although many reviewers criticize the multiple scenes highlighting the road-side evangelist, in this shot he condemns the asbestos producers in ways that move the narrative of the film forward.
A taxidermy shop serves as another sign of the mythical wild past Libby continues to embrace.	Nostalgia lingers for a more pristine era before Zonolite as with this annual Logging Days celebration. This sign welcomes area visitors to the festival.
To emphasize the irony behind the celebration, Libby locals watch a parade during Logging Days in front of a store selling lumber. These locals struggle with an EPA that in their eyes challenges the rugged individualism on which the town and region were built.	The film takes the time to illustrate the benefits Zonolite brought to the community as one of the biggest producers of asbestos and its offshoot products, including insulation and fertilizer.

Shots demonstrate how this simpler lifestyle translated to an idyllic town life in the 1950s.  According to the EPA, however,

“While in operation, the Libby mine may have produced 80 percent of the world’s supply of vermiculite. Vermiculite has been used in building insulation and as a soil conditioner. Unfortunately, the vermiculite from the Libby mine was contaminated with a toxic form of naturally-occurring asbestos called tremolite-actinolite asbestiform mineral fibers” (“Libby Site Background”).

Despite this nostalgia for the pristine Libby before vermiculite, the film also suggests that the area’s resources have been depleted for years, explaining that after fur traders left the area, logging companies came in and overcut and harvested the mountain forests, depleting resources in the Montana region. According to the film, there were up to 2000 people working in the Forest Service and 200 in the mine during this seemingly untouched period, and Libby was seen as a flourishing community. Yet today, Libby is still represented as a good place to hunt and fish. Visitors can tour the Mineral Avenue attractions and social clubs on the down town main streets. The police are efficient and protect tourists suggesting that the town has remained untouched by the modern world, and loggers’ days and taxidermist exhibits commemorate the logging and fur trading industries of more than half a century ago.

Libby, Montana--the Documentary: A Rhetorical Analysis

 Libby, Montana and the Superfund

The town highlighted in the documentary bearing its name, Libby, Montana, did receive a recommendation from the EPA for a superfund site status, and the narrative surrounding the superfund’s implementation is documented well in Drury Gunn Carr and Doug Hawes-Davis’s traditionally structured Libby, Montana (2004). With a synthetic approach that combines interviews with victims with news reports and archival footage of mining operations providing historical context, the film illustrates the dire living conditions in Libby, where for decades the Zonolite Company mined vermiculite, a mineral used for insulation that also contained tremolite, a deadly type of asbestos. This more traditional approach to documentary also incorporates a balanced perspective of the environmental issue virtually missing from Blue Vinyl.

Opening scenes of Libby, Montana draw from a science film illustrating the rise of vermiculite, a source of asbestos, as an ancient mineral from the earth’s core.	This science film also demonstrates the versatility of asbestos by showing its flexible mineral structure
Many early scenes provide a nostalgic glimpse of the pristine waters and forests around Libby. This scene shows archival footage from what look like the 1930s of a lake surrounded by forested hills.	The film includes different parts of a regional map. In this segment, the Zonolite Company’s location is pinpointed.
This scene also provides a nostalgic look at Libby’s past. The shot is in color, suggesting that it came from a more recent era.	The map of the region gives very specific information about vermiculite mining by the Zonolite Company.
Although the film depicts the region's past from a nostalgic perspective, it gives a nod to other environmental disasters in the area. This scene illustrating lumbering practices foreshadows ...	... the overcutting that occurred over the decades in the lumber industry. Nostalgia seems unwarranted when juxtaposed with images of a past that encouraged exploitIng resources. The number of felled trees in this scene is both awe inspiring and horrific.

Unlike Blue Vinyl, Libby Montana looks more like what Patricia Aufderheide calls a “regular documentary,” featuring

“sonorous, ‘voice-of God’ narration, an analytical argument rather than a story with characters, head shots of experts leavened with a few people-on the-street interviews, stock images that illustrate the narrator’s point ...,perhaps a little educational animation, and dignified music” (10).

This “regular” synthetic approach weakens the film’s rhetoric, so the documentary remains compelling only because the human impact of eco-disaster in the Libby community infuses an emotional appeal to the audience and filmmakers.

The documentary’s approach muffles their argument in multiple ways. Instead of structuring the film as an anti-corporate argument, for example, Carr and Hawes-Davis organize it like a mystery, with facts revealed slowly to build toward a conclusion. Although Helfand and Gold choose a similar structure, because they also include a clear position and a personal narrative with which audiences can connect, their film maintains its strong rhetoric consistently. Because of its mystery structure, Libby, Montana, on the other hand, can, as Mike Hale of the New York Times explains,

“be hard to follow and frustratingly incomplete if you don’t already know the framework of the long-running and complex story.” 

Blue Vinyl and Environmental Injustices--Conclusion

Although choosing a more environmentally sound product will not solve industry-wide problems for Blue Vinyl's co-director, to at least minimize one aspect of environmental justice, the negative environmental consequences of home construction, Helfand looks for eco-friendly siding alternatives for her parents’ house. Despite setbacks, including struggling with the dilemma of Habitat for Humanity’s vinyl homes being funded by the Vinyl Institute and Helfand’s ineffective programmed meeting with the Vinyl Institute, Helfand discovers reclaimed wood as an alternative for the vinyl that also proves aesthetically pleasing to her parents. Since it costs a small fortune, however, she misses her goal to find an economically feasible alternative and, ironically pays for the new siding herself with money from a DES settlement, her “uterus money,” as she calls it. 

Blue Vinyl provides a clear case that vinyl siding is hazardous to human and nonhuman nature but ends with an ambiguous view of alternatives too expensive for Helfand’s family or Habitat for Humanity homes. Yet it also broaches some wider-reaching solutions to the environmental hazards of PVC, condemning vinyl companies for their knowing endangerment of their employees and of residents near their plants. Blue Vinyl addresses environmental justice issues on both an individual and universal level. Helfand’s film unearths inequities related to geography and racial and class bias, illustrating the extent to which Lake Charles and Mossville, Louisiana, and Venice, Italy, have become “sacrifice zones” in which toxins are tolerated because residents and factory workers lack power. 

Helfand and Baggett help provide them with a voice in both Helfand’s documentary film and the court cases Baggett leads. PVC, vinyl, and industrial ecology The dangers of PVC have been widely documented in research reports, but so have studies that demonstrate the viability of safer and affordable alternatives. According to David T. Allen, “billions of pounds of vinyl chloride are produced annually.” Yet, in their Tufts University study, Frank Ackerman and Rachel Massey effectively document the hazards of PVC and vinyl over its life cycle, but they also note the availability of viable and safe alternatives for PVC products, including wood shingles or clapboard, fiber cement, and simulated stucco. They also refute claims that vinyl is “maintenance free,” arguing that fiber cement is “more durable than vinyl” and “does not warp or burn.” 

Although Helfand and Gold conclude that environmentally sound alternatives are available but costly, Ackerman and Massey disagree, challenging “economic arguments for continued use of PVC” and asserting that alternatives to PVC are not only viable but also economical. According to their report, “academic studies have shown that the costs of environmental protection are routinely overestimated in advance, and decline rapidly after implementation.” Ackerman and Massey’s results are reinforced by the research conclusions of both G.K. Al-Sharrah, et al and David Goldsmith, engineers who highlight the need to insert environmental objectives in industry analyses that “represent sustainability giving good results in selecting environmentally friendly processes and at the same time profitable” outcomes (1). Goldsmith, on the other hand, argues against “an anthropocentric model of nature as a supplier of resources” and instead asserts “that it would be beneficial to critically examine the ethical basis for sustainable built environments. 

These studies demonstrate the viability of an environmentally sound approach to PVC and other chemical production. Despite these studies, PVC production and consumption continue at an astronomical pace. In fact, in 2011, nine years after the release of Blue Vinyl, Mossville, Louisiana, the predominately African American community right next door to Lake Charles, lost its case with the EPA to establish the community and its PVC plants as a Superfund Site. The EPA Superfund Strategy Recommendation on May 3, 2011 explained away both water and soil contamination as “within the range of the background for the area” or “naturally occurring.” With these justifications, the site score fell below the required 28.5. 

For us, however, this oversight implicates the EPA in the environmental injustice and racism suffered by the residents of Mossville, as well as the residents of Lake Charles and the thousands of PVC plant workers in the region, issues addressed with strong emotional appeal in Blue Vinyl. Helfand helps remove the blue vinyl siding from her parents’ home in preparation for new ecologically sound reclaimed wood. The last piece of the reclaimed wood is placed on the Helfand home with the only remaining emblem of blue vinyl as a penciled scrawl on the top piece. Helfand and her parents create warnings about PVC hazards from the blue vinyl, hooking it to Mardis Gras beads as a reminder of its Lake Charles, Louisiana origin. To spread the word about PVC hazards, the family gives away the beads with their message while pointing viewers to their My House is Your House campaign for green home construction.

Blue Vinyl and Environmental Racism

One of the homeowners photographs the house movers taking her house to a new location, documenting for one last time her Mossville property.	The move from Mossville through the St. Charles streets emphasizes the loss these residents sustained because their town was turned into an environmental disaster.

In the documentary Blue Vinyl, ailing or deceased employees in Venice and Lake Charles and residents in Lake Charles and Mossville, Louisiana highlight the human costs of a violation of rights and environmental justice. To prove that PVC causes cancer and that residents are breathing PVC too, testing buckets are created to measure toxic exposures and warn residents in Lake Charles. When tested, the air was found to be full of chloride and other chemicals, and those toxins also contaminated nearby water sources. 

The most extreme environmental consequence of PVC and dioxin revealed by the film, however, transforms environmental injustice into environmental racism, when residents of Mossville, a predominantly African American community in the region, are forced to leave because PVC toxins from area factories have contaminated their water. As further evidence of blatant environmental injustice and racism, these residents are not only left without a community but also without recourse for future health issues. In order to sell their homes at low prices, the PVC companies required all residents sign an agreement that they would not file suit against the company if they developed health problems caused by the contamination. 

Clearly, these residents have lost their right to a secure, healthy, and ecologically sound environment. A for sale sign illustrates the environmental racism caused by dioxins contaminating an entire water source. All citizens were forced to leave their community because of the toxic water produced by PVC leakage. After signing release forms with the PVC industry, a Mossville home is moved to a new location. One of the homeowners photographs the house movers taking her house to a new location, documenting for one last time her Mossville property. The move from Mossville through the St. Charles streets emphasizes the loss these residents sustained because their town was turned into an environmental disaster. 

A for sale sign illustrates the environmental racism caused by dioxins contaminating an entire water source. All citizens were forced to leave their community because of the toxic water produced by PVC leakage.	After signing release forms with the PVC industry, a Mossville home is moved to a new location.