Goldman Environmental Prize goes to Texas man who took on refineries over pollution

They call Port Arthur gasoline alley, cancer alley, and the armpit of Texas. For most of his life, Hilton Kelley has called it home.

The city has had the same distinctive odor since he was a boy, Kelley said. Adults jokingly called it the smell of money, because the nearby oil refineries and petrochemical plants did most of the hiring. But after the cancer rate grew, the childhood asthma rate rose and the population plummeted, Kelley, now 50, stopped laughing.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Kelley’s decade-long fight to lower the city’s air pollution earned him this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize for the North America category, being awarded Monday in San Francisco.

The annual prize and a $150,000 stipend is routinely awarded to six grass-roots environmentalists from different parts of the world. Since the award was established in 1990, a total of $13.2 million has been awarded to 139 recipients from 79 countries, as of 2010, according to a spokeswoman.

In addition to Kelley, the other 2011 winners are a mother of five who started Germany’s first community-owned renewable-energy utility company; a Salvadoran farmer who’s risking his life to fight a gold mining operation; an Indonesian biologist whose efforts to clean a river spared millions from drinking toxins; a Zimbabwean who fought to save the black rhino from extinction; and a Russian who monitors petroleum companies on an ecologically rich island.

Kelley is an accidental environmentalist. He left Port Arthur for a Navy stint in 1980 and remained in California for 20 years, working part of the time as a Hollywood stuntman. While visiting his home town, 90 miles east of Houston on the Gulf Coast, for its annual Mardi Gras festival in February 2000, he was deeply troubled by what he saw.

“It was just very dismal. It was mind-numbing,” Kelley said last week in a telephone interview. “The town needed to be awakened.”

The city and surrounding Jefferson County had one of the highest levels of air pollution in the country and suffered from cancer rates that were 23 percent higher than the state average, according to the Texas Cancer Registry. Health officials said many children in Port Arthur had respiratory problems, according to organizers of the prize.

Kelley knew next to nothing about clean-air standards. But within months, he educated himself on public policy, gathered leaders and old school buddies in the African American community, started an organization called the Community In-Power and Development Association in May 2000, and put 70 refineries and chemical plants in the area on notice.

Kelley harassed Shell Oil with protests and legal action. He even traveled to the Hague to demonstrate outside one of the oil giant’s corporate meetings. He “was able to expose the oil industry’s lax protocols and made the companies accountable in a way they never were before,” the prize’s organizers said.

In 2006, Motiva Enterprises, a subsidiary of Shell Oil and billed as the largest refinery in the nation, was persuaded to start a $3.5 million community fund as part of a Good Neighbor Agreement to promote economic revitalization and improve pollution controls. The next year, activists led by Kelley ended a corporation’s plan to import from Mexico 20,000 tons of toxic liquids that were banned by the federal government and incinerate them at its Port Arthur hazardous-waste plant.