Robin Michener Nathan The Times During their 'toxic tour' of Newtown, a group of delegates from the National Bucket Brigade stops in front of the Cargill plant to pose for a picture with their banner while the group holds their noses to protest the smell in the area. Robin Michener Nathan The Times Faye Bush, right, leads a 'toxic tour', showing industry and pollution in Newtown on Thursday afternoon, for a group of delegates from the National Bucket Brigade.

Even as the fumes of a landfill fire still lingered in parts of Hall County Thursday, a group of environmentalists came to Gainesville to study air pollution from a historical perspective.

The San Francisco-based National Bucket Brigade, which trains volunteers to collect air samples in their neighborhoods, is holding its annual conference in Atlanta Saturday. Some of the participants arrived early and took a bus to Gainesville to go on a "toxic tour" with the Newtown Florist Club.

For more than 50 years, the club has been advocating for civil rights and environmental justice on the south end of Gainesville, where residents have long complained that nearby industries are harming their health.

"There's still a lot of injustice," said Newtown Florist Club President Faye Bush. "We take steps forward, but then we go back. Here in Gainesville, everybody talks about the quality of the water. They don't seem to worry about the quality of the air."

Frustrated by a perceived lack of response from the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, some club members went through the training to learn how to use the air-sampling buckets. Several more will be trained when they attend the conference at Emory University on Saturday.

Newtown has persisted in its efforts despite the fact that the EPD doesn't consider samples collected by amateurs to be valid evidence of a pollution violation.

Denny Larson, coordinator of the Bucket Brigade conference, said volunteers can still make a difference.

"We've done training with groups in 22 states, and a lot of state agencies don't take it seriously at first," he said. "But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has encouraged such efforts. We use accredited labs and follow EPA protocols. And while states don't use our samples to take enforcement action, they do use it as a basis to start their own investigations."

About 100 people are expected to attend the conference Saturday. The agenda includes an "environmental monitoring fair," workshops on topics such as First Amendment rights, group organizing, and using legal resources, and a keynote speech by Clark Atlanta University's Robert Bullard, a leading expert in the field of environmental racism.

The smaller group that came up to Gainesville Thursday included Bucket Brigade members from all over the country, who planned to hold their annual board meeting at St. Paul United Methodist Church in the evening after finishing the toxic tour.

Bush said the Newtown Florist Club has taken many visitors on tours over the years, showing them poultry plants, feed mills and other facilities that have had issues with pollution. Of particular interest were the Cargill and Purina plants, which residents have blamed for many of their air quality problems.

During the tour, Bush explains the historical reasons why industrial pollution seems to be concentrated in a certain area of Gainesville.

"Sometimes we also take tours to the north side of Jesse Jewell (Parkway), so people can see how things look there compared to what we have on the south side," she said.

Larson said most environmental activists nationwide have heard of Newtown, thanks to Ellen Griffith Spears' book "The Newtown Story: One Community's Fight for Environmental Justice," published in 1998.

It tells the inspiring tale of a low-income, mostly African-American neighborhood where residents refused to be victimized. Instead, they banded together to fight the companies that they believed were causing their health problems.

Today, the Newtown club is not merely thriving; its programs have grown so much that the group plans to move into a larger house on Desota Street, across from the one their office now occupies.

"Newtown's situation has been pretty well publicized," Larson said. "It's considered a classic example of the environmental justice movement."

Contact: dgilbert@gainesvilletimes.com; (770) 718-3407

Originally published Friday, September 7, 2007