THE HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATION OF A GRASS-ROOTS ENVIRONMENTAL GROUP

This paper examines the historical transformation of a grassroots environmental group in Alabama's Black belt soils region. This group, known as Alabamians for a Clean Environment (ACE) formed with the specific purpose of closing down the nation's largest hazardous waste landfill just outside the town of Emelle in Sumter County. An examination of the agenda and activities of this group and the careers of its core members reveals struggles to maneuver the public right to know within entrenched economic and regulatory contingencies. While generating knowledge about national networks of waste disposal and the risks associated with them, ACE members crossed spatial locales and juggled national with local agendas. By tracing the professional development of these members as they moved from homefront to other sites of grassroots struggle, this paper outlines the marginal position ACE cultivated in local waste politics and the alliances they made with translocal networks.